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Franklin Templeton brings BENJI tokenized fund to MoonPay amid broader blockchain push

Franklin Templeton brings BENJI tokenized fund to MoonPay amid broader blockchain push

MoonPay Trade will let institutions move between stablecoins and Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund for treasury, collateral and liquidity uses, as CEO Jenny Johnson argues blockchain challenges traditional finance fee models.

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Fact Check
The BusinessWire official press release dated June 2, 2026 directly confirms Franklin Templeton and MoonPay announced a strategic partnership integrating the BENJI tokenized fund (via Benji Technology Platform) with MoonPay Trade for institutional users. CoinDesk and CryptoBriefing independently corroborate the same announcement and details. The framing about accelerating institutional adoption and improving liquidity is explicitly supported by quotes from MoonPay Institutional CEO Caroline Pham and Franklin Templeton's Sandy Kaul in the press release.
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Summary

Franklin Templeton is integrating its BENJI tokenized money market fund and other tokenized products into MoonPay Trade, allowing institutional users to swap stablecoins including USDC and USDT for fund exposure and convert back through MoonPay’s onchain trading infrastructure. The companies said the setup is intended to support treasury management, liquidity provision, collateral and portfolio rebalancing workflows. Separately, Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson said at the Proof of Talk summit in Paris that blockchain faces resistance from Wall Street because it threatens fee income in traditional finance, citing lower transaction costs for BENJI on Stellar versus legacy systems. Franklin Templeton, which reported about $1.74 trillion in assets under management, said BENJI launched in 2021 as the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain as its system of record and highlighted a wider digital-assets strategy that includes work with Payward, Binance, Ondo Finance and a planned acquisition of 250 Digital.

Terms & Concepts
  • Tokenized money market fund: A money market fund whose ownership and transaction records are represented and processed on blockchain rails, allowing use in digital-asset workflows.
  • Onchain workflow: A transaction, settlement or collateral process carried out directly on blockchain networks rather than only through traditional financial infrastructure.
  • Cross-chain routing: Technology that directs transactions across different blockchains to find execution and settlement paths.