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

Wall Road big Franklin Templeton mentioned on Wednesday that its OnChain U.S. Authorities Cash Fund, aka FOBXX, is now obtainable on Solana.

Listed on the Nasdaq, the $594 million cash market fund is tokenized, which means its shares are issued as digital belongings throughout varied networks. Buyers are capable of entry FOBXX utilizing Franklin Templeton’s Benji Investments cell app, which serves as a digital pockets.

First launched in 2021, FOBXX allows traders to achieve publicity to U.S. authorities securities, money, and repurchase agreements. Sustaining a share value of $1, the fund’s BENJI token carefully resembles a yield-bearing stablecoin.

Franklin Templeton’s growth to Solana signifies continued efforts to nook an rising sector of crypto-based merchandise. It faces stiff competitors from BlackRock and its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, aka BUIDL, launched on Ethereum final spring.

Amongst $3.6 billion in tokenized treasury merchandise, BUIDL’s market cap has swelled to $637 million, muscling previous BENJI’s complete worth final April, based on rwa.xyz information.

Franklin Templeton’s choice to concern BENJI on Solana, nonetheless, locations the product inside one in all crypto’s buzziest ecosystems for decentralized finance, or DeFi functions. BlackRock’s BUIDL has, to this point, not been issued on the speedy layer-1 community.

Although the metric is taken into account considerably crude, Solana’s complete worth locked (TVL) has grown to $9 billion, making it the second most precious DeFi ecosystem behind Ethereum’s $56 billion panorama (not together with Ethereum scaling networks), based on DefiLlama information.

Encompassing real-world belongings like bonds, actual property, and gold, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink as soon as dubbed tokenization the “subsequent evolution of markets,” enabling near-instantaneous settlement and diminished charges.

Whereas tokenized markets are nonetheless of their infancy, British financial institution Commonplace Chartered projected final month the tokenization sector may develop to as a lot as $30 trillion by 2034.

In November, BlackRock expanded BUIDL’s footprint to 5 new blockchains, issuing shares on Aptos, Avalanche, and the Ethereum scaling networks Arbitrum, Optimism, and Polygon.

First obtainable on Ethereum sidechain community Polygon and the layer-1 community Stellar, BENJI expanded to Ethereum final 12 months, in addition to Aptos, Avalanche, Arbitrum, and the Coinbase-launched Ethereum scaling community Base.

Edited by Andrew Hayward