Uniswap Token Jumps Following BlackRock Investment as BUIDL Goes DeFi

Uniswap’s governance token jumped on Wednesday after the decentralized exchange’s creator announced an integration with BUIDL, BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund.

The world’s largest asset manager is enabling the $2.1 billion product to trade via UniswapX, Uniswap Labs said in a press release. The protocol functions as a marketplace where professional traders bid to provide users with the best possible price.

Uniswap changed hands around $3.84 on Wednesday, a more than 13% increase over the past day, according to CoinGecko. Despite the jump, the token’s price had still fallen nearly 29% over the past month, tumbling recently amid a broader downturn in the crypto market.

In the press release, Uniswap Labs said that BlackRock had also “made a strategic investment within the Uniswap ecosystem,” but the company didn’t specify the allocation’s scope.

The asset manager plans to purchase Uniswap tokens—the first token tied to decentralized finance (or DeFi) on its balance sheet—a person familiar with the matter told Decrypt. A disclosure notes “any existing investment by BlackRock may be discontinued at any time.”

In terms of BUIDL’s integration with UniswapX, trading will still be facilitated by Securitize, the tokenization specialist managing BlackRock’s fund. Still, the system functions automatically, searching for the best possible quote across a group of allowed participants.

That means BUIDL will trade on-chain similar to other tokens, with some degree of added security, as crypto market makers including Wintermute and Flowdesk compete through a process known as RFQ, or Request For Quote.

The integration is aimed at “bridging the gap between traditional finance and DeFi,” according to Uniswap. And although institutional investors can face restrictions as far as handling digital assets goes, Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo said the integration supports self-custody.

“This is the unlock we’ve been working toward: bringing the trust and regulatory standards of traditional finance to the speed and openness for which DeFi is known,” he said in a statement, noting that the framework could be applied to other real-world assets.

BlackRock’s BUIDL is among the largest tokenized assets, according to RWA.xyz. The product’s tokens, which are pegged to the price of the U.S. dollar, are backed by cash and U.S. Treasuries. Unlike most stablecoins, BUIDL offers investors a yield.

In December, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink and COO Rob Goldstein declared in a column for The Economist that tokenization will become “the next major evolution in market infrastructure” by enabling instantaneous settlement and expanding the world of investable assets.

In its thematic outlook for 2026, the asset manager identified Ethereum as a leader in tokenization, which underpins most stablecoins. Uniswap launched on Ethereum’s mainnet in 2018, and last year, its creators debuted a layer-2 network called Unichain.