BlackRock’s BUIDL fund pays $4.17M dividends in March, surpasses $25M in total payout

BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) distributed $4.17 million in dividends during March, marking the largest monthly payout for a tokenized Treasury fund.

According to a report by BUIDL’s issuer, Securitize, the record-setting distribution brings BUIDL’s cumulative dividend payments to $25.4 million since its inception, reflecting increasing institutional interest in on-chain exposure to traditional financial products.

Additionally, Securitize noted that the March record is roughly 2x larger than the previous $2.1 million peak registered in July 2024.

The fund, which tokenizes a money market strategy comprised of US Treasuries and cash equivalents, provides daily dividend payouts Monday through Friday, giving investors near real-time yield accruals directly on-chain.

Tokenized US Treasury funds are emerging as a foundational layer in on-chain finance. By providing verifiable, yield-bearing backing, they offer alternatives to crypto-native stablecoins. The sector is the second-largest in tokenization, with nearly $5 billion in size.

$1.9 billion in market cap fueled by DeFi

BUIDL’s assets under management (AUM) reached an all-time high of $1.93 billion on March 27, less than a month after crossing the $1 billion threshold.

According to data from rwa.xyz, its rapid growth places it among the largest real-world asset (RWA) products on public blockchains, trailing only four stablecoins in market capitalization.

A key driver of BUIDL’s AUM expansion is Ethena Labs’ synthetic dollar, USDtb, which uses the fund for 90% of its backing. As of the latest figures shared by Ethena Labs, USDtb has $1.29 billion in exposure to BUIDL, accounting for 67% of the fund’s total market value.

USDtb, designed to maintain price stability through a delta-neutral strategy, allocates reserve capital into BUIDL to earn yield from US Treasury exposure. This structure has made BUIDL a critical component in Ethena’s stablecoin design, directly linking traditional fixed-income instruments to crypto-native applications.

Notably, MakerDAO’s Spark will hold a vote on April 3 to decide whether the protocol should follow its plan to invest $500 million in BUIDL.

This would boost the fund’s market size even further, making participation in investments by DeFi protocols represent 74% of current numbers.

Multi-chain fund, but Ethereum dominates

BUIDL has been expanding its offering to various blockchains. After its launch on Ethereum, the fund expanded to Arbitrum, Polygon, Optimism, Avalanche, Aptos, and Solana more recently.

This multi-chain deployment is part of Securitize’s strategy to make institutional-grade financial products natively accessible across decentralized environments, facilitating integrations with protocols and wallets across ecosystems.

Yet, $1.72 billion of BUIDL shares are issued on Ethereum’s blockchain, nearly 90% of the fund’s size.