BlackRock has confirmed it has “no commercial relationship” with Hedera and that it did not choose the Hedera Hashgraph to tokenize any BlackRock funds, including shares of its $22 billion money market fund.
Hedera’s (HBAR) token rallied over 100% on Tuesday following the HBAR Foundation’s announcement on X stating that blockchain firms Archax and Ownera tokenized BlackRock’s ICS U.S. Treasury Fund on Hedera.
Some misinterpreted the post to suggest BlackRock played an active role in the tokenization effort, but a BlackRock spokesperson has confirmed to Cointelegraph that’s not the case.
“BlackRock has no commercial relationship with Hedera nor has BlackRock selected Hedera to tokenise any BlackRock funds.”
As of the time of writing, HBAR has fallen 32.8% in the past 24 hours to $0.118 since it peaked at $0.176 at 5:00 am UTC on April 24, according to CoinGecko.
“As we have in the past, BlackRock will communicate directly with the public on the evolution of our digital asset strategy,” the spokesperson added.
HBAR Foundation’s announcement has amassed over 2.9 million views and 3,200 reposts since it was posted a little over 36 hours ago — though some cryptocurrency influencers misinterpreted the message.
“BLACKROCK JUST TOKENIZED ONE OF THEIR MONEY MARKET FUNDS ON HEDERA,” said Mason Versluis to his 189,000 X followers.
Archax CEO Graham Rodford also clarified later on X that it was his firm’s choice to put shares of BlackRock’s money market fund on Hedera but said BlackRock was “aware” that Archax was tokenizing shares of the fund.
Rodford further explained the nuance during an interview with crypto YouTuber Jesus Martinez.
“What we saw on Twitter was kind of pretty much close to the truth [...] Archax had clients that wanted to invest in the BlackRock money market fund. When they expressed an interest we opened an account at BlackRock so that we could,” explained Roford.
"With most of the investments we make, we want to tokenize them, we told them [BlackRock] we were going to and then just out of the good relationship with them we said 'hey we're putting out a press release, you guys happy to check it?' — so they checked it and gave their views on it," he explained.
“Some kind of went a bit off track, saying ‘hey, BlackRock did this, BlackRock did that, BlackRock were involved’ […] but Archax has been leading the project.”
Cointelegraph reached out to HBAR Foundation on April 24 but didn’t receive a response.
Related: Hedera network approves $408M of HBAR for ecosystem growth
Despite the short-lived price pump, HBAR is still down over 78% from its September 2021 all-time high of $0.57, according to CoinGecko.
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Update (April 25 at 3:45 am UTC): Added a further explanation from Archax CEO Graham Rodford taken from an interview with Jesus Martinez.