BlackRock bets on stablecoins.
The Wall Street giant said Thursday that it will retool one of its money market funds to explicitly serve U.S. stablecoin issuers, making the fund an approved reserve asset for such tokens under the recently passed law. GENIUS Law.
The BlackRock Select Treasury Based Liquidity Fund (BSTBL) will eliminate agency investments, shorten the maturity of its investments in US Treasuries, and add overnight repurchase agreements as an eligible asset, in a bid to make the fund GENIUS compliant and have maximum liquidity for stablecoin issuers.
jon steel, The global head of product for BlackRock’s cash management business said Thursday that the company has seen increased demand from stablecoin issuers seeking reserve management options in the wake of the approval of GENIUS.
“We believe (the fund) positions BlackRock as one of the reserve asset managers of choice for the digital payments ecosystem,” Steel said in a statement.
BlackRock’s bold push into stablecoin reserves will almost certainly have a significant impact on the sector.
Earlier this week, the company reported that its cash management business has surpassed $1 trillion in assets under management for the first time. Its Bitcoin and Ethereum spot ETFs are also comfortably the biggest trades on Wall Street.
Visa believes stablecoins can disrupt the $40 trillion credit market
However, today’s development is far from the company’s first foray into a stablecoin. In 2022, BlackRock led a $400 million funding round for USDC issuer Circle, in a deal that made the asset manager the largest holder of Circle’s reserves.
Cryptocurrencies have been a priority for BlackRock this week. On Tuesday, the company’s CEO, Larry Fink, announced The company is currently developing its own technology to tokenize all types of traditional assets.
“We think we need to move quickly,” Fink said at the time. “We need to tokenize all assets, especially assets that have multiple levels of intermediaries.”