💵Weekly Recap: BlackRock Drives Surge in RWAs

Tokenized U.S. treasury assets dominated the crypto news narrative this week, with the sector’s capitalization surging to an all-time high of more than $1 billion.

The bullish momentum follows the launch of the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) on Ethereum last week. The tokenized fund from the world’s largest asset manager has already mopped up an impressive $275 million since going live to rank as the second-largest on-chain U.S. Treasuries fund.

In related news, Ondo Finance pledged to allocate assets backing its $88.5 million Short-Term US Government Bond Fund (OUSG) to BUIDL. Also, in real-world assets (RWAs) news, Anemoy, a Centrifuge-native asset manager offering exposure to tokenized treasuries, expanded onto Celo.

The buzz surrounding tokenized treasuries comes as the broader market for on-chain RWAs is booming, with the combined capitalization of RWA governance tokens rallying more than 60% over the past seven days.

It was a significant week for regulation-related news, with Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder behind the insolvent CeFi firms FTX and Alameda Research, receiving a 25-year sentence. Bankman-Fried was convicted on seven counts for mishandling customer assets to the tune of an $8 billion loss for users.

In other legal developments, the SEC’s lawsuit against Coinbase will move forward after a court ruled that the agency “adequately allege[d]” that Coinbase offered unlicensed securities through its staking program. The SEC is also facing a lawsuit from the DeFi Education Fund and a small-time airdrop issuer seeking a court ruling that airdropped tokens do not comprise securities investment contracts.

Also, KuCoin is suffering heavy withdrawals after the U.S. Department of Justice charged the exchange and two of its executives with operating an unlicensed money transmission business and violating the Bank Secrecy Act.

Memecoin mania continues to rage on, with meme tokens on Base surpassing a combined capitalization of $1 billion. DEGEN is among the sector’s top performers as of late, with the token rallying an absurd 2,674% in the 30 days. The meteoric gains come as the token finds new utility as a vehicle for fundraising on the network, in addition to the project launching its own Layer 3 network called Degen Chain.

BNB Chain is also benefiting from the recent memecoin craze, with the network’s decentralized exchanges outpacing Ethereum and Solana by trade volume this past week.

Ethena Labs, the team behind the yield-bearing USDe stablecoin, announced that it will airdrop a token to its users, with 5% of its supply going to early adopters, on April 2. MNT, the native token on Mantle, is up 63% in the past week after Mantle began distributing Ethena Shards to MNT stakers via its new Rewards Station (Ethena calls its points, shards).