Franklin Templeton has announced a new collaboration with MoonPay that integrates its BENJI tokenized money market fund into the MoonPay Trade platform. This move opens a fresh avenue for institutional clients to transition between stablecoins and tokenized fund offerings.
The partnership, revealed in a statement on Tuesday, enables institutions to exchange stablecoins such as USDC and USDT for shares of Franklin Templeton’s on-chain money market fund through MoonPay’s trading infrastructure. Both firms indicated this could serve as a foundation for a deeper strategic alliance moving forward.
By linking BENJI to MoonPay Trade, holders gain direct access to stablecoin liquidity, while institutions looking for exposure to tokenized money market instruments get an on-ramp. Franklin Templeton highlighted the potential for this setup to facilitate treasury operations, portfolio adjustments, collateral management, and liquidity provisioning.
Sandy Kaul, head of digital assets at Franklin Templeton, emphasized that tokenized funds become more practical when they operate with the speed and programmability of digital asset networks. Partnering with MoonPay creates a trusted gateway between stablecoins and tokenized fund products, she noted.
MoonPay sees this as an expansion of its institutional services beyond traditional crypto, fiat, and stablecoin offerings. The announcement comes shortly after Caroline Pham, former acting chair of the CFTC, took the helm at MoonPay Institutional.
Pham remarked that tokenized money market funds enhance liquidity and capital efficiency when institutions can tap into on-chain financial systems. The MoonPay-Franklin Templeton collaboration on liquidity and collateral solutions exemplifies the infrastructure now enabling institutional digital asset adoption.
MoonPay Trade, launched in late May, is an institutional on-chain execution platform. It provides a single API for enterprises to access over 200 blockchains, cross-chain routing, trade execution, settlement, collateral movement, and tokenized asset transactions, all under compliance measures. The platform leverages technology from recent MoonPay acquisitions, including Decent for cross-chain routing, DFlow for trading tech, and Sodot for key management.
Franklin Templeton, managing approximately $1.74 trillion in assets, is a major traditional asset manager in the tokenization space. Its Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, known as FOBXX or BENJI, launched in 2021 as the first U.S.-registered mutual fund on a public blockchain. The firm has previously expanded BENJI through partnerships with Payward (Kraken’s parent) for tokenizing traditional investments and with Binance for off-exchange collateral. In April, Franklin Templeton agreed to acquire 250 Digital, a spinoff from CoinFund, to bolster its crypto investment business, and is collaborating with Ondo Finance to tokenize a suite of ETFs.
MoonPay has also been active in other integrations, such as a dedicated app within ChatGPT’s App Store that enables users to create crypto purchase links without leaving the chatbot. That app supports Bitcoin, XRP, Ethereum, Solana, USDC, and over 100 other assets across more than 30 blockchains.