BlackRock is preparing to bring blockchain to the back office of one of its largest funds, filing to offer a digital share class of its $150 billion Treasury Trust money market fund through BNY Mellon.

The new “DLT Shares,” short for distributed ledger technology, won’t hold crypto. BNY Mellon, the fund’s exclusive distributor, intends to use blockchain to mirror share ownership records, an incremental step that could pave the way for broader adoption of tokenized cash, digital assets, or blockchain-based settlement infrastructure in traditional finance.

In the past few years, a growing number of firms has experimented with creating blockchain-based representations of real world assets (RWAs), bringing the traditional finance world rapidly into the crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi) environment. Earlier Wednesday, Libre said it was tokenizing $500 million of messaging platform Telegram’s $2.4 billion debt and bringing it to the TON blockchain.

BlackRock’s Liquidity Treasury Trust Fund is part of the firm’s Liquidity Funds suite and managed over $150 billion in assets as of April 29. The DLT share class has a minimum investment requirement of $3 million for institutional buyers, with no minimums on subsequent purchases. The SEC filing is preliminary and subject to approval.

The move isn’t BlackRock’s first into tokenization. Its blockchain-native BUIDL fund, created in partnership with Securitize, now manages over $1.7 billion in assets and recently expanded onto Solana.

CEO Larry Fink has consistently emphasized his belief in the long-term potential of tokenization and decentralized finance. In his 2025 annual letter to shareholders, Fink warned that the U.S. risks ceding its financial dominance if it fails to control its debt — a vulnerability that could accelerate investor interest in alternatives like bitcoin (BTC).

“If the U.S. doesn’t get its debt under control … America risks losing [its reserve currency status] to digital assets like Bitcoin,” Fink wrote. “Decentralized finance is an extraordinary innovation. It makes markets faster, cheaper, and more transparent. Yet that same innovation could undermine America’s economic advantage.”

UPDATE (April 30, 7:29 UTC): Adds third paragraph on tokenization trends, rewrites headline.

Libre, a tokenization firm that works closely with the likes of hedge fund Brevan Howard, investment management firm Hamilton Lane and Nomura’s digital assets unit Laser Digital, plans to tokenize $500 million worth of Telegram debt as the blockchain-based Telegram Bond Fund (TBF) on the TON network that’s linked to the messaging platform.

TBF will offer accredited investors exposure to some of the around $2.35 billion of outstanding bonds issued by Telegram, providing institutional-grade yield products that will also be available as collateral for on-chain borrowing and product development on TON, Libre said.

“What we’ve created is like a fixed income fund that acquires the bonds and then we tokenize the fund,” Libre CEO Avtar Sehra in an interview. “When you purchase units in the fund these are on the TON chain, giving you access to the returns of the underlying bonds themselves. This opens up opportunities to use the bonds for collateral, ease of transfers, etc, to ultimately create utility with these financial instruments.”

The past year or two has seen a rush to create blockchain-based representations of real world assets (RWAs), bringing the traditional finance world rapidly within the ambit of crypto and decentralized finance (DeFi).

Sehra said many of his customers want either tokenized money market products because they’re looking for quick access to cash, or something that’s associated with an ecosystem they are involved in or work within.

The TON network was originally developed by Telegram before continuing as an independent operation. Over the last year or so, TON has been focused on bringing a large swathe of Telegram’s 950 million-plus users on-chain.

Libre has already tokenized over $200 million in assets across funds from leading institutions including BlackRock, Brevan Howard, Hamilton Lane, and Laser Digital.

“Our objective isn’t just to tokenize things for the sake of tokenizing them,” Sehra said. “I think the real value in tokenizing traditional financial instruments is unlocking the utility of those assets.”

UPDATE (April. 30, 06:32 UTC): Changes the outstanding Telegram bonds figure to $2.35 billion

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) delayed approval decisions on spot xrp (XRP) and dogecoin (DOGE) exchange-traded funds (ETFs) late Tuesday, in line with analyst expectations.

The SEC said it will wait until June 15 for the next steps for the Bitwise DOGE ETF and June 17 for the Franklin XRP Fund, separate filings show.

The law says the Commission has 45 days from when a proposed rule change is announced to approve it, reject it, or start a process to decide if it should be rejected. These 45 days can be extended to 90 days if the Commission thinks more time is needed.

«The Commission finds it appropriate to designate a longer period within which to take action on the proposed rule change so that it has sufficient time to consider the proposed rule change and the issues raised therein,» the agency said in the filings.

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst James Seyffart said in an X post that these delays are expected as final deadlines for most filings are in October or later.

XRP and DOGE are little-changed in the past 24 hours alongside flat bitcoin price action.