BENJI — Franklin Templeton's tokenised money market fund and the first SEC-registered fund to record share ownership natively on a public blockchain — has crossed seven hundred million dollars in assets under management.
Franklin Templeton's BENJI — formally the Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund — has crossed seven hundred million dollars in assets under management. BENJI was the first money-market fund registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 to record share ownership directly on a public blockchain, and remains the cleanest example of a fully-registered US fund operating natively on-chain.
Why BENJI matters more than its AUM
Seven hundred million dollars is small next to BUIDL's 2.4 billion. The structural distinction is the wrapper. BUIDL is a Reg D 144A exempt offering — its share ownership is recorded on-chain as a convenience, but the legal record sits with Securitize as the transfer agent. BENJI's share ownership IS the on-chain record. The blockchain is the official ledger of the fund, recognised by the SEC. That is a categorically different regulatory posture.
The fund is multi-chain, with the largest balances on Stellar and Polygon. The yield, currently around 5.1 percent annualised, is distributed daily via on-chain minting of additional BENJI tokens — a pattern that DeFi protocols have used for years but that traditional asset managers were structurally incapable of replicating until tokenisation.
BENJI is the closest thing tokenisation has to a regulatory proof point. If the SEC accepts the chain as the official share register, every other question gets easier.
What it implies for the equity stack
Money funds were the gateway because they are the safest case. The next legal frontier is tokenised funds that hold individual US equities — a SPAC-like wrapper recognised by the SEC where the share register is on-chain. If CLARITY passes, the legal substrate for that already exists. BENJI's quiet seven hundred million is the proof-of-concept the next wave will cite.
Franklin Templeton has been the unsung adult in the room for tokenisation. While the headlines went to BlackRock and Apollo, BENJI did the boring legal work that made everything else possible. The next time the SEC approves an on-chain wrapper, the cite will start with BENJI.
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