Today Securitize, BlackRock’s tokenization partner, announced that BlackRock’s money market fund, BUIDL, is now available on five additional blockchains. It launched in March on Ethereum and has now expanded to Aptos, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Optimism’s OP Mainnet, and Polygon.

BUIDL is the largest tokenized money market fund on a public blockchain with a market capitalization of $517 million. Ondo Finance has issued its own money market fund backed by BUIDL, so it accounts for $192 million of BUIDL’s balance. While BlackRock has a minimum investment of $5 million, Ondo’s OUSG has a $5,000 minimum and also temporarily waves fees.

Notably, BUIDL has management fees of 50 basis points on most blockchains but it’s only 20 bps on Aptos, Avalanche, and Polygon, with the lower costs subsidized by foundations associated with the blockchains.

“We wanted to develop an ecosystem that was thoughtfully designed to be digital and take advantage of the advantages of tokenization,” said Securitize CEO and co-founder Carlos Domingo. “Real-world asset tokenization is scaling, and we’re excited to have these blockchains added to increase the potential of the BUIDL ecosystem. With these new chains we’ll start to see more investors looking to leverage the underlying technology to increase efficiencies on all the things that until now have been hard to do.”

In October Securitize integrated with Zero Hash to allow digital asset firms to use USDC to buy BUIDL and keep their funds on-chain. For some time the USDC stablecoin issuer Circle has said it stands ready to buy BUIDL funds for USDC, allowing investors to exit their investment whenever they like. On a related point, we previously explored why asset managers might want a shared stablecoin.

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US mortgage and real estate service firm Radian has integrated R3’s Corda enterprise blockchain with its Titlegenius offering. The workflow system for real estate title transfers uses DLT for document storage and data transfer. Rather than a black box, it provides transparency around the title transfer process and claims to cut closing costs by an average of 25%.

Radian has a market capitalization of more than $5 billion, although mortgage insurance is its primary revenue source rather than title services.

Title transfer services typically check the history of the property to ensure there are no surprises. They are not just verifying that the seller is the true title holder, but that there are no longer mortgage or other liens against the property. They frequently provide title insurance just in case they missed something.

Once that’s done, the final deed of transfer is drafted and the transaction proceeds to closing and settlement. The process can include various parties, such as the buyer, the real estate agents, mortgage providers and lawyers. By creating a transparent workflow using DLT, all parties can get an up-to-date record of the status of the transaction.

“The title transfer process is notoriously slow and complex, and we are excited to collaborate with R3 to make this process simpler and more efficient for our clients,” said Steven Stipetich, Radian’s Senior Vice President of Title. “There are many valuable use cases for DLT in the property space like bulk refinancing – already supported by the titlegenius platform.”

Coadjute also uses Corda for real estate sales

Corda is also used by UK property technology firm Coadjute, which does something similar to Titlegenius. However, its software provides the glue to share data between different real estate software solutions used by the estate agents of the buyer and seller. Corda was incorporated into Coadjute’s software since its founding in 2018. The startup’s backers include UK banks such as Lloyds, Natwest and Nationwide.

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On Friday Tether, known as the operator of the largest stablecoin, reported its investment division completed its first trade finance transaction in October. It involved providing finance for 670,000 barrels of Middle Eastern crude oil worth around $45 million.

The credit granted was from Tether Investments, a company with $7 billion in equity funded by the profits of the stablecoin firmanted . Hence, it does not involve the use of stablecoin reserves. However, the Tether stablecoin was used for the payment.

“With USDT, we’re bringing efficiency and speed to markets that have historically relied on slower, more costly payment structures,” said Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether.

“This transaction marks the beginning, as we look to support a broader range of commodities and industries, fostering greater inclusivity and innovation in global finance.”

Tether‘s main stablecoin has a current market capitalization of more than $124 billion.

Tether comes out of the shadows

For years there were doubts about whether the Tether stablecoin was fully backed. The company makes out that these concerns are unwarranted. However, the New York Attorney General found that Tether misrepresented the status of the stablecoin reserves during 2018 and 2019 and banned the stablecoin from the state as part of a settlement.

During that time, Tether lent $625 million of its reserves (around a third of the total) to sister company Bitfinex exchange, which would have been insolvent without the funds. With the subsequent Bitcoin rally, Bitfinex managed to recover.

However, since Tether recently became enormously profitable earning $7 billion during the first nine months of 2024, that breach of ethics and trust seems to have been forgotten.

In another positive piece of news for Tether, the co-head of Donald Trump’s transition team is Howard Lutnick, the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. And Cantor looks after the $100 billion plus in Treasuries and repos that form part of Tether’s stablecoin reserves, making it an important client.

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