Blackrock’s BUIDL Hits New Highs on CeDeFi and Euler Activations

BUIDL (Blackrock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) continues on its upward trajectory after a series of activations and investments were announced throughout May.

The BUIDL market capitalization now sits at $2.9 billion, a 346% increase from the beginning of the year.

In the most recent move, today, real-world asset (RWA) investment and strategy firm BounceBit announced a boosted yield strategy leveraging a 3-month Bitcoin basis and options trade while using BUIDL as collateral. The proof-of-concept trade is “achieving approx. 24% APY,” according to BounceBit.

BounceBit, which labels its product line as “CeDeFi Reimagined,” offers a variety of yield and broker strategies backed by its BounceBit Layer 1 blockchain. CeDeFi refers to a blend of centralized and decentralized defiance (DeFi). The basis trade is a strategy to collect yield via funding by owning a spot asset and shorting its derivative, which can be especially effective in bull markets when managed properly.

In another recent activation involving Blackrock’s tokenized RWA fund, DeFi protocol Euler Finance launched sBUIDL as collateral on May 15, marking the fund’s most recent pure DeFi integration.

The asset sBUIDL is a composable ERC-20 standard token issued by Securitize, which can be used to borrow USDC or AUSD on Euler.

Euler’s total value locked (TVL) has skyrocketed since the product’s relaunch in September, after suffering a hack in March 2023 that completely decimated its TVL. Euler TVL is currently at an all-time high of $924 million, a 740% increase since Jan. 1.

The DeFi integrations come just a week after Securitize, which is also the tokenization provider for BUIDL, received a strategic investment from market making firm Jump Crypto. Jump’s investment amount remains undisclosed, but signals yet another massive entity’s conviction in the advancement of asset tokenization.