On April 24, Archax, a digital asset exchange regulated by the UK FCA, announced a partnership with the HBAR fund to provide tokenized shares of BlackRock’s US Treasury Money Market Fund. The news that Hedera participated in the tokenization of BlackRock’s MMF was interpreted as a positive signal by the market, and the price of its token HBAR once rose by more than 106%, but has now fallen back.

At the same time, although BlackRock did not participate in Hedera's MMF tokenization development, its strong cooperation resources have always attracted market attention, and this year Hedera is also investing heavily in supporting its own ecosystem.

Collaboration to tokenize BlackRock MMF completes first multi-million dollar transaction

The announcement pointed out that in the current high interest rate environment, MMF (money market fund) is a useful tool that has the potential to provide institutional stability and yield for the underlying investment of short-term debt products and reduce the counterparty risk of a single bank or stablecoin provider. At the same time, by creating a secondary market for tokenized instruments, investors can be provided with services for almost instant transfer of MMF shares throughout the day, and these tokens can also be used for collateral transfer, not just traditional subscription/redemption.

With the tokenization of BlackRock’s ICS U.S. Treasury Money Market, users no longer need to go through the cumbersome application process to purchase, but can trade BlackRock MMF directly on the Archax platform or through the on-chain network. Currently, the first multi-million dollar tokenized stock transaction of BlackRock MMF has been completed on the Ownera Finp2P digital asset network, which is also tokenized on Hedera.

The collaboration is based on the tokenization of Abrdn MMF created by Archax on the Hedera and Ethereum blockchains in 2023. Abrdn is the largest asset management company in the UK with assets of over US$669.1 billion.

In this regard, Archax CEO and co-founder Graham Rodford said that money market funds from different asset managers can follow different underlying investment themes, such as investing in short-term government debt issuance, so it is necessary to provide a range of different products to meet customer needs. Archax has expanded the range of options provided and served a wider range of customer needs by adding more funds to the tokenized MMF product portfolio.

Shayne Higdo, CEO of HBAR Foundation, said that with the support of Archax, adding tokenized MMF stocks on Hedera is a huge trust in Hedera. Hedera's speed, security and low-cost infrastructure have been verified, and it is hoped that more TradFi institutions will join Hedera in the future to realize more RWA cases.

The announcement also caused misunderstandings, including Chris O'Connor, founder of the Cardano Ghost Fund DAO, who pointed out that BlackRock "did not participate" in the development of Hedera and criticized the way the HBAR Foundation made the announcement. He said, "What actually happened is the HBAR project, which tokenized the shares of the BlackRock fund through the secondary market. Just like I can buy a Rolex watch, take a picture, and send it to my X account, it doesn't mean that Rolex cooperates with me."

Affected by this, Coingecko data shows that the price of the HBAR token has been falling since it hit a high of US$0.18. As of the time of writing, it has fallen by about 23.5% from its high point.

Most of the council members are from traditional giants, and they plan to allocate more than $600 million to develop the ecosystem.

The listing of BlackRock MMF tokenized shares on the blockchain is also an important reason why Hedera is hotly discussed and hyped. As one of the world's largest asset management groups, BlackRock has an asset size of over 10 trillion US dollars, and its layout in RWA is also the focus of market attention.

However, Hedera has been deepening its ties with giants. According to the latest official disclosure by Hedera, its board members come from many well-known crypto-native institutions and traditional giants, including BitGo, Chainlink, Google, Boeing Deutsche Telekom, Nomura Securities, IBM, DELL, LG, Ubisoft, Mondelez International and more than 30 other institutions.

The joining of these members also brings powerful cooperation resources to Hedera. For example, Google Cloud cooperates with Hedera Hashgraph and will operate its network nodes, gaming giant Ubisoft joins Hedera's governance committee to further explore the encryption field, LG Electronics cooperates with Hedera to launch an NFT platform, and food company Mondelez International will develop DLT-based solutions on Hedera.

In addition to these council members, Hedera has also reached cooperation with other institutions in many fields such as payment, technology development and automobiles. For example, the Federal Reserve's instant payment system FedNow has added Hedera-supported micropayment platform Dropp as its service provider, Hedera has signed a five-year cooperation agreement worth US$250 million with the Saudi Ministry of Investment and launched the "DeepTech Venture Studio" to develop technical solutions, Hyundai Motor and Kia have launched a carbon dioxide emission monitoring system based on the Hedera network, and Hedera has cooperated with the Algorand ecosystem to develop a new DeRec standard.

So far, Hedera has officially stated that its ecological projects have exceeded 80, covering DeFi, wallets, stablecoins, NFTs, metaverse, games, exchanges and other tracks. Hedera has also begun to increase its support for ecological and technological implementation this year. As early as January this year, the Hedera Council announced that it had voted to approve the board of directors to allocate an additional 4.86 billion HBARs (currently worth $680 million) to further develop the Hedera ecosystem and achieve decentralized governance.

In general, although Hedera’s announcement on “BlackRock Fund Tokenization” has a certain hype element, its rich partner resources and generous ecological support are attracting market attention.