Franklin Templeton Expands $410M Money Market Fund to Ethereum Blockchain

Franklin Templeton has expanded the trading of its OnChain U.S. Government Money Market Fund (FOBXX) to the second largest blockchain by market cap, Ethereum (ETH).

The asset manager has added a series of new blockchains to support the fund this year, including, most recently, Coinbase’s Base, Aptos, and Avalanche. It uses the Stellar network as the primary public blockchain.

FOBXX launched in 2021, becoming the first money market fund to use a public blockchain to track transactions and ownership. It currently stands at a $410 million market cap, making it the third-largest tokenized money market fund.

BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) moved to the top of the list just six weeks after its launch in late March. It currently stands at $545 million, while the second largest fund, Ondo’s U.S. Dollar Yield (USDY), is at $452 million.

Among issuers, Ethereum is by far the top choice to issue shares of tokenized treasuries, with the largest blockchain handling over $1.6 billion of assets, followed by Stellar (XLM) and Solana (SOL), according to data by rwa.xyz.

Asset manager Grayscale, in a report in April, argued that Ethereum is “meaningfully decentralized and credibly neutral for network participants, likely a requirement for any global platform for tokenized assets” and, therefore, has the best chances among smart contracts to benefit from tokenization.