BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager with $14 trillion under management, on Wednesday listed its tokenized U.S. Treasury fund BUIDL for trading on decentralized exchange Uniswap (UNI) and purchased an undisclosed amount of Uniswap's governance token UNI.
It is BlackRock's first direct use of DeFi trading infrastructure for any of its products.
UNI surged roughly 25% on the news, according to CoinDesk.
What Happened
BUIDL - the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund - is a blockchain-based fund backed entirely by U.S. Treasury bills and cash equivalents. Launched in March 2024 through tokenization firm Securitize, it has grown into the largest tokenized Treasury product on public blockchains with approximately $2.4 billion in assets, according to The Block data.
The fund's shares are now tradable through UniswapX, an offchain order routing system that sources quotes from approved market makers - including Wintermute, Flowdesk, and Tokka Labs - and settles transactions onchain through smart contracts. All participants must be pre-qualified and whitelisted through Securitize.
Access remains limited to qualified purchasers, a legal category requiring at least $5 million in investable assets. That restriction means practical trading volume will be narrow at first.
"Large asset managers want to walk before they run, and start with qualified purchasers," Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo said. "But the infrastructure we're announcing will work equally with retail products."
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Why It Matters
The pairing is notable for what it connects. BlackRock is the most established name in traditional asset management. Uniswap is one of DeFi's foundational platforms, having processed over $4 trillion in cumulative volume through automated smart contracts rather than centralized intermediaries.
BUIDL has already been expanding across multiple chains - Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), Avalanche (AVAX), Aptos (APT), Arbitrum (ARB), and others - and is accepted as collateral on platforms like Deribit and Crypto.com. The Uniswap integration adds a DeFi-native secondary market for the first time.
Hayden Adams, Uniswap's founder, told Fortune the collaboration came together over 18 months of meetings between BlackRock's Hudson Yards office and Uniswap's SoHo headquarters.
He added that Uniswap's former COO Mary-Catherine Lader, who previously started BlackRock's digital asset division, helped broker the deal.
What To Watch
The immediate impact is constrained by design - whitelisted institutions only, approved market makers, and a $5 million entry threshold.
But the arrangement functions as a test case for whether tokenized traditional assets can trade effectively on DeFi rails.
If it works, the model could extend to other BlackRock products and eventually to retail-eligible funds, according to Domingo. For now, the more telling detail may be that BlackRock is buying UNI - putting actual capital behind the ecosystem, not just connecting to its infrastructure.
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