Franklin Templeton’s Tokenized Treasury Fund Lands on HashKey

Franklin Templeton has begun distributing its tokenized money market fund through HashKey Exchange, giving the Hong Kong platform’s clients access to a blockchain-wrapped pool of U.S. government debt.

The Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Liquidity Fund, traded as grBENJI, invests primarily in U.S. government money market instruments and dollar cash assets, and is now available on HashKey’s Earn channel. Franklin Templeton manages $1.8 trillion in assets and has run a tokenized version of the fund since 2021, when it became the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain to record share ownership.

The product is available to professional investors only and is “not available for offering to the public in Hong Kong.”

What the fund actually pays

Returns on this kind of product track the short end of the Treasury curve. RWA.xyz currently lists the BENJI token yielding around 3.6% over seven and 30 days at a net asset value of $1.00, with just over 1,100 holders, though published figures for the fund’s size vary considerably depending on whether a single token or the whole suite is counted.

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 the firm intended to expand “beyond tokenized money market funds into other tokenized products over time,” using HashKey’s platform across Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Dubai and Bermuda.

In May, Franklin Templeton agreed a strategic collaboration with Payward, the parent of crypto exchange Kraken, covering tokenized equities, custody and actively managed yield products, with BENJI to be integrated into Kraken as collateral and a cash management tool for institutional clients. It has also taken the token to BNB Chain following a tie-up with Binance, and struck deals with DigiFT in May and MoonPay Trade in June, the latter letting institutions swap stablecoins directly into the fund.

The firm has also built out a dedicated crypto arm alongside the distribution push, launching Franklin Crypto through its acquisition of CoinFund spinoff 250 Digital, which completed in June. Franklin Templeton used BENJI tokens as part of the payment for that deal, describing it as a step toward conducting mergers and acquisitions on-chain.