[Franklin Templeton’s Tokenized Money Market Fund Expands Features to Arbitrum]
Franklin Templeton has announced the introduction of its OnChain U.S. Government Money Market Fund (FOBXX) to Ethereum’s Layer-2 blockchain Arbitrum, marking the fund’s third time trading on the blockchain. Previously, the fund’s market share has been tokenized on Stellar and Polygon. A spokesperson for the company said that the Stellar network is the official market share ownership record, and that the Polygon and Arbitrum networks are used based on request and qualifications, with Arbitrum initially open to institutional wallets.
This expanded functionality is designed to integrate decentralized finance into traditional financial systems and attract new FOBXX audiences. Roger Bayston, head of digital assets at Franklin Templeton, said entering the Arbitrum ecosystem is an important step in improving asset management capabilities. Launched in 2021, the fund is the first to use a public blockchain to record transactions and ownership and currently has a market capitalization of $420 million, making it the third-largest on-chain product tied to U.S. Treasury bills.
Other companies are also beginning to tokenize real-world assets (RWAs) and bring them to the blockchain. Including BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, and crypto-native startups Securitize and Ondo Finance, have launched tokenized funds in recent years. BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), the largest such fund by market capitalization, runs on the Ethereum main chain, with Securitize managing tokenized shares and maintaining official ownership records.
