BlackRock’s tokenized liquidity fund has moved ahead of other major real-world asset products tracked by DeFiLlama. The BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, known as BUIDL, currently holds approximately $3.44 billion in total value locked, compared with about $3.01 billion for Circle’s USYC and $2.87 billion for Tether Gold.
The ranking places a tokenized Treasury and money-market structure above both another yield-bearing fund product and a physical-gold token. BUIDL’s lead reinforces the central role of short-term government debt in the on-chain RWA market, but it does not mean the three products carry equivalent assets, investor rights or risk profiles.
Multichain Share Classes Expand BUIDL’s Footprint
DeFiLlama distributes BUIDL’s reported value across eight networks. Ethereum accounts for approximately $1.16 billion, followed by Aptos with $821.9 million, Solana with $654.5 million and Avalanche with $634 million. Smaller balances are recorded on BNB Chain, Optimism, Arbitrum and Polygon. No single blockchain holds a majority of the fund’s protocol-level TVL, with Ethereum representing roughly one-third of the total.
BlackRock launched BUIDL through Securitize in March 2024. The fund seeks to maintain a $1 token value while investing its assets in cash, U.S. Treasury bills and repurchase agreements. Income accrues daily and is distributed to investors as additional tokens each month. The product combines a conventional liquidity-fund portfolio with blockchain-based issuance and transfer infrastructure.
Access remains limited to qualified purchasers who complete the applicable identity and compliance procedures. RWA.xyz lists a $5 million minimum initial investment, daily subscriptions and a $250,000 minimum redemption amount. BUIDL is therefore an institutional tokenized fund rather than an unrestricted retail Treasury token.
The competing products follow different structures. USYC represents an interest in a Cayman Islands fund investing primarily in reverse repurchase agreements backed by U.S. government securities, while each Tether Gold token represents an interest in one fine troy ounce of physical gold. Their similar dollar valuations conceal fundamentally different sources of return and collateral exposure.
Dashboard Methodologies Produce Different Valuations
BUIDL’s $3.44 billion DeFiLlama figure is higher than the approximately $2.61 billion total asset value displayed by RWA.xyz. DeFiLlama defines its measurement as the value of coins held in the protocol’s smart contracts and tracks several BUIDL share classes across eight chains. RWA.xyz lists individual tokenized asset classes separately, including a distinct BUIDL-I entry. The valuation gap appears to result primarily from different aggregation and classification methods rather than a confirmed discrepancy in the fund’s underlying assets.
RWA.xyz currently records 112 BUIDL holder addresses and 31 active addresses over the trailing 30 days. Those numbers point to concentrated on-chain ownership, although wallet counts cannot reveal the full number of beneficial investors using custodians or institutional intermediaries. A multibillion-dollar balance does not necessarily imply broad distribution or active secondary-market trading.
DeFiLlama also shows only about $320,000 in identifiable token liquidity for BUIDL, despite its multibillion-dollar TVL. The contrast reflects the fund’s controlled subscription and transfer model, under which tokens generally move among approved participants rather than through unrestricted public markets. Asset value, DeFi liquidity and transfer activity are separate measurements and should not be treated as interchangeable indicators of adoption.
BUIDL’s position nevertheless demonstrates that institutional tokenized fund structures can accumulate more on-chain value than prominent commodity tokens and competing Treasury products. The next measure of market leadership will be sustained net inflows, collateral usage, redemptions and cross-chain activity, rather than one tracker snapshot or headline TVL figure.