Franklin Templeton Launches its Money Market Fund on Ethereum Blockchain

Asset manager Franklin Templeton has expanded the trading of its OnChain U.S. Government Money Market Fund (FOBXX) to the Ethereum blockchain.

Launched in 2021, FOBXX is the first money market fund to use a public blockchain to track transactions and ownership. It currently stands at a $410 million market cap, making it the third-largest tokenized money market fund.

BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), the largest tokenized treasury fund in terms of assets under management (AUM), leads with $545 million, followed by Ondo’s U.S. Dollar Yield (USDY) at $452 million.

Franklin Templeton Expands to Ethereum

Since this year, Franklin Templeton has been actively adding a series of other blockchains, such as Avalanche, Coinbase’s Base, and Aptos, to support the fund while maintaining the Stellar network as the primary public blockchain.

The asset manager has also improved its utility within the digital asset ecosystem by enabling peer-to-peer transfer capabilities for FOBXX.

According to Franklin Templeton, the fund invests at least 99.5% of its total assets in US government securities, cash, and fully collateralized repurchase agreements. With the recent expansion to Ethereum, the asset manager has diversified its blockchain presence to the second-largest blockchain by market cap.

Recent data by rwa.xyz reveals that among issuers, Ethereum remains the dominant choice to issue shares of tokenized treasuries. The blockchain handles over $1.6 billion of assets, followed by Stellar (XLM) and Solana (SOL).

Earlier this month, Franklin Templeton expanded Benji, its blockchain record-keeping system, to Base.

BlackRock’s BUIDL Goes Multichain

Franklin Templeton’s latest adoption of a blockchain network is not new. Another investment firm, BlackRock, made a similar move. In a recent press release, BlackRock announced the expansion of its tokenized money fund, BUIDL, across various blockchains. It was initially launched on the Ethereum network in collaboration with Securitize. BUIDL is currently deployed on Aptos, Arbitrum, Optimism’s OP Mainnet, Polygon, and Avalanche.

“Real-world asset tokenization is scaling, and we’re excited to have these blockchains added to increase the potential of the BUIDL ecosystem. With these new chains, we’ll start to see more investors looking to leverage the underlying technology to increase efficiencies on all the things that until now have been hard to do,” Securitize CEO and co-founder Carlos Domingo stated.