BlackRock launches European UCITS tokenised money market funds on public Ethereum

BlackRock has introduced digital share classes across six existing funds in its BlackRock Institutional Cash Series (ICS), covering dollar, euro, and sterling denominations, marking its first European UCITS tokenised money market fund (MMF) offering. The tokenisation infrastructure is provided by Kinexys by JP Morgan, and notably the tokens are issued on the public Ethereum blockchain rather than the permissioned distributed ledger technology (DLT) network the two firms used in their earlier partnership.

The stated purposes for the digital share classes are liquidity provision for corporate treasurers and collateral mobility, two use cases that are increasingly attracting non-crypto-native institutional clients. That trajectory is underscored by a separate deal announced in June, in which Ant International began using Amundi’s tokenised MMF for corporate treasury management, with Amundi described as Europe’s largest asset manager.

A structural question hangs over the product’s operational readiness. JP Morgan acts as transfer agent, responsible for maintaining the official shareholder registry, but the timing of registry updates relative to token transfers remains unresolved. Where a mismatch exists between an on-chain transfer and an off-hours registry update, legal ownership may not pass until the next working day, introducing settlement risk. BlackRock did not respond to a request for clarification on when token transfers become legally binding before publication.