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 token (HBAR) 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 5:00am 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 that it was his firm’s choice to put shares of BlackRock’s money market fund on Hedera, but claimed BlackRock was “aware” that Archax was tokenizing shares of the fund.
“If we decide to tokenise, arguably we do not need to approach the investment manager, but we always do as we want long term relationships,” Rodford added.
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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