Franklin Templeton's tokenized Treasury fund lands on HashKey

Franklin Templeton is distributing its Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Liquidity Fund through HashKey Exchange. The fund trades as grBENJI and is available on HashKey's Earn channel. The fund is restricted to professional investors and is not offered to the public in Hong Kong. The fund invests primarily in U.S. government money market instruments and dollar cash assets. Franklin Templeton manages $1.8 trillion in assets. Franklin Templeton has operated a tokenized version of the fund since 2021. The fund became the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain to record share ownership. RWA.xyz lists the BENJI token at around 3.6% yield over seven days and 30 days. RWA.xyz lists the token's net asset value at $1.00. The token has just over 1,100 holders. Haiyang Ru, chief executive of HashKey Exchange BG, said the listing addressed institutional demand for compliant real-world asset yield. Chetan Karkhanis, Franklin Templeton's senior vice president for digital assets client engagement, said Franklin Templeton intended to expand beyond tokenized money market funds into other tokenized products over time. Karkhanis said Franklin Templeton would use HashKey's platform across Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Dubai and Bermuda. In May, Franklin Templeton agreed to a strategic collaboration with Payward, the parent of Kraken. The collaboration covers tokenized equities, custody and actively managed yield products. The collaboration includes plans to integrate BENJI into Kraken as collateral and a cash management tool for institutional clients. Franklin Templeton also took BENJI to BNB Chain after a tie-up with Binance. Franklin Templeton reached deals with DigiFT in May and MoonPay Trade in June. The MoonPay Trade deal allows institutions to swap stablecoins directly into the fund. Franklin Templeton launched Franklin Crypto through its acquisition of CoinFund spinoff 250 Digital. The acquisition was completed in June. Franklin Templeton used BENJI tokens as part of the payment for the acquisition. Franklin Templeton described the transaction as a step toward conducting mergers and acquisitions on-chain.