HashKey Exchange has begun distributing Franklin Templeton’s tokenized U.S. government money market fund through its Earn channel, extending one of Wall Street’s earliest blockchain-native products into Asian markets.
Franklin Templeton manages $1.8 trillion in assets, Decrypt reported. Traded as BENJI and operating as the “Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Liquidity Fund,” the vehicle invests primarily in U.S. government money market instruments and dollar cash assets.
The product is restricted to professional investors. It is “not available for offering to the public in Hong Kong.”
The listing puts a five-year-old product in front of a new client base. Franklin Templeton has run a tokenized version of the fund since 2021, when it became the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to record share ownership on a public blockchain.
RWA.xyz currently lists the BENJI token yielding around 3.6% over seven and 30 days at a net asset value of $1.00, with just over 1,100 holders. Published figures for the fund’s size vary considerably, depending on whether a single token or the whole suite is counted.
Chetan Karkhanis, Franklin Templeton senior vice president for digital assets client engagement, said the firm intended to expand “beyond tokenized money market funds into other tokenized products over time,” using HashKey’s platform across Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Dubai and Bermuda.
Haiyang Ru, chief executive of HashKey Exchange BG, said the listing addressed institutional demand for compliant real-world asset yield.
The HashKey tie-up is one of several distribution bets Franklin Templeton has stacked this year. In May, the firm agreed a strategic collaboration with Payward, parent of Kraken, covering tokenized equities, custody and actively managed yield products. BENJI is to be integrated into Kraken as collateral and a cash management tool for institutional clients.
Franklin Templeton has also brought the token to BNB Chain following a tie-up with Binance. Deals with DigiFT in May and MoonPay Trade in June let institutions swap stablecoins directly into the fund.
The firm launched “Franklin Crypto” through its acquisition of CoinFund spinoff 250 Digital, which completed in June. BENJI tokens were used as part of the payment for that deal, described as a step toward conducting M&A on-chain.
What the listing does not do is settle the question of how big the underlying fund actually is. Decrypt notes that published figures vary considerably depending on methodology, and no single figure is confirmed by the readable source.
