BlackRock Creates Tokenized Asset Fund, SEC Filing Shows

Investment management giant BlackRock (BLK) has created a tokenized asset fund, according to a document filed to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund was incorporated on the British Virgin Islands and will be launched in partnership with tokenization firm Securitize.

Blockchain data shows that the fund was seeded with $100 million in Circle’s USDC stablecoin using the Ethereum network.

The move follows BlackRock’s foray into digital asset fund after listing a spot-based bitcoin (BTC) exchange-traded fund (ETF) in January, which amassed over $15 billion of assets under management. The company also filed for a spot ether (ETH) ETF last year.

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said in a January interview with CNBC that BTC and ETH ETFs “are just stepping stones towards tokenization and I really do believe this is where we’re going to be going.”

The fund also represents a significant milestone for tokenization of real-world assets, a growing sector in the intersection of digital assets and traditional finance that comprises of placing traditional assets on blockchain rails in pursuit of faster settlements and increased efficiency.

Tokenized RWA platform Ondo Finance’s native token ONDO jumped as much as 20% on the news, and is up 12% over the past 24 hours outperforming the broad-market CoinDesk 20 Index (CD20) and bitcoin (BTC).