Ethena and BlackRock Expand Tie, Adding USDe to Its $20 Trillion Platform

Ethena Labs and BlackRock announced an expanded collaboration on Monday that adds Ethena’s synthetic dollar USDe to BlackRock’s Aladdin platform and creates a $100 million facility to give holders of BlackRock’s tokenized treasury fund, BUIDL, a way to reach liquidity when traditional markets are closed.

Tokenized treasury funds settle against a banking system that closes on nights and weekends, leaving holders of those funds without an easy way to move into cash when traditional markets are shut. The new facility is built to close that gap. Securitize — which tokenizes BUIDL and serves as its regulated transfer agent — runs the facility, letting approved BUIDL holders trade the fund for USDC, USDtb and other eligible stablecoins and back again, even while markets are dark.

Ethena and BlackRock framed the tie-up as two-way, on-chain plumbing connecting BUIDL and stablecoins — one that, they said, lets holders convert into the fund almost instantly. The setup builds on a round-the-clock atomic swap tie between USDtb and BUIDL that Ethena and Securitize established a year ago.

Separately, BlackRock made USDe a supported asset on Aladdin, the portfolio and risk system that large institutions running upward of $20 trillion in assets rely on to manage their holdings. USDtb anchors the relationship — a stablecoin that Anchorage Digital Bank issues and that holds BUIDL as its main backing — and BUIDL will also back a forthcoming white-label product from Ethena, CoinDesk reported.

“We believe stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets to be inextricably linked,” said Robert Mitchnick, BlackRock’s global head of digital assets. He said the facility “enables a level of frictionless interoperability that is core to the unique utility that tokenizing treasury funds makes possible.”

The deal is the latest in a run of institutional moves around Ethena, following a strategic ENA investment from asset manager Janus Henderson earlier in June. ENA, Ethena’s governance token, rose about 8% in the 24 hours after the announcement, according to CoinDesk.

“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,” said Guy Young, Ethena’s founder.

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