BlackRock Intros Pair of Tokenized Money Market Offerings

BlackRock says it is expanding its cash management strategy with two new tokenized money market products.

The new offerings are dubbed OnChain Shares of the BlackRock Select Treasury Based Liquidity Fund (BSTBL) and the BlackRock Daily Reinvestment Stablecoin Reserve Vehicle (BRSRV), the investment management giant said in a Monday (Aug. 3) news release.

“Cash remains a foundational building block for investors, corporations, and financial institutions,” said Jon Steel, global head of product and platform for BlackRock’s cash management business. “U.S. money market funds have grown to more than $8.4 trillion in assets as investors continue to prioritize liquidity, capital preservation, and the potential for yield. As demand grows for high-quality reserve assets to support stablecoins and other tokenized financial products, these funds provide clients with additional choice in how they access and use money market fund investment solutions across traditional and digital markets.”

According to the release, the products are designed to combine BlackRock’s money market capabilities with blockchain-based infrastructure while maintaining the liquidity and stability investors expect money market funds to provide.

BlackRock introduced its first tokenized fund issued on a public blockchain, the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), in the spring of 2024.

A report on the launch by CoinDesk includes comments BlackRock Chief Financial Officer Martin Small made during a recent earnings call about the company’s ambitions to become the industry’s go-to stablecoin reserve manager.

“We already manage $60 billion of reserves for Circle, representing about a quarter of the $300 billion stablecoin market,” he said. “We see lots of growth ahead in stablecoin and we want to be the reserve manager of choice.”

In other tokenization news, a report last week by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) noted that real-value testing (RVT) of tokenization of wholesale cross-border payments showed an average time from payment initiation to settlement of about 80 seconds.

The test was conducted Project Agorá, a public-private collaboration exploring tokenization of wholesale cross-border payments, based on a concept initially proposed by BIS.

“RVT marked an important milestone for Project Agorá, demonstrating the feasibility of settling real-value transactions on a multicurrency programmable and shared platform using tokenized reserves and tokenized deposits,” BIS said in the report.

In a report in May, the BIS said Project Agorá created a prototype that showed tokenized commercial bank deposits could be combined with “the trust and safety” of tokenized central bank reserves with a shared platform.