BlackRock Makes Big DeFi Play: BUIDL Launches on UniswapX, Will Purchase UNI Token

BlockBeats News, February 12th, Uniswap Labs announced a partnership with Securitize, and BlackRock's BUIDL is now tradable via UniswapX. This marks BlackRock's first direct foray into the DeFi space, supporting accredited institutional investors (requiring whitelisting, with assets of at least $5 million) to trade using stablecoins. At the same time, BlackRock has stated that it will purchase Uniswap's UNI token but has not disclosed the specific amount. In response to this news, the UNI price experienced a brief 30% surge, soaring from around $3.3 to $4.5 and has since fallen back to $3.5.

The crypto community views this as a milestone in the deep integration of TradFi and DeFi. With over $14 trillion in assets under management, BlackRock's choice of Uniswap represents a strong endorsement of DeFi infrastructure, with UNI being the beneficiary. Uniswap founder Hayden Adams stated: "DeFi is experiencing an important day. This partnership leverages Uniswap's market structure to provide on-chain trading for BUIDL investors, settling on the Ethereum blockchain. This is a significant step towards 'almost all value being tradable on-chain'."

Renowned crypto investor William Mougayar stated, "Extremely bullish on Ethereum, Uniswap is Ethereum's largest infrastructure, starting with BUIDL and the fund assets managed by BlackRock. Other tokenized assets will quickly follow suit." Tony Edward, founder of the Thinking Crypto Podcast, remarked, "Major crypto adoption, BlackRock is embracing DeFi."

However, some community users point out that trading is limited by whitelists and an RFQ mechanism, with initial liquidity restrictions and not a fully open AMM. BlackRock has previously expanded BUIDL on chains like Polygon, making this more of a DeFi expansion rather than a "first step into the field."