BlackRock's Ethereum-native tokenized money market fund has more than tripled in value over the past three weeks, nearing the $2 billion mark

This article has been updated to include quotes from Brickken CEO Edwin Mata.

The U.S. is seeing a "meaningful shift" to a more crypto-friendly regulatory environment, which has helped boost institutional interest in real-world asset (RWA) tokens and sparked a rapid surge in BlackRock's Ethereum-native money market fund.

BlackRock's USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) saw a over three-fold increase over the past three weeks, going from $615 million to $1.87 billion, according to Token Terminal data shared by Leon Waidmann, head of research at Onchain Foundation, a Web3 intelligence platform.

"BUIDL fund TVL exploded from $615M → $1.87B in just 3 weeks. The tokenization wave is hitting faster than most realize," the researcher wrote in a March 26 X post.

BlackRock's BUIDL fund is part of the wider RWA tokenization sector, which refers to financial products and tangible assets such as real estate and fine art minted on the blockchain, increasing investor accessibility to and trading opportunities for these assets.

The world's largest asset manager launched BUIDL in March 2024 in partnership with tokenization platform Securitize. In a recent Fortune report, Securitize chief operating officer Michael Sonnenshein said the fund aims to make offchain assets "unboring."

The rapid surge in BUIDL follows a period of strong institutional interest in RWA tokens, driven by more regulatory clarity, Edwin Mata, co-founder and CEO of Brickken, a European RWA platform told Cointelegraph.

"There's a meaningful shift in the U.S. to a more crypto-friendly regulatory environment, which is also helping spur demand for tokenized RWA products," Mata said.

RWA tokens reached a new cumulative all-time high of over $17 billion on Feb. 3, following Bitcoin's decline below $100,000.

However, the total value of onchain RWAs is less than 0.5% away from surpassing the $20 billion mark, with a total cumulative value of $19.57 billion, according to data from RWA.xyz.

RWA will likely rise to new all-time highs in 2025 as they attract investor interest amid Bitcoin's lack of momentum, according to Alexander Loktev, chief revenue officer at P2P.org, an institutional staking and crypto infrastructure provider.

"Considering the recent moves we've seen from major financial institutions, particularly BlackRock and JPMorgan's growing involvement in tokenization, I believe we could hit $50 billion in TVL," Loktev said.

Traditional finance (TradFi) institutions are "starting to view tokenized assets as a serious bridge to DeFi," driven by institutions looking for digital asset investments with "predictable yields," added Loktev.