Crypto's biggest business now looks suspiciously like banking — black turtlenecks sold separately 🏦

BlackRock has launched two tokenized money market funds designed to help stablecoin issuers meet reserve requirements under the US GENIUS Act, marking another step in the convergence between digital asset infrastructure and traditional finance. One fund tokenizes shares of BlackRock's existing Treasury liquidity strategy on Ethereum, allowing approved investors to transfer ownership onchain while the underlying assets remain invested in cash and short-term US government securities. The second is a new institutional money market vehicle built for digital asset markets that supports multiple blockchains and automatically reinvests income, making it suitable for stablecoin reserve management.

The launch deepens BlackRock's presence in the rapidly growing tokenized Treasury market, where the asset manager already operates BUIDL, the industry's largest tokenized Treasury fund. It also reflects a broader shift by Wall Street toward onchain financial products following the passage of the GENIUS Act, which established a federal framework for payment stablecoins. Tether generated another $1.5 billion in profit from its US Treasury holdings over the same period, underscoring how stablecoin reserves and tokenized money market funds have become significant revenue drivers for the digital asset industry.

Tokenized gold, meanwhile, recorded its strongest quarter to date, with spot trading volume reaching $90.7 billion in Q1 as gold futures rallied above $5,600 per troy ounce. A RedStone report found tokenized bullion held up during gold's sharp sell-off, though adoption in decentralized lending remains limited. Only about $63 million of Tether Gold and PAX Gold is used as collateral on Aave v3 and Morpho, roughly 1.5% of their combined $4.2 billion market cap. On March 23, Aave processed its largest cluster of XAUT liquidations without disruption after gold fell 10% in a week, the worst weekly performance in more than four decades.

JPMorgan's Greg Shearer described the move as an "extremely brutal flush." Gold futures have since declined more than 20% from January peaks on expectations of higher US interest rates, and RedStone's findings suggested tokenized gold was resilient yet faces an infrastructure gap as tokenized real-world assets scale. Even Bitcoin ($BTC) mining is increasingly defined by production costs, profitability and balance sheet management rather than the price of $BTC, reflecting the industry's broader shift toward financial-infrastructure economics rather than purely digital-asset-native models.