BlackRock’s BUIDL Fund Comes to Uniswap as the Asset Manager Invests in DeFi
BlackRock has taken its most direct step yet into decentralized finance. On Wednesday, February 11, Uniswap Labs and tokenization firm Securitize said shares of BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, a tokenized money market fund backed by U.S. Treasuries and cash, can now be traded through UniswapX, a trading system built by the team behind the largest decentralized exchange.
Alongside the integration, BlackRock made what the announcement called “a strategic investment within the Uniswap ecosystem.” Uniswap’s UNI governance token jumped on the news.
How BUIDL trading on UniswapX works
BUIDL, formally the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, is issued on blockchains through Securitize and pays its holders yield from short-term government debt. Until now, investors have mainly bought and redeemed shares through Securitize directly.
Under the new arrangement, Securitize Markets will facilitate BUIDL trades for investors who opt in to use UniswapX. Rather than a public pool open to anyone, the system uses a request-for-quote model: approved market makers compete to offer the best price, and trades settle on-chain through smart contracts. According to the joint announcement, the initial quoting firms are Flowdesk, Tokka Labs and Wintermute, and trading is available 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
Access is restricted. Every participant must be pre-qualified and whitelisted by Securitize, and the service is aimed at institutional investors and market makers. The main practical use, according to the companies, is to let holders move quickly between BUIDL and stablecoins on-chain without waiting for traditional redemption processes.
Estimates of the fund’s size vary. The Block put BUIDL’s assets at about $2.4 billion as of February 11, while Decrypt described it as a fund of about $2.1 billion.
What the executives said
Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s global head of digital assets, said the integration “marks a major leap forward in the interoperability of tokenized USD yield funds with stablecoins.”
Uniswap Labs founder and chief executive Hayden Adams said that enabling BUIDL on UniswapX “supercharges our mission,” while Securitize chief executive Carlos Domingo called it “the unlock we’ve been working toward,” describing it as a way of bringing “the trust and regulatory standards of traditional finance to the speed and openness for which DeFi is known.”
Domingo told Decrypt that the approach supports self-custody and could be extended to other tokenized real-world assets.
BlackRock and the UNI token
The investment drew as much attention as the integration itself. The announcement did not say what BlackRock bought or how much it spent, and The Block reported that Adams declined to comment on the size. A source told Decrypt that BlackRock plans to buy UNI, which would make it the first DeFi token on the firm’s balance sheet. A disclosure attached to the announcement said any BlackRock investment “may be discontinued at any time.”
Traders reacted quickly. The Block reported that UNI rose roughly 20% shortly after the news, while Decrypt said the token was up more than 13% over the previous day at about $3.84, citing CoinGecko. Even after the jump, UNI remained down nearly 29% over the past month, according to Decrypt, reflecting a broader crypto downturn that has hit DeFi tokens especially hard.
The announcement also made clear that Uniswap Labs and Securitize are third parties with respect to BUIDL, and investors were directed to the fund’s prospectus disclosures before trading.
Why it matters for DeFi
Tokenized funds such as BUIDL have grown quickly over the past two years, but most of that activity has stayed inside closed, permissioned systems run by issuers and their partners. Using UniswapX connects one of the largest tokenized Treasury funds to infrastructure that was built for open, decentralized trading, even if access remains gated for now.
For DeFi, the deal offers a form of validation from the world’s largest asset manager. It suggests that institutions are willing to use decentralized trading technology when it can be paired with identity checks and whitelists, a hybrid model that some in the industry see as the most realistic path for bringing traditional assets on-chain. Uniswap, for its part, gains a high-profile institutional product and a link to a client base it has had little access to.
There are limits. With trading restricted to a small group of pre-approved institutions and a handful of market makers, the volume that passes through UniswapX may be modest at first, and the arrangement keeps Securitize in a central gatekeeping role. Critics of permissioned DeFi argue that such setups borrow the branding of decentralized finance without its openness.
Still, BlackRock has already pushed BUIDL onto several blockchains and into a range of DeFi integrations, and this step goes further by tying the fund to a major decentralized exchange and, apparently, to that exchange’s token. For an industry that has spent years asking when large asset managers would engage directly with DeFi, Wednesday’s announcement gives at least a partial answer.