Franklin Templeton brings BENJI tokenized fund to MoonPay Trade

Franklin Templeton is integrating its BENJI tokenized money market fund and other tokenized products into MoonPay Trade. The partnership will let institutional users swap between stablecoins like USDC and USDT and Franklin Templeton's tokenized money market fund using MoonPay's recently launched onchain trading infrastructure.

The partnership is "expected to serve as the foundation for a broader strategic relationship between Franklin Templeton and MoonPay," a statement on Tuesday said. MoonPay noted the move also represents a significant expansion beyond "crypto, fiat, and stablecoins" for the firm and counts as one of MoonPay Institutional CEO Caroline Pham's "first major moves" since joining the firm after serving as the former acting Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair.

"Tokenized money market funds only become more useful when they can move with the speed and programmability of the broader digital asset ecosystem," Franklin Templeton Head of Innovation & Digital Assets Sandy Kaul said. "For us, leadership in this space means doing the work to make that unlock possible, and teaming up with MoonPay creates another trusted gateway for institutions to move between stablecoin liquidity and tokenized fund exposure."

In addition to providing a path for BENJI holders to swap into stablecoins, the integration also creates an onramp for using the tokenized fund in other onchain workflows like treasury management, liquidity provision, collateral, and portfolio rebalancing, the announcement notes.

"Digital assets like tokenized money market funds provide benefits like improved liquidity and capital efficiency, but only if institutions have access to the onchain financial ecosystem," Pham said. "MoonPay's strategic partnership with Franklin Templeton on liquidity and collateral solutions showcases the latest innovations driving institutional adoption of digital assets."

Introduced in late May, MoonPay Trade is MoonPay's institutional-grade onchain execution platform that provides a single API for institutions and enterprises to access 200+ blockchains, handle cross-chain routing, trade execution, settlement, collateral movement, and tokenized asset transactions with full compliance. MoonPay Trade is supported by some of MoonPay's recent acquisitions, including the cross-chain routing and liquidity provider Decent, trading platform DFlow, and crypto key-management infrastructure tool Sodot.

Franklin Templeton is a major asset manager with about $1.74 trillion in AUM, according to its latest quarterly report, and has become a significant force in the tokenization sector. The Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX / BENJI) was the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain at launch in 2021 — a fact that ages well in a space where "first" tends to be a temporary title.

In recent months, Franklin Templeton has worked to expand BENJI's footprint through partnerships with Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, which includes plans to tokenize additional traditional investment products, as well as Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange, to extend BENJI as a form of off-exchange collateral. In April, Franklin Templeton also agreed to buy 250 Digital, a spinoff from the venture firm CoinFund, to expand its crypto investment offering. It is also working with Ondo Finance to tokenize a suite of ETFs.

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