Franklin Templeton partners with MoonPay

Franklin Templeton and MoonPay said on June 2 that they are linking Franklin’s Benji Technology Platform with MoonPay Trade so eligible institutional users can move between supported stablecoins and Franklin Templeton tokenized money market fund exposure through an onchain execution workflow. The companies described the arrangement as a strategic partnership aimed at making tokenized financial products more usable across institutional digital-asset markets. (marketchameleon.com) The deal extends MoonPay Trade beyond crypto, fiat and stablecoins into tokenized money market funds, according to the announcement. (franklintempleton.com) For Franklin Templeton, it adds another distribution and liquidity route for BENJI, the token representation of its Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund. (marketchameleon.com) Here’s the thread on what actually changed — and what did not. 1/ Franklin Templeton is not launching a new fund here. It is plugging its existing BENJI infrastructure into MoonPay Trade’s institutional trading stack. The initial integration lets eligible institutions move between supported stablecoins and Franklin Templeton tokenized money market fund exposure without leaving public blockchain rails. (marketchameleon.com) 2/ MoonPay Trade is the key piece on MoonPay’s side. MoonPay launched that product on May 21, saying it gives institutions and enterprises access to digital assets across 200-plus chains and protocols through a single API. MoonPay said the platform handles execution, settlement, conversion and payments, and is backed by its KYC/AML and reporting infrastructure. (marketchameleon.com) 3/ BENJI is the tokenized wrapper around Franklin Templeton’s Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, ticker FOBXX. Franklin Templeton says the fund was the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain as its system of record for transactions and share ownership. 4/ The practical change is about routing and access. (marketchameleon.com) Franklin Templeton said MoonPay’s quote, routing, execution and network infrastructure should make its tokenized money market fund suite easier to use in institutional onchain workflows. The companies specifically pointed to treasury management, liquidity management, portfolio rebalancing and collateral-adjacent use cases. (moonpay.com) 5/ The scale point matters. Franklin Templeton said the BENJI suite represented $1.98 billion in assets under management as of April 29, 2026. It also said BENJI represented more than $650 million on Stellar as of April 2026 and that cumulative peer-to-peer transfer volume had surpassed $211 million as of March 31, 2026. (franklintempleton.com) 6/ Franklin Templeton has been building toward this for a while. In June 2024, it enabled certain institutional users on Benji Investments to convert USDC into U.S. dollars to buy BENJI tokens, and to convert sale proceeds back into USDC. At the time, Roger Bayston said the goal was to give investors a stablecoin-like access point to a regulated yield-bearing fund. (marketchameleon.com) 7/ MoonPay has also been positioning for institutional infrastructure rather than only retail ramps. Its institutional page says it offers self-hosted key management, low-latency onchain order routing, native collateral movement, custody through MoonPay Trust Company, and aggregated liquidity across 200-plus chains. 8/ The clearest quote from Franklin Templeton came from Sandy Kaul, head of innovation and digital assets. (franklintempleton.com) Kaul said tokenized money market funds become more useful when they can “move with the speed and programmability” of the broader digital-asset ecosystem, and said MoonPay creates “another trusted gateway” between stablecoin liquidity and tokenized fund exposure. 9/ MoonPay framed the deal as an institutional market-access play. Caroline D. Pham, CEO of MoonPay Institutional, said tokenized money market funds can improve liquidity and capital efficiency only if institutions can access the onchain financial ecosystem. (franklintempleton.com) 10/ What to watch next: the companies said this initial integration is expected to be the foundation for a broader strategic relationship. (moonpay.com) For now, the announcement is limited to eligible institutional users, supported stablecoins, and Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money market fund exposure through MoonPay Trade. (marketchameleon.com)