Franklin Templeton Expands Money Market Fund to Solana Ahead of Rival BlackRock

Wall Street giant Franklin Templeton said on Wednesday that its OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, aka FOBXX, is now available on Solana.

Listed on the Nasdaq, the $594 million money market fund is tokenized, meaning its shares are issued as digital assets across various networks. Investors are able to access FOBXX using Franklin Templeton’s Benji Investments mobile app, which serves as a digital wallet.

First launched in 2021, FOBXX enables investors to gain exposure to U.S. government securities, cash, and repurchase agreements. Maintaining a share price of $1, the fund’s BENJI token closely resembles a yield-bearing stablecoin.

Franklin Templeton’s expansion to Solana signifies continued efforts to corner an emerging sector of crypto-based products. It faces stiff competition from BlackRock and its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, aka BUIDL, launched on Ethereum last spring.

Among $3.6 billion in tokenized treasury products, BUIDL’s market cap has swelled to $637 million, muscling past BENJI’s total value last April, according to rwa.xyz data.

Franklin Templeton’s decision to issue BENJI on Solana, however, places the product within one of crypto’s buzziest ecosystems for decentralized finance, or DeFi applications. BlackRock’s BUIDL has, so far, not been issued on the speedy layer-1 network.

Though the metric is considered somewhat crude, Solana’s total value locked (TVL) has grown to $9 billion, making it the second most valuable DeFi ecosystem behind Ethereum’s $56 billion landscape (not including Ethereum scaling networks), according to DefiLlama data.

Encompassing real-world assets like bonds, real estate, and gold, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink once dubbed tokenization the “next evolution of markets,” enabling near-instantaneous settlement and reduced fees.

While tokenized markets are still in their infancy, British bank Standard Chartered projected last month the tokenization sector could grow to as much as $30 trillion by 2034.

In November, BlackRock expanded BUIDL’s footprint to five new blockchains, issuing shares on Aptos, Avalanche, and the Ethereum scaling networks Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon.

First available on Ethereum sidechain network Polygon and the layer-1 network Stellar, BENJI expanded to Ethereum last year, as well as Aptos, Avalanche, Arbitrum, and the Coinbase-launched Ethereum scaling network Base.

Edited by Andrew Hayward