The $1.74 trillion asset manager is letting institutions move directly between stablecoins and shares of its tokenized US government money fund through MoonPay’s new institutional rails, marking one of the first listings of a US-registered tokenized MMF on a third-party onchain trading venue.
Franklin Templeton plugged its BENJI tokenized money-market fund into MoonPay Trade on Tuesday, opening an onchain path for institutional users to swap supported stablecoins directly into shares of the asset manager’s US government money fund and back without leaving the blockchain.
The integration, disclosed in a joint statement over Business Wire on Tuesday, links Franklin Templeton’s Benji Technology Platform, the firm’s proprietary blockchain recordkeeping and transfer-agency stack, with MoonPay Trade’s institutional quote, routing, and execution engine.
Franklin Templeton, which reported about $1.74 trillion in assets under management in its latest quarterly report, said BENJI holders will be able to swap into stablecoin liquidity through MoonPay and use the fund inside onchain workflows like treasury management, portfolio rebalancing, and collateral.
The deal turns MoonPay, until recently best known as a fiat-to-crypto onramp, into one of the first institutional trading venues to list a US-registered tokenized money-market fund alongside crypto, fiat, and stablecoins. It also extends BENJI’s distribution beyond Franklin Templeton’s own Benji Investments app and Benji Institutional portal, and lands in a tokenized-treasuries category that CoinGecko now tracks at $11.2 billion in market value, part of a $64.9 billion real-world-assets segment.
Kaul on the “Universal Liquidity Layer”
“Tokenized money market funds only become more useful when they can move with the speed and programmability of the broader digital asset ecosystem,” Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton’s head of innovation and digital assets, said in the announcement.
“Teaming up with MoonPay creates another trusted gateway for institutions to move between stablecoin liquidity and tokenized fund exposure.”
Caroline D. Pham, the chief executive of MoonPay Institutional and former acting chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, framed it from MoonPay’s side: tokenized money market funds deliver “improved liquidity and capital efficiency, but only if institutions have access to the onchain financial ecosystem.”
BENJI’s Place in the Tokenized-Treasury Stack
BENJI represents one share of the Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund, known as FOBXX, which launched in 2021 as the first US-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain as its system of record. The token now lives across multiple public blockchains, with Total Asset Value at $821 million, according to RWA.xyz.
The product still trails BlackRock’s BUIDL, at $2.4 billion in circulating supply, and Ondo’s USDY at $2.1 billion, according to RWA.xyz. But BENJI is the only entry in that top tier issued by a US-registered mutual fund, a structural distinction that has kept it off most third-party trading surfaces.
MoonPay Trade as Institutional Pipe
MoonPay launched MoonPay Trade in late May as a single-API platform for institutions to execute trades, move liquidity, and settle payments across more than 200 blockchains and protocols. The trading engine pulls together three recent MoonPay acquisitions: Decent for cross-chain routing and liquidity, DFlow for trading technology, and Sodot for crypto key management. MoonPay Trade sits underneath MoonPay Institutional, the regulated trading arm Pham was hired to run.
Franklin Templeton has been widening BENJI’s surface area for more than a year. The firm has partnered with Binance to allow BENJI as off-exchange collateral, has worked with Payward, the parent of Kraken, on tokenizing additional traditional investment products, and in April agreed to buy 250 Digital, a CoinFund spinoff, to grow its crypto-investment business. It is also working with Ondo Finance to tokenize a group of ETFs.
What Stays Off the Pipe
Access is gated to “eligible institutional users” — the same KYC and accreditation gating that applies to BENJI itself, layered on top of MoonPay Institutional’s compliance flow. Retail holders of BENJI in the US still buy and redeem through the Benji Investments app, not through MoonPay. Neither party disclosed the fee structure for stablecoin-to-BENJI conversions through MoonPay Trade or whether settlement runs through any specific network’s BENJI deployment.
Franklin Templeton said the integration is “expected to serve as the foundation for a broader strategic relationship” with MoonPay.
