Franklin Templeton expands BENJI distribution through MoonPay partnership

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BENJI expansion via MoonPay

Highlights

Franklin Templeton is integrating BENJI and other tokenized products with MoonPay Trade, enabling institutional swaps between stablecoins like USDC, USDT, and its tokenized money market fund.
MoonPay Trade, launched in late May, offers institutional onchain execution across 200 blockchains, with the Franklin Templeton deal marking expansion into tokenized money market funds beyond crypto, fiat, and stablecoins.
Franklin Templeton, with $1.74 trillion in assets under management, continues broadening tokenization efforts through deals with Payward, Binance, and moves like the April agreement to buy 250 Digital.

Integration adds onchain access for institutions

The partnership is outlined in a statement issued on Tuesday, which says Franklin Templeton is integrating BENJI and other tokenized products into MoonPay Trade. The arrangement lets institutional users swap between stablecoins such as USDC and USDT and Franklin Templeton's tokenized money market fund through MoonPay's recently launched onchain trading infrastructure.

Franklin Templeton Head of Innovation & Digital Assets Sandy Kaul says tokenized money market funds become more useful when they can move with the speed and programmability of the wider digital asset ecosystem. She says the tie-up with MoonPay creates another trusted gateway for institutions to move between stablecoin liquidity and tokenized fund exposure.

MoonPay says the integration also gives BENJI holders a route into stablecoins while opening the tokenized fund to other onchain workflows, including treasury management, liquidity provision, collateral and portfolio rebalancing. MoonPay Institutional CEO Caroline Pham says digital assets such as tokenized money market funds can improve liquidity and capital efficiency when institutions can access the onchain financial ecosystem.

Tokenization push broadens market reach

MoonPay Trade, introduced in late May, is the company's institutional-grade onchain execution platform offering a single API for access to more than 200 blockchains, cross-chain routing, trade execution, settlement, collateral movement and tokenized asset transactions with compliance features. MoonPay says the Franklin Templeton deal marks an expansion beyond crypto, fiat and stablecoins, and one of Pham's first major moves since joining after serving as former acting chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Franklin Templeton, which reports about $1.74 trillion in assets under management in its latest quarterly report, has been building a larger presence in tokenization. Its Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, FOBXX, also known as BENJI, was the first U.S.-registered mutual fund launched on a public blockchain in 2021.

In recent months, the asset manager has expanded BENJI through partnerships with Payward, parent of crypto exchange Kraken, and with Binance to use the fund as a form of off-exchange collateral. In April, Franklin Templeton also agrees to buy 250 Digital, a CoinFund spinoff, and it is working with Ondo Finance to tokenize a suite of ETFs.

Our previous coverage of the Federal Reserve’s push to shrink its $6.7 trillion balance sheet outlined how new leadership is pressing for faster quantitative tightening to reduce the Fed’s footprint in markets and refocus policy on interest rates. We noted that while the strategy aims to ease liquidity constraints and encourage banks to lend more, an aggressive drawdown could also drain bank reserves and complicate efforts to expand credit.

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