Franklin Templeton's Tokenized Money Market Fund Expands to Arbitrum

Franklin Templeton, a $1.5 trillion asset manager, has made its OnChain U.S. Government Money Market Fund (FOBXX) available on Ethereum via layer-2 blockchain Arbitrum, the company said Thursday.

This is the third blockchain where the fund's shares can be traded. Previously, the fund was tokenized on Stellar and Polygon, another layer-2 network of Ethereum.

"The Stellar network is the Franklin OnChain U.S Government Money Fund’s official record of share ownership," a spokesperson for Franklin Templeton told CoinDesk. "The Fund may also use the Polygon and Arbitrum networks for certain accounts upon request and subject to eligibility. Arbitrum will initially be available to institutional wallets."

The Wall Street investment giant said the expansion will help the integration of decentralized finance into the traditional financial system and help Franklin reach a new audience for FOBXX.

“Expanding into the Arbitrum ecosystem is an important step on our journey to empower our asset management capabilities with blockchain technology,” said Roger Bayston, head of digital assets at Franklin Templeton, in a statement.

The fund, which launched in 2021, was the first to use a public blockchain to record transactions and ownership. It stands at a $420 million market cap, making it the third-largest U.S. Treasury-linked on-chain product, according to data from rwa.xyz

Since then, several other firms have made a push into tokenization of real world assets (RWAs) by bringing their funds onto blockchain rails. The biggest ones include BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, and crypto-native startups Securitize and Ondo Finance, all of which have launched tokenized funds in recent years.

BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) is the biggest such fund by market cap. BUIDL runs on the main Ethereum chain and Securitize manages the tokenized shares and keeps official ownership records.