Blackrock entered DeFi through UniSwap, a modest recovery in Bitcoin standards
BlackRock made its first formal move into decentralized finance this week, listing a treasury fund listed on Uniswap, while bitcoin and ether made modest gains amid heavy ETF inflows.
Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) each rose 2.5% last week, but failed to break through key psychological levels due to mixed exchange-traded fund (ETF) flows and crypto investor sentiment.
Bitcoin ETFs started the week with two consecutive days of inflows, but quickly turned around with $276 million in losses on Wednesday and $410 million on Thursday.
According to Farside Investors data, the Ether ETF saw similar flows, with two modest inflows, resulting in $129 million in outflows on Wednesday and $113 million on Thursday.
In a silver lining to the correction, Bitcoin's sharp drawdown to $59,930 could be a critical “halfway point” sign in the current bear market, according to Kaiko Research, where markets are now sitting at a critical inflection point that determines the relevance of the four-year cycle theory.
Despite sliding crypto valuations, large institutions continue to explore cryptocurrency adoption, including BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, which debuted decentralized finance (DeFi) on Wednesday.
BlackRock enters DeFi, taps Uniswap for institutional token trading
Asset management giant BlackRock is making its first formal move into decentralized finance by bringing US Treasury funds into Uniswap, a critical juncture for the adoption of institutional deflation.
According to Wednesday's announcement, BlackRock will list its US Dollar Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) on the Uniswap decentralized exchange, allowing institutional investors to buy and sell the tokenized security.
As part of the arrangement, BlackRock is buying Uniswap's native management token UNI for an undisclosed amount, the announcement said.
The collaboration is being facilitated by tokenization company Securities, which partnered with the world's largest asset manager on the BUIDL startup.
According to Fortune, trading will initially be limited to select institutional investors and market makers before becoming more widespread.
Securities CEO Carlos Domingo said: “For the first time, institutions and authorized investors can access technology to trade tokenized real-world assets with self-protection, like BUIDL, a leader in the decentralized financial space.
BUIDL is the largest money market fund with total assets of over $2.18 billion, according to data compiled by RWA.xyz. The currency is issued on several blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, Aptos and Avalanche.
In December, BUIDL reached a key milestone of over $100 million in treasury holdings.
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Trump family plans WMFI FX and currency exchange platform: Report
World Liberty Financial, a decentralized financial platform backed by US President Donald Trump's family, announced on Thursday that it will launch foreign exchange (FX) and remittance services for its users.
The proposed foreign exchange and currency exchange platform, called WorldSwap, seeks to challenge traditional money exchange and FX service providers with low fees and a simple user interface, Reuters reported.
Daily global FX trading volume will exceed $9.6 trillion by April 2025, according to a report from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and the private remittance market will grow to $892 billion annually by 2024, according to World Bank data.
No exact timetable has been given for the release. Cointelegraph reached out to World Liberty Financial but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
WLFI's expansion into FX and foreign exchange is drawing scrutiny from Democratic lawmakers in the US as it grows following WLFI's application for a national trust bank charter in January and the launch of the Global Free Markets lending platform.
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Uniswap won earlier when a US judge rejected Bancor's patent claim
A New York federal judge has dismissed a patent infringement lawsuit filed by Bancor's affiliates against Uniswap, ruling that the asserted patents claim abstract ideas and are ineligible for protection under US patent law.
In a memorandum opinion and order issued Tuesday by U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Judge John G. Coltle ruled against BitProtocol Foundation and LocalCoin Ltd. By Universal Navigation Inc. and granted defendant's motion to dismiss their complaint against Uniswap Foundation.
The court ruled that the patents address an abstract idea for calculating crypto currency values and therefore fail the two-step test for patent eligibility established by the US Supreme Court.
The ruling marks a procedural victory for Uniswap, but it is not final. The suit was dismissed without prejudice, giving the defendants 21 days to file an amended complaint. If an amended complaint is not filed, the dismissal will be reversed with prejudice.
“A lawyer told me we won,” Uniswap founder Hayden Adams wrote on X shortly after the verdict.
A spokesperson for Uniswap Labs told Cointelegraph: “Uniswap Labs has always been proud to build publicly – a core value of DeFi. We are pleased that the court has found this case to be frivolous.”
Cointelegraph reached out to Bprotocol Foundation representatives for comment but did not receive a response by press time.
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Binance completes $1 billion Bitcoin conversion for SAFU emergency fund
Binance has completed a $1 billion Bitcoin conversion for an emergency fund, committed to holding Bitcoin as its primary reserve asset.
Binance bought another $304 million worth of Bitcoin (BTC) on Thursday, completing the conversion of a billion dollars in Bitcoin to its Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) wallet, according to Arkham data.
The currency now holds 15,000 bitcoins, worth more than $1 billion, with an average total cost of 67,000 coins, Binance said on Thursday's XPost.
“With the SAFU Fund now fully in Bitcoin, we reinforce our belief in BTC as a major long-term reserve asset.”
The latest tranche of BTC came three days after Binance's predecessor raised $300 million on Monday.
The exchange first announced that it would convert $1 billion of its User Protection Fund into bitcoin on January 30, opening a 30-day window for the first purchases, which were completed in less than two weeks.
He said he would rebalance the currency if the exchange rate's volatility dropped below $800 million.
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Vitalik draws a line between “true DeFi” and a centralized production stable coin
Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has drawn clear boundaries around what he considers “true” decentralized finance (DeFi), pushing back against commodity-based stablecoin strategies that he says fail to meaningfully transform risk.
In his talk on X, Buterin said that DeFi gains not only from generating revenue on centralized assets, but also from changing how risk is allocated and managed.
Buterin's comments come amid renewed scrutiny of Defi's core use cases, particularly in lending markets built around fiat-backed stablecoins such as the USDC.
While not specifying specific protocols, Buterin took aim at what he described as a “USDC product,” which he said relied heavily on central issuers while offering little discount on issuer or counterparty risk.
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Overview of the DeFi market
According to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView, most of the 100 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization ended the week in the green.
The Bitcoin (PPP) token is up 195%, the biggest gainer of the week, up 100%, followed by the Humanity Protocol (H) token, which is up 57% in the past week.
Thanks for reading this week's roundup of the most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and lessons about this dynamic and evolving space.
