2023-2026, the institutions arrive

In January 2024, the day after the launch of the first bitcoin-backed exchange-traded funds in the United States, Larry Fink, chairman of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, declared on US television that these funds were only a first step, and that the future of markets lay in the tokenisation of every financial security. Two months later, in March 2024, BlackRock launched with Securitize its first tokenised fund on a public blockchain, the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, which the whole sector would soon call by its ticker, BUIDL.

The name on the door weighed far more than the initial amount. For fifteen years, tokenisation had been carried by start-ups, enthusiasts, leaderless protocols and a few experimenting banks. Now the manager of more than ten trillion dollars of assets was issuing directly on Ethereum. Investment committees around the world understood that the subject had just changed category. Three years followed, up to the autumn of 2026 in which I write these lines. The years of institutionalisation.

The regulated pioneers

BlackRock was not the first. As early as 2021 Franklin Templeton had launched a US money market fund registered with the SEC, whose transactions and register of holders were kept on the public Stellar blockchain. It was a world first for a regulated fund open to the public. WisdomTree had followed with a range of tokenised funds. In Europe, Spiko launched in 2024 its French money market UCITS issued natively on Ethereum, described in chapter 4. Circle, the issuer of USDC, bought Hashnote and its tokenised Treasury bill fund, USYC, at the start of 2025.