BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, crossed two billion dollars in assets in early 2026, less than two years after launch. The fund holds Treasuries on a public blockchain rather than in a traditional fund administrator’s ledger, and large institutional holders settle into and out of it twenty-four hours a day. That single product is the clearest signal yet that US tokenization has moved past pilot status and into a working part of the asset management business, and it is one of several pieces of evidence that mark how blockchain fundamentals now sit inside America’s financial market.
Tokenized treasuries and the BlackRock BUIDL signal
BlackRock launched the BUIDL fund in March 2024 in partnership with Securitize, a US registered transfer agent for digital securities. The fund holds short dated US Treasuries, repurchase agreements, and cash, and the shares are issued as tokens on the Ethereum public blockchain. Holders can redeem into US dollars on any business day, and qualified institutional investors can transfer tokens around the clock to counterparties on the approved list. Independent reporting at the Federal Reserve payments research portal tracks the broader category of tokenized money market products.
Franklin Templeton launched a similar product, the OnChain US Government Money Fund, in 2021, earlier than BlackRock but with a smaller initial footprint. The fund records share ownership on the Stellar and Polygon public blockchains and reports the on chain holdings alongside the traditional fund accounting. Together, the two funds and a handful of smaller competitors have pushed tokenized Treasury products past five billion dollars in assets under management as of mid-2026, which is small relative to the broader US money market fund industry but large enough that index providers have begun publishing dedicated benchmarks for the category.
The TechBullion digital banking trends coverage tracks how the appeal to corporate treasurers has driven the growth. A treasurer who runs short term cash in a tokenized money fund can settle to and from the fund outside the regular business day, which closes a gap that the US payments system has carried for a hundred years. The cash that previously sat idle in a non interest bearing account on a Friday afternoon can now be parked in a tokenized fund through the weekend and earn the prevailing short rate.
JPM Kinexys, Citi Token Services, and tokenized cash
JPMorgan Kinexys handles a daily volume of around two billion dollars in tokenized intra company payments and growing interbank flows. The platform began in 2020 under the Onyx name, was rebranded in 2024, and has expanded steadily as more US and foreign banks have joined the network. The system gives a corporate client with multi-currency cash needs the ability to move money between accounts around the clock, which is operationally meaningful for any company with global treasury operations.
Citi Token Services lets corporate clients on the Citi balance sheet move tokenized deposits between Citi branches twenty-four hours a day. The McKinsey financial services research at McKinsey insights tracks how the major US banks have each built a comparable service over the last three years. The common pattern is a permissioned chain operated by the bank, tokens that represent claims on the bank, and a settlement model that integrates with the bank’s existing core systems rather than replacing them.
Visa published a pilot in 2023 that settled card transactions in USD Coin on the Solana public blockchain, and Mastercard runs the Multi-Token Network for tokenized payment flows across participating banks. The TechBullion AI in financial services explainer covers how these pilots fit alongside the existing US payments rails. The card networks process tens of trillions of dollars a year, so the bar for replacing any production rail is high, but the pilots have moved from press release to real settled volume across at least three of the major networks.
The risks: smart contract bugs, regulatory unclarity, custody
Smart contract risk is the technical risk that the code defining a tokenized asset, an exchange, or a lending protocol contains an exploitable defect. The public crypto market has lost roughly forty billion dollars to such defects since 2020 according to industry tracking firms. US regulated tokenization projects address this through code audits, formal verification, and a more conservative use of programmability than the public crypto market, but the risk is not zero. A bug in a tokenized money fund’s redemption logic, for example, could freeze the fund at the worst possible moment.
Regulatory unclarity is the second risk. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and state banking regulators all have a claim on parts of the tokenization business. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has begun publishing notes on the consumer impact of tokenized products as the category reaches retail clients. The line between a tokenized security, a tokenized commodity, a tokenized deposit, and a stablecoin is technically narrow but legally consequential, and US institutions have spent years sorting through the implications.
Custody is the third risk. A traditional security sits with a US qualified custodian, which is a regulated category with strong consumer protections. A token sitting in a self managed wallet has no such protections, and a token sitting in an unregulated exchange has the protection of that exchange’s solvency. The collapse of FTX in 2022 cost US customers an estimated eight billion dollars, and the bankruptcy is still working through the US courts in 2026. US institutional tokenization projects have responded by working only with qualified custodians, which restores the protection but also restores some of the friction the technology was supposed to remove.
Benefits the existing US system cannot match
The first benefit is twenty-four hour settlement. The US dollar payment system closes nightly and weekly, while a tokenized cash or asset system on a permissioned chain can settle continuously. A US corporate treasurer with operations in Asia can fund a Friday night payroll without parking cash on Thursday, which frees working capital across the year. The Bank for International Settlements at the BIS fintech portal tracks how the same benefit accrues across cross border flows, where the time zone gap between New York and Singapore has cost the industry roughly a hundred billion dollars in idle balances annually.
The second benefit is atomic settlement. A tokenized cash leg and a tokenized security leg can be programmed to settle in a single transaction or not at all, which removes the settlement risk that the two day US equity settlement cycle still carries. The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation moved to T plus one in 2024, but the residual risk remains, and atomic settlement on a shared chain takes it to zero by construction. A handful of US bond market participants now run pilot trades on this basis.
The third benefit is programmability. A tokenized asset can carry rules that execute automatically. A coupon payment on a tokenized bond can release on the coupon date without a manual instruction. A margin call on a tokenized derivative can trigger when the collateral falls below a threshold. The benefits do not show up at the consumer level immediately, but they compound on the institutional side, where the operating cost of US fixed income markets currently runs into the tens of billions of dollars annually according to industry studies.
The next decade for US blockchain finance
Three things will define US blockchain finance through the late 2030s. The first is the scale of tokenized Treasury and money market products. If the category reaches one hundred billion dollars in assets, which is the trajectory implied by current growth rates, the operational case will be made and the rest of the industry will adopt to keep pace. The TechBullion regtech compliance overview tracks how the supervisor view has shifted from skepticism to engaged participation in the standards process over the last two years.
The second is the regulatory clarity question. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has issued interpretive letters that let US national banks hold tokenized assets and run permissioned chains, and the SEC has continued to work through the application of securities law to specific tokenization patterns. The third is interoperability. The current US deployment is a set of permissioned islands, JPMorgan, Citi, BNY, and Bank of America each running its own chain. The number worth watching through 2027 is the share of US tokenized cash volume that settles across chains rather than within a single bank’s chain. When that share passes twenty percent, the industry will have crossed from pilot connectivity into a working multi-bank tokenized US dollar market.
