BlackRock files for tokenized money-market funds on Ethereum, targets stablecoin reserves

BlackRock filed paperwork with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday to issue two new tokenized money-market funds, including an Ethereum-native digital share class of its $6.1bn BlackRock Select Treasury Based Liquidity Fund. The move pulls the world’s largest asset manager deeper into onchain finance and aims a new product squarely at stablecoin issuers searching for yield-bearing reserve assets.

The first filing introduces a new digital share class, designated BSTBL, of an existing institutional liquidity fund that holds cash, US Treasury bills and short-duration Treasury notes with maturities of 93 days or less, according to the registration documents. BSTBL tokens will be issued exclusively on the Ethereum blockchain, with BNY Mellon Investment Servicing acting as the fund’s transfer agent and maintaining the official shareholder ledger via ERC-20 contracts. A separate, second filing proposes a new fund called the BlackRock Daily Reinvestment Stablecoin Reserve Vehicle, which would hold cash, short-term US Treasuries and overnight repurchase agreements and would issue what the prospectus calls “OnChain Shares” across multiple permissioned public blockchains.

Neither fund is yet live. Both require SEC clearance before BlackRock can begin issuing shares.

Why this filing matters

The structure is a meaningful departure from BlackRock’s existing onchain product. The BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, ticker BUIDL, sits at roughly $2.5bn in assets across eight blockchain networks (Ethereum, BNB Chain, Solana, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism and Aptos) with Securitize as transfer agent, as Ledger Insights has documented. BUIDL is a standalone fund built around tokenization from inception. BSTBL takes the opposite approach: it bolts a digital share class onto a pre-existing institutional liquidity fund roughly two-and-a-half times larger than BUIDL, with a different transfer agent and a single-chain footprint focused on Ethereum.

That matters for two reasons. First, it formalises a template that other asset managers can replicate quickly: keep the underlying fund and its custody, audit and accounting plumbing intact, and graft a token contract onto the share register. Second, by routing the share registry through BNY Mellon, BlackRock is tying a 240-year-old custody bank into the cap table of an Ethereum-issued security. That is a different institutional alignment than BUIDL’s reliance on Securitize, a crypto-native transfer agent.

Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s head of digital assets, framed the firm’s tokenization push when BUIDL launched as solving “real problems” for institutional clients. The new filings extend that pitch to stablecoin operators, who currently park most of their reserves in conventional money-market funds and bank deposits, surrendering the convenience of onchain settlement to keep regulated yield exposure.

Stablecoin reserves are the actual target

The Daily Reinvestment Stablecoin Reserve Vehicle reads as a direct play for that book of business. The prospectus language describes a fund engineered to qualify as an eligible reserve asset under the GENIUS Act stablecoin framework that Congress passed last year, Crypto Briefing reported. Issuers of dollar-pegged stablecoins must back their tokens with cash and short-duration Treasuries; that requirement currently funnels billions into Treasury bills and bank deposits at firms like BNY Mellon, JPMorgan and State Street.

BlackRock’s bet is that those issuers will pay a fee for an onchain wrapper around the same underlying portfolio. The Daily Reinvestment vehicle would issue OnChain Shares through approved crypto wallets, allowing a stablecoin issuer to post the shares as collateral, transfer them between custodians at blockchain speed and verify reserve composition through onchain attestations.

The numbers around that reserve flow are large. The global stablecoin market is now valued at over $320bn. Tokenized US Treasuries in aggregate are approaching $14bn in market size, with Ethereum hosting around $8.0bn of that as of May. Both figures have grown several-hundred per cent year-on-year. The broader tokenized real-world asset market crossed $30bn earlier this week, as scramnews reported, with growth accelerating after Andreessen Horowitz published research projecting an order-of-magnitude expansion over the coming decade. Boston Consulting Group and Ripple have put the total addressable tokenization market at $18.9 trillion by 2033.

A thickening competitive field

BlackRock is not alone here. Franklin Templeton’s BENJI, registered with the SEC as FOBXX, became the first onchain money-market fund back in 2021 and still runs on Stellar and Polygon. JPMorgan brought its MONY tokenized institutional vehicle live in December 2025 on the bank’s permissioned Onyx network. Coinbase rolled out CUSHY earlier this year as an onchain yield product mixing public credit and private lending exposure, pitched at the same retail-and-prosumer crypto holders who already park USDC on Coinbase Exchange.

Nate Geraci, president of The ETF Store, told Crypto Briefing the BlackRock filings should be read as a structural rather than tactical move. “Investors should expect much more of this from top asset managers,” Geraci wrote, arguing that the largest issuers will end up competing for stablecoin reserve mandates the way they presently compete for ETF benchmark mandates.

There is an obvious economic logic to that view. Passive-ETF fee compression has pushed expense ratios on the largest products down to single-digit basis points. A tokenized wrapper around the same Treasuries can extract a wider spread on cash-management activity that stablecoin issuers must perform anyway. The global stablecoin float sits north of $320bn. Capturing even a few per cent of that wallet at money-market-fund fees would dwarf the revenue BlackRock currently books on $2.5bn of BUIDL assets.

The regulatory backdrop

Washington has shifted on tokenization in a way that makes the filings tractable. SEC chair Paul Atkins opened a formal rulemaking track for onchain markets and crypto vaults this week, as scramnews has reported. The Senate Banking Committee has scheduled a May 14 markup of the CLARITY Act, which would clarify the SEC-CFTC jurisdictional split for digital assets. The GENIUS Act stablecoin reserve rules, passed last year, give issuers a defined statutory standard against which a vehicle like the Daily Reinvestment fund can be designed.

The legal shape of these products is the part that makes them registrable. They are securities under the Investment Company Act of 1940, sold to qualified investors, audited under the same fund accounting standards as any other open-end money-market fund. The Treasury portfolio underneath is conventional. What is new is the share registry. That is the lane the SEC under Atkins has signalled it is prepared to license.

What to watch

Open-end fund registrations typically clear the SEC in three to six months. BlackRock has not floated a target launch date for either vehicle, and Bloomberg’s wire on Thursday described the filings as preparatory rather than imminent. That suggests the firm is staking out regulatory ground ahead of any product calendar, not signalling a near-term rollout.

The partner stack on the Daily Reinvestment vehicle is also still blank. The BSTBL filing names BNY Mellon Investment Servicing as transfer agent. The stablecoin reserve fund’s prospectus is silent on which entity will run the OnChain Share registry, which custodians will hold the underlying Treasuries, and which blockchain networks will be supported beyond Ethereum. Which way that decision lands will signal how directly BlackRock intends to compete with Securitize-native rivals like Ondo Finance and Backed.

Pricing is the third unknown, and the most consequential. Existing tokenized money-market funds carry management fees in a 15-to-50 basis-point range. Pricing the new vehicles under BUIDL to grab share would put pressure on the entire category. Pricing them in line with, or above, BUIDL would say the opposite: that demand from stablecoin issuers is strong enough to support full asset-management economics on top of a Treasury portfolio that already sits in the legacy fund range.

The filings answer none of that. What they do confirm is that the largest asset manager on the planet is now willing to register multiple distinct funds aimed at the same convergence of regulated Treasury exposure and public blockchain settlement. Two years ago that convergence lived in press releases. It now lives in registration paperwork at the SEC.