Today Franklin Templeton announced its tokenized money market fund, FOBXX, is now available on the Avalanche blockchain. The asset manager first launched the fund on the Stellar blockchain more than three years ago with assets under management currently $402 million. Subsequently it expanded support to Polygon and Arbitrum, with plans to launch on the Aptos blockchain.
“Bringing the Benji platform to the Avalanche network further expands access to our first-of-its-kind tokenized money market fund,” said Roger Bayston, Head of Digital Assets at Franklin Templeton. “We look forward to working with Avalanche’s vibrant developer community to bring new blockchain-enabled innovations into the market.”
Two years ago, Securitize used the Avalanche blockchain to tokenize access to a KKR Health Care fund. The ability to create private permissioned chains as subnets has attracted institutional experiments, including three sets of trials involving the likes of Citi, JP Morgan Private Bank, Apollo, WisdomTree, T.Rowe Price, Wellington Management and Cumberland.
Franklin Templeton embraces blockchain
Meanwhile, Franklin Templeton uses blockchains to record the ownership of FOBXX fund shares as part of an integrated record keeping system. The FOBXX token smart contract uses a whitelist of permissioned wallets. Hence, while FOBXX can be transferred peer-to-peer, the recipient needs to have a whitelisted wallet address.
The prospectus states that the “transfer agent is responsible for maintaining the accuracy of Fund share ownership on any blockchain network used by the blockchain-integrated system and has the ability to correct errors and unauthorized transactions in, and limit the transferability of, Fund shares.”
While Stellar has a minimum investment of $20, the other chains are $50,000 except for Avalanche which is $500,000. However, the minimums can be waived at the discretion of Franklin Templeton. Investors need to request to use the Avalanche blockchain in advance.
Despite significant institutional interest in the public blockchain space, few have embraced it as enthusiastically as Franklin Templeton. It operates nodes on at least a dozen public chains.
