Author: Jae, PANews

On February 11, global asset management giant BlackRock announced that it would deploy its tokenized treasury bond fund BUIDL, which has a scale of approximately $2.2 billion, to the UniswapX protocol for on-chain trading.

At the same time, BlackRock confirmed that it has purchased Uniswap's native governance token UNI. Although the quantity has not been disclosed, this marks the first time that this financial empire, managing $14 trillion in assets, has directly exposed its balance sheet to DeFi (decentralized finance) governance tokens.

Upon the announcement, the UNI token surged over 25%. Uniswap founder Hayden Adams stated: DeFi has reached an important day, and this collaboration will leverage Uniswap's market structure to provide on-chain trading for BUIDL investors, with settlement on Ethereum. This is a significant step toward "almost all value being tradeable on-chain."

This event is not just a simple asset listing; it is also a new exploration into financial infrastructure. For the first time, Wall Street has proactively entered the living room of DeFi, sat down, handed out business cards, and pulled out a checkbook. Tony Edward, founder of the Thinking Crypto Podcast, noted: This is a major adoption of cryptocurrency, and BlackRock is embracing DeFi.

For Uniswap, this means it is transforming from being primarily retail-driven into an invisible backend of institutional-grade liquidity. For BlackRock, this signifies that it finally believes: DEX (decentralized exchanges) have matured enough to serve as underlying financial infrastructure to be entrusted.

BUIDL's $2.2 Billion "Ride" on Uniswap, Treasury Bonds Can Also Instantly Turn to U

To understand the significance of this collaboration, one must clarify a key fact: BUIDL has not been thrown into a Uniswap V2 or V3 liquidity pool like ordinary tokens, but has been embedded into UniswapX.

Since its launch, BUIDL has developed into the largest on-chain institutional-grade tokenized fund, primarily supported by U.S. Treasury bonds, cash, and repo agreements.

However, the liquidity of such assets has long been limited to traditional over-the-counter (OTC) trades or specific redemption periods, restricting their utility in the digital asset market.

UniswapX is a trading aggregation protocol launched by Uniswap Labs based on an "intent-based" framework, with its core mechanism being the Request for Quote (RFQ) framework, which will provide institutional investors with a trading environment free of gas fees, immune to MEV (miner extractable value), and with optimal pricing.

In other words, users do not need to find trading routes themselves, pay gas fees, or worry about MEV attacks; they simply need to express "I want to swap BUIDL for USDC," and the rest is handled by professional market makers.

The greatest difference between this architecture and traditional AMM (automated market makers) is that: it is programmably compliant.

In BUIDL's trading flow, Securitize Markets will act as the "regulatory gatekeeper," responsible for pre-qualifying all investors participating in trades and verifying their whitelist status. Only qualified investors with assets exceeding $5 million can enter this trading ecosystem. Market makers such as Wintermute and Flowdesk have also been pre-selected.

This means that although BUIDL is traded on a decentralized protocol, its participants are still under strict KYC/AML regulations.

This concept of "compliance layering" resolves the conflict between the anonymity of decentralized protocols and the compliance requirements of traditional finance. In simple terms, trading occurs on the Uniswap interface, settlement occurs on Ethereum's ledger, but the compliance pressure is placed upfront on Securitize.

Uniswap manages to maintain the permissionless nature of the protocol's underlying design while attracting institutional capital. This is a full application of the "intent-based" trading model: users express intent, and professional fillers complete the execution under compliance.

More disruptively, there is a leap in settlement efficiency.

Traditional money market fund settlements usually require T+1 or even longer. However, the integration of BUIDL on UniswapX will achieve atomic-level instantaneous settlement.

This indicates that holders can instantly convert their treasury bond shares generating a 4% annual yield to USDC at any time (including weekends and holidays), significantly enhancing capital efficiency.

For institutions, this level of liquidity will provide tokenized assets with unmatched advantages in collateral management and risk hedging compared to traditional assets.

This essentially creates a high liquidity secondary market for "yield-generating stablecoins." UniswapX is precisely providing this low-loss conversion channel between yield rights and instant purchasing power.

UNI is no longer an air governance token; BlackRock is investing real money into it

If the launch of BUIDL represents a business collaboration, then BlackRock's purchase of UNI tokens signifies a capital marriage.

For a long time, UNI has been jokingly referred to as "a governance token with no value." Holders could participate in votes but could not directly gain any economic share from the protocol's transactions worth hundreds of billions of dollars every year. However, this status will end by the end of 2025.

The approval of the "UNIfication" proposal has rewritten the value narrative of UNI.

Under the "UNIfication" framework, Uniswap has officially activated the protocol fee switch and introduced a smart contract system of "TokenJar + Firepit."

All protocol fees from Uniswap V2, V3, and Layer 2 Unichain will flow into TokenJar, and the only way to extract this value is to destroy an equivalent amount of UNI tokens through Firepit.

This programmatic buyback and burn mechanism has directly transformed the protocol's trading volume into a deflationary force for UNI tokens for the first time.

As of February 12, based on estimates from DeFiLlama, the annualized income of the Uniswap protocol will exceed $26 million.

BlackRock's purchase of UNI tokens at this moment demonstrates a sharp capital intuition.

UNI is no longer just a symbolic voting right; it has become a blue-chip asset with "productive asset" characteristics. As trading volumes of RWA assets like BUIDL continue to expand on Uniswap, the fees captured by the protocol will rise, accelerating the burn of UNI and enhancing the inherent value of the token.

However, the strategic intent behind this transaction goes far beyond financial returns; it is about the "voice" in the global decentralized liquidity infrastructure. As a capital giant managing over $14 trillion in assets, BlackRock needs to ensure that the trading protocols on which its tokenized assets rely operate stably, without adverse radical governance changes for institutions.

Holding a sufficient proportion of UNI tokens means:

1. Preventing discriminatory fee policies: Ensuring that the UniswapX path where BUIDL resides will not be subject to excessive fees.
2. Promoting compliance Hooks standardization: In the Uniswap V4 Hooks architecture, BlackRock can use its voting rights to support compliance-oriented clearing Hooks, thereby creating a more favorable trading environment for institutions.
3. Backing of asset value: By directly holding a position, BlackRock will also signal to other traditional financial institutions that certain DeFi tokens are mature enough to be part of a diversified asset allocation.

The marriage between BlackRock and Uniswap is not a chance encounter of capital, but signifies that DeFi has officially transitioned from "experimental finance" to "infrastructure finance."

By bringing in participants of BlackRock's level, Uniswap has carved out a new moat in the increasingly competitive DEX market.

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