What happened
Franklin Templeton's BENJI token, the on-chain share class of its Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund, climbed from $594 million in assets under management to more than $2. 5 billion over the course of 2026, according to a CryptoBriefing report Thursday. That's better than a four-fold increase in a single year.
The token represents a share of a money market fund that holds US government securities, cash, and repurchase agreements, distributed on public blockchains rather than through traditional fund transfer agents. Franklin Templeton attributed the growth to a mix of new institutional partnerships and expansion of BENJI across multiple chains, per the report. The asset manager was one of the first traditional finance names to put a registered US mutual fund on a public blockchain when it launched BENJI on Stellar back in 2021, and has since extended it to networks including Polygon, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, and Aptos.
Why it matters
Tokenized US Treasuries have quietly become one of the largest live use cases for real-world assets on public chains. The category sat near $770 million at the start of 2024 and has grown into a multi-billion-dollar segment as institutions look for on-chain instruments that pay short-end yield without exposure to crypto beta. Franklin Templeton pulling ahead matters because it's a $1.
5 trillion asset manager operating a fully registered '40 Act fund on-chain, not a crypto-native issuer wrapping bills. That gives allocators a compliance path most tokenized offerings still lack. The competitive frame here is BlackRock's BUIDL, launched on Ethereum in March 2024 with Securitize, and Ondo Finance's OUSG.
BENJI passing $2. 5 billion suggests Franklin Templeton's chain-agnostic distribution is winning share against Ethereum-first products. It's a distribution story more than a product story.