Franklin Templeton Expands Tokenized Money Market to Arbitrum
Date: 2024-08-09 Author: Oliver Abernathy Categories: BUSINESS
Franklin Templeton, which manages $1.5 trillion in assets, announced the availability of its tokenized U.S. money market fund (FOBXX) on the Arbitrum blockchain, which is the second layer of the Ethereum network. This is the third blockchain on which the fund’s shares can be traded. The fund has previously been tokenized on the Stellar and Polygon blockchains.
A Franklin Templeton representative told CoinDesk that Stellar remains the official record of ownership of the fund’s shares, but the fund can use the Polygon and Arbitrum networks for certain accounts upon request and subject to certain conditions. Arbitrum will initially be available only to institutional wallets.
The company said that expanding to Arbitrum will help integrate decentralized finance into the traditional financial system and attract a new audience to FOBXX. “Expanding into the Arbitrum ecosystem is an important step in our journey to strengthen our asset management capabilities using blockchain technology,” said Roger Bayston, head of digital assets at Franklin Templeton.
The fund launched in 2021 and was the first to use a public blockchain to record transactions and ownership. It currently has a market cap of $420 million, making it the third-largest U.S. Treasury bond product on the blockchain, according to rwa.xyz.
Since then, several other companies have also made moves toward tokenizing real-world assets by moving their funds to the blockchain. Among them are major players like BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, as well as crypto startups Securitize and Ondo Finance, which have launched tokenized funds in recent years.
BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) is the largest such fund by market cap. BUIDL runs on the Ethereum main chain, and Securitize manages the tokenized shares and maintains official records of ownership.
As such, Franklin Templeton continues to expand its capabilities in the digital asset space, offering its clients new ways to manage and invest in tokenized assets.
