BlackRock's BUIDL Passed $1 Billion. The Interesting Part Came After.
BUIDL crossed $1 billion in March 2025, a year after launch. The more telling story since then is where the fund went: into crypto exchanges as trading collateral, where a token that earns Treasury interest is genuinely useful.
Updated September 2026 with the fund's growth and its use as exchange collateral.
BlackRock's tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, passed $1 billion in assets in March 2025, about a year after it launched. (PR Newswire) The number made headlines. The more useful story is what happened next: the fund found a job.
What BUIDL is
BUIDL, the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, holds short-term US government debt and cash, like any money market fund. The difference is the record of ownership. Securitize, the fund's transfer agent, issues one token per share on public blockchains, held at $1 each, and pays the interest as new tokens. Only approved institutional investors can buy. (Eco)
Where it went next
In June 2025 BUIDL became accepted as collateral on Crypto.com and Deribit, and in November 2025 on Binance, which also brought the fund to BNB Chain. (CoinDesk, CoinDesk)
This is the part that matters. A large trader has to keep money on an exchange to back their positions. Until recently that money sat as stablecoins earning nothing. A BUIDL token can sit in the same place and earn Treasury interest. That is a real, measurable improvement for a real group of users, which is more than most tokenization launches can say.
The numbers have not gone in a straight line
After $1 billion in March 2025, BUIDL was reported at about $2.9 billion in June 2025, about $2.5 billion in November 2025 and about $2.87 billion across chains in July 2026. In late September 2026, rwa.xyz showed it at about $2.24 billion. (CoinDesk, CoinDesk, rwa.xyz)
That is normal for a money market fund. Big holders park cash and move it. But it means the size of the fund tells you where large players kept their cash that month, not how many people have come to trust tokenization.
What we do not know yet
Most of the world still cannot buy BUIDL directly. It is a gated, institutional product, and much of its reach comes through other products that hold it, such as Ondo's OUSG. Those add a layer, and a set of fees and rules, between the buyer and the Treasury bill. We have written about that layering in our Ondo piece.
The open question is whether the same discipline, named managers and a regulated record of ownership, can reach ordinary savers without losing what made it trustworthy. So far, the answer has mostly been "only one layer removed".
Sources
- PR Newswire / Securitize, "BUIDL surpasses $1B in AUM", March 2025. Link
- Eco, "What Is BUIDL? BlackRock's Tokenized Treasury Fund". Link
- CoinDesk, "BlackRock's $2.9B tokenized Treasury fund now accepted as collateral on Crypto.com, Deribit", 18 June 2025. Link
- CoinDesk, "BlackRock's tokenized fund gets listed as collateral on Binance, expands to BNB Chain", 14 November 2025. Link
- Blockcast, on BUIDL's size across chains, July 2026. Link
- rwa.xyz, BUIDL asset page, accessed September 2026. Link
TokenCrib is an information service, not investment advice.