Franklin Templeton, a $1.5 trillion asset manager, has achieved his goal OnChain US Government Money Market Fund (FOBXX) available on Ethereum via layer-2 blockchain Arbitrum, the company said Thursday.
This is the third blockchain where the fund’s shares can be traded. Previously, the fund was tokenized on Stellar and Polygon, another layer 2 network of Ethereum.
“The Stellar Network is the official record of share ownership of the Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund,” a spokesperson for Franklin Templeton told CoinDesk. “The Fund may also use the Polygon and Arbitrum networks for certain accounts upon request and subject to eligibility. Arbitrum will initially be available for institutional wallets.”
The Wall Street investment giant said the expansion will help integrate decentralized finance into the traditional financial system and help Franklin reach a new audience for FOBXX.
“Expanding into the Arbitrum ecosystem is an important step on our journey to strengthen our asset management capabilities with blockchain technology,” said Roger Bayston, head of digital assets at Franklin Templeton, in a statement.
The fund, which launched in 2021, was the first to use a public blockchain to record transactions and ownership. It has a market cap of $420 million, making it the third-largest U.S. Treasury-linked on-chain product, according to data from rwa.xyz.
Since then, several other companies have taken a step into the tokenization of real world assets (RWAs) by bringing their funds onto blockchain rails. Among the largest are BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, and crypto-native startups Securitize and Ondo Finance, all of which have launched tokenized funds in recent years.
BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) is the largest fund of this type in terms of market capitalization. BUIDL runs on the main Ethereum chain and Securitize manages the tokenized shares and maintains official ownership records.
