TheBlock
Franklin Templeton is integrating its BENJI tokenized money market fund into MoonPay Trade, the institutional-grade onchain execution platform launched in late May. The partnership lets institutional users swap seamlessly between stablecoins like USDC and USDT and BENJI — and opens the fund to onchain workflows including treasury management, liquidity provision, collateral, and portfolio rebalancing.
Why it matters
Franklin Templeton manages roughly $1.74 trillion in AUM and has been the most aggressive traditional asset manager in the tokenization race: BENJI (FOBXX) was the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to run on a public blockchain back in 2021. This MoonPay integration is the latest in a string of distribution moves — the firm has already extended BENJI as off-exchange collateral on Binance, explored tokenized product expansion with Kraken parent Payward, and tapped Ondo Finance to tokenize a suite of ETFs. Each new gateway compounds the fund's utility as on-chain liquidity infrastructure rather than a standalone product. The deal is also described as a foundation for a broader strategic relationship, signalling more integrations ahead.
Market impact
For the tokenized real-world asset sector, the signal is structural: a $1.74T asset manager is actively wiring its flagship tokenized product into the plumbing that institutions already use for stablecoin settlement. MoonPay Trade's single-API access to 200+ blockchains, cross-chain routing, and compliance layer removes the friction that has kept most institutional treasuries on the sidelines. Caroline Pham — former acting CFTC chair, now MoonPay Institutional CEO — called this one of her first major moves, lending regulatory credibility to the push.
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