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Franklin Templeton and MoonPay announced a partnership on 2 June that connects the $1.74 trillion asset manager's Benji Technology Platform with MoonPay Trade's institutional infrastructure, giving eligible institutions a direct onchain path between supported stablecoins and Franklin Templeton's tokenized money market fund products.
Under the arrangement, institutions can convert stablecoins – including USDC and USDT – into tokenized money market fund exposure and back again using MoonPay's quote, routing, and execution systems, without separately onboarding to multiple platforms. The integration is intended to support treasury management, portfolio rebalancing, and collateral allocation workflows that institutions increasingly want to run onchain.
Franklin Templeton has positioned the Benji Technology Platform as its core blockchain-enabled recordkeeping and transfer agency infrastructure. The firm used Benji to launch what it describes as the world's first U.S.-registered mutual fund to use blockchain technology for transaction processing, followed by a fully tokenized UCITS fund in Luxembourg in 2024 and a retail tokenized fund in Singapore in 2025. In April 2026, Franklin Templeton announced the formation of Franklin Crypto, a dedicated digital asset investment division built around its acquisition of crypto investment firm 250 Digital.
Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton's head of innovation and digital assets, said the firm views 2026 as "the year of the universal liquidity layer," with stablecoins, tokenized funds, and digital currencies becoming interoperable across trading, lending, and collateral management.
The MoonPay partnership is being led in part by Caroline Pham, who joined MoonPay as head of its institutional division after serving as acting chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Pham described the integration as an example of digital assets providing improved liquidity and capital efficiency for institutions that have access to the onchain financial ecosystem.
For MoonPay, the deal marks an extension of its business beyond crypto trading and payment processing into tokenized real-world assets. The firm says it serves more than 30 million customers across 180 countries and supports more than 500 enterprise customers.
The tokenized money market fund sector has grown substantially over the past two years as asset managers have looked to bring short-duration, yield-bearing products onto public and private blockchains. Franklin Templeton is one of several large institutions – alongside BlackRock and others – that have moved to capture that market. The MoonPay integration adds a distribution and liquidity layer that the firm's tokenized products have previously lacked: the ability to move in and out of fund exposure programmatically within onchain workflows, rather than through traditional transfer agency processes.
