BlackRock, Standard Chartered, and OKX have launched a collateral framework that allows institutional clients to post BlackRock's BUIDL tokenised Treasury fund as collateral for trading on OKX Middle East — extending BUIDL's collateral utility into the Gulf institutional market with a G-SIB custodian and one of the world's largest crypto exchanges.
Standard Chartered acts as custodian in the arrangement, providing the institutional-grade custody infrastructure that allows BUIDL to function as collateral within OKX's trading environment. The framework enables institutional clients to hold BUIDL positions in Standard Chartered custody and simultaneously use those positions as margin and collateral for trading activity on OKX Middle East — earning yield on the underlying Treasury exposure while the assets remain deployed as collateral.
The Middle East geography is deliberate. Gulf institutional investors — sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and regional banks — have been among the most active adopters of tokenised financial products, and OKX Middle East's regulatory positioning in the UAE gives the arrangement a compliant institutional framework for the region. Standard Chartered's significant Gulf banking presence makes it a natural custodian for this geography.
The deployment extends BUIDL's collateral footprint significantly. BUIDL was accepted as collateral at Crypto.com and Deribit in June 2025, used as DeFi liquidity infrastructure via UniswapX in February 2026, and integrated into the Canton Network ecosystem. The OKX Middle East framework adds a regulated Gulf institutional trading venue to that collateral infrastructure, confirming that BUIDL is becoming standard collateral across multiple market structure segments simultaneously.