Bitcoin and crypto prices have gone into meltdown in recent weeks, adding to a price crash that’s wiped out more than $2 trillion worth of value from the market.
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The bitcoin price has dropped to under $60,000 per bitcoin, down more than 50% from its October peak, with traders braced for a “cascade.”
Now, as analysts with JPMorgan warn a bitcoin price nightmare is suddenly coming true, BlackRock has said it will integrated Ethena’s yield-generating “synthetic dollar” into its $20 trillion Aladdin risk management platform.
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BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink has embraced bitcoin, predicting the bitcoin price will soar in coming years.
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“The next phase of digital asset adoption will be driven by infrastructure that allows traditional institutions to interact with onchain financial products through familiar systems and workflows,” Ethena founder Guy Young said in a statement.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager that went all in on bitcoin in 2024 via its spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF), and Ethena Labs, developer of the USDe “synthetic dollar,” have announced that BlackRock’s Aladdin users will get greater access to Ethena’s products, including improved liquidity for BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (Buidl), an onchain, tokenized money market fund.
In 2024, BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink called the financial giant’s bitcoin and crypto ETFs, “step one in the technological revolution in the financial markets. Step two is going to be the tokenization of every financial asset”—pushing Wall Street into adoption of crypto technology.
“The integration of USDe on Aladdin provides unique institutional access for the more than $20 trillion of assets managed by financial institutions on Aladdin,” Ethena developers posted to X, adding that BlackRock’s Buidl will serve as the primary reserve asset for an upcoming white-label product.
Aladdin is BlackRock’s portfolio construction and risk management platform used by banks, insurers, pension funds and asset managers overseeing more than $20 trillion in combined assets.
“We believe stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets to be inextricably linked,” Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s head of digital assets, said in a statement. “This liquidity facility enables a level of frictionless interoperability that is core to the unique utility that tokenizing treasury funds makes possible.”
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The bitcoin price has suffered a massive crash, losing more than 50% of its value, with traders braced for a further bitcoin price crash to come.
Forbes Digital Assets
As part of the agreement, Ethena will support a $100 million liquidity facility through Securitize, the tokenization platform and regulated transfer agent for Buidl.
The $100 million liquidity facility will allow eligible holders of BlackRock’s Buidl to exchange their holdings for USDC, USDtb and other supported stablecoins outside traditional market hours, and convert those assets back into Buidl.
Meanwhile, Securitize has announced that it is set to start trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday after getting approval for its proposed merger with Cantor Equity Partners II (CEPT).