So, like, BlackRock and BNY Mellon are teaming up to bring blockchain to the back office of one of their big funds. They’re gonna offer a new type of digital shares for the Treasury Trust money market fund, worth a whopping $150 billion. The new shares, called “DLT Shares,” are gonna use distributed ledger technology, but they’re not gonna have any crypto in them. BNY Mellon, the exclusive distributor of the fund, plans to use blockchain to keep track of who owns what shares.
This move could open the door for more tokenized cash, digital assets, and blockchain-based settlement stuff in the traditional finance world. It seems like lots of companies have been dabbling in turning real assets into blockchain representations lately, blurring the lines between traditional finance and the crypto scene. Just the other day, Libre announced they were tokenizing $500 million of Telegram’s $2.4 billion debt and putting it on the TON blockchain.
BlackRock’s Liquidity Treasury Trust Fund is part of their Liquidity Funds suite and has over $150 billion in assets under management as of April 29. The new DLT share class requires a minimum investment of $3 million for big shot institutional buyers, but there’s no minimum for additional purchases. The SEC still has to give the thumbs up on this whole thing, though, so it’s not set in stone yet.
This isn’t BlackRock’s first rodeo when it comes to tokenization. They already have a fund called BUIDL that works with blockchain and manages over $1.7 billion in assets. They’ve even expanded onto Solana recently. CEO Larry Fink seems to be a big fan of tokenization and decentralized finance, talking about how important it is for the future. In his annual letter to shareholders, he even mentioned how the U.S. could lose out to digital assets like Bitcoin if they don’t get their debt under control. Yikes.
So, yeah, BlackRock and BNY Mellon are shaking things up with this new blockchain move. It’s gonna be interesting to see how it all plays out. Who knows, maybe this could change the game for traditional finance in a big way. Time will tell, I guess.
