Uniswap Surges as BlackRock Investment Fuels BUIDL DeFi Integration

Uniswap’s governance token jumped on Wednesday after the
decentralized exchange’s creator announced an integration with BUIDL, BlackRock’s tokenized
money market fund.

The world’s largest asset manager is enabling the $2.1 billion product to
trade via UniswapX, Uniswap Labs said in a press release. The protocol
functions as a marketplace where professional traders bid to provide users
with the best possible price.

Uniswap changed hands around $3.84 on Wednesday, a more than 13% increase
over the past day, according to
CoinGecko. Despite the jump, the token’s price had still fallen nearly 29% over
the past month, tumbling recently amid a broader downturn in the crypto
market.

In the press release, Uniswap Labs said that BlackRock had also “made a
strategic investment within the Uniswap ecosystem,” but the company didn’t
specify the allocation’s scope.

The asset manager plans to purchase Uniswap tokens—the first token tied to
decentralized finance
(or DeFi) on its balance sheet—a person familiar with the matter told
Decrypt. A disclosure notes “any existing investment by
BlackRock may be discontinued at any time.”

In terms of BUIDL’s integration with UniswapX, trading will still be
facilitated by Securitize, the tokenization specialist managing
BlackRock’s fund. Still, the system functions automatically, searching for
the best possible quote across a group of allowed participants.

That means BUIDL will trade on-chain similar to other tokens, with some
degree of added security, as crypto market makers including Wintermute and
Flowdesk compete through a process known as RFQ, or Request For Quote.

The integration is aimed at “bridging the gap between traditional finance
and DeFi,” according to Uniswap. And although institutional investors can
face restrictions as far as handling digital assets goes, Securitize CEO
Carlos Domingo said the integration supports self-custody.

“This is the unlock we’ve been working toward: bringing the trust and
regulatory standards of traditional finance to the speed and openness for
which DeFi is known,” he said in a statement, noting that the framework
could be applied to other real-world assets.

BlackRock’s BUIDL is among the largest tokenized assets, according to
RWA.xyz. The
product’s tokens, which are pegged to the price of the U.S. dollar, are
backed by cash and U.S. Treasuries. Unlike most stablecoins, BUIDL offers
investors a yield.

In December, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and COO Rob Goldstein
declared
in a column for
The Economist
that tokenization will become “the next major evolution in market
infrastructure” by enabling instantaneous settlement and expanding the
world of investable assets.

In its thematic outlook for 2026, the asset manager
identified
Ethereum
as a leader in tokenization, which underpins most stablecoins. Uniswap
launched on Ethereum’s mainnet in 2018, and last year, its creators
debuted
a
layer-2 network
called Unichain.

Source:
https://decrypt.co/357749/uniswap-token-jumps-blackrock-investment-buidl-defi