Franklin Templeton’s On-Chain Treasuries Fund Launches On Avalanche

Franklin Templeton, one of the world’s largest investment managers with more than $1.4 trillion in assets under management, continues to expand its tokenized U.S. treasuries fund onto new chains.

On Aug. 22, Franklin Templeton launched the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX) onto Avalanche, a Layer 1 network ranking as the seventh largest chain by total value locked (TVL) in DeFi protocols.

The fund pays investors dividends from yields derived from U.S. treasury assets while maintaining a stable share price of $1 each. Shares in the fund are purchased via Franklin Templeton’s Benji Investments platform, with one BENJI token representing $1 worth of shares in FOBXX. Retail traders can use the Benji mobile app, while the Benji Institutional web portal serves accredited investors.

“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.

“Franklin Templeton shares a mutual commitment to developing transformative digital financial products and services that will meet on-chain investor demand today and bring off-chain capital and users into the ecosystem,” said John Wu, the president of Ava Labs, the development team behind Avalanche.

FOBXX launched on Stellar in 2021, and claims to comprise the only U.S.-registered mutual fund leveraging public blockchains as its “system of record to process transactions and record share ownership.”

FOBXX expanded onto the Polygon POS Ethereum sidechain in April 2023. On Aug. 8, the fund also launched on Arbitrum, the top Layer 2 by TVL. Users purchasing shares via Benji select which network their shares are transferred to.

Franklin Templeton first entered the web3 sector with the launch of its Digital Assets division in 2018.

FOBXX versus BUIDL

Franklin Templeton is betting that the multi-chain expansion will allow FOBXX to remain competitive with the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) — the Ethereum-based tokenized treasuries fund from the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock.

BUIDL went live on March 20 and overtook FOBXX by assets under management roughly six weeks later. BUIDL now boasts assets under management of $502.7 million, beating out FOBXX with $424.9 million — despite the fund growing 30.5% since the year began, according to Rwa.xyz.

The growth of BUIDL and FOBXX has propelled the tokenized treasuries sector to a market cap of $1.92 billion, up 150% since the start of 2024.

While Avalanche’s TVL has doubled since the bear trend bottomed out during Q3 2023, the network’s TVL has oscillated sideways throughout 2024, currently sitting at $1.12 billion for a 7.44% year-to-date drawdown.

The price of Avalanche’s AVAX token is up 1.5% over the past 24 hours, according to The Defiant’s crypto price feeds.

Read More: Blackrock’s Tokenized Treasuries Fund BUIDL Tops $500M