Ethena, the protocol behind the $3.4 billion yield-generating "synthetic dollar" token USDe, is planning to invest a part of its reserves in tokenized real-world assets (RWA), and BlackRock's BUIDL fund is among the first applicants to throw its hat in the ring.

The protocol laid out plans in a July 16 governance post to allocate a part of its $235 million USDT holdings, roughly 7% of collateral assets, and its $45 million surplus buffer called the Reserve Fund to RWA products to earn a yield. Ethena's token provides yield to investors by buying spot bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) and parallely selling, or shorting, perpetual swaps of the assets on crypto exchanges, harvesting the funding rate.

BlackRock's BUIDL, a money market fund represented by an Ethereum-based token, seeks a $34 million allocation from Ethena's $45 million Reserve Fund, according to a Monday post by Jonathan Espinosa from tokenization platform Securitize, BUIDL's distribution partner.

Steakhouse Financial also applied for a Reserve Fund allocation on Monday with a USDC lending vault on DeFi platform Morpho Blue, which is overcollateralized by wrapped bitcoin (wBTC), wrapped staked ether (wstETH) and Backed's tokenized Treasury Bills product (bIB01).

Mountain Protocol, issuer of the USDM yield-bearing stablecoin, also signaled interest in applying, with founder Michael Carrica replying last week to the governance post that the protocol "will be presenting a proposal in the coming days."

All prospective applicants will need to post their proposal publicly on the governance forum, Guy Young, founder of Ethena Labs, the developer company behind the protocol, said in an email.

Ethena's governance token ENA rallied 22% following the news, outperforming the broad-market crypto benchmark CoinDesk 20 Index's 1% gain during the same period.

Ethena's open competition is the latest example of tokenized RWAs getting increasingly used in the crypto-native, decentralized finance (DeFi) world. Most recently, DeFi lender MakerDAO announced plans to invest $1 billion of backing assets of the DAI stablecoin in tokenized Treasury products, while ArbitrumDAO, an ecosystem development organization of Ethereum layer-2 Arbitrum, finalized a similar contest to allocate the equivalent of 35 million of ARB tokens in tokenized offerings.

Read more: MakerDAO's $1B Tokenized Treasury Investment Plan Draws Interest from BlackRock's BUIDL, Ondo, Superstate

UPDATE (July 23, 21:35 UTC): Clarifies that the BlackRock, Steakhouse proposals are for Ethena's Reserve Fund allocation.

UPDATE (July 24, 12:52 UTC): Adds ENA price action following the report.