Points of Focus

• Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund is now on MoonPay Trade, enabling on-chain swaps with USDC and USDT.
• BENJI hits $1.98B AUM, expanding into collateral, treasury, and M&A uses.
• Tokenized MMFs still lean on primary issuance; secondary-market liquidity stays thin.

Franklin Templeton’s BENJI tokenized money market fund is now accessible via MoonPay Trade, the institutional onchain execution platform MoonPay launched on May 21, 2026. The integration connects Franklin Templeton’s Benji Technology Platform with MoonPay’s cross-chain routing and settlement infrastructure, giving eligible institutional users a fully onchain route between BENJI and major stablecoins including USDC and USDT.

Both firms described the deal as the foundation of a broader strategic relationship. Franklin Templeton managed $1.74 trillion in AUM as of April 30, 2026.

Franklin Templeton and MoonPay have formed a new strategic partnership that includes:

🪙 tokenized financial products
🏦 institutional trading infrastructure
⛓️ onchain capital markets
💦 stablecoin liquidity

this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship @FTDA_US pic.twitter.com/3KqqCDJkKi

— MoonPay 🟣 (@moonpay) June 2, 2026

MoonPay Trade pushes beyond stablecoins

The partnership marks one of MoonPay Trade’s first major expansions into tokenized real-world assets less than two weeks after the platform’s debut. MoonPay Trade consolidates cross-chain routing, trade execution, compliance workflows, and fiat conversion across 200-plus blockchains through a single API. 

It’s powered by technology acquired through MoonPay’s purchases of Decent.xyz, a Y Combinator-backed cross-chain routing firm; DFlow, which processed more than $12 billion in trading volume in Q1 2026, and crypto key-management provider Sodot.

BREAKING: MoonPay has acquired Decent and launched MoonPay Trade

the only API you need for onchain execution, settlement, conversion, and payments on 200+ chains and protocols

one-click to DeFi for institutions, apps, and enterprises

performant, compliant, and live now pic.twitter.com/bbl3FY4xhO

— MoonPay 🟣 (@moonpay) May 21, 2026

Caroline D. Pham, CEO of MoonPay Institutional and former acting CFTC chair, is leading the initiative. Pham has argued that tokenized money market funds deliver yield and capital efficiency only when institutions have compliant access to the broader onchain financial ecosystem. Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton’s Head of Innovation and Digital Assets, framed the MoonPay integration as creating another trusted gateway for institutions to move between stablecoin liquidity and tokenized fund exposure.

BENJI at five: Collateral use cases multiply

Launched in 2021, BENJI became the first US-registered mutual fund to record transactions on a public blockchain, initially operating on Stellar. The BENJI suite had reached $1.98 billion in AUM across nine chains as of April 29, 2026, with BENJI investor numbers up more than 140% between April 2024 and March 2026.

Franklin Templeton has been widening BENJI’s institutional footprint throughout 2026. It extended BENJI as off-exchange collateral with Binance in February 2026 and explored tokenized investment products with Payward (Kraken’s parent) in May. In April 2026, it incorporated BENJI tokens as payment consideration in its planned acquisition of 250 Digital, a CoinFund spinoff, in one of the first uses of a tokenized fund in corporate M&A.

Primary issuance still dominates; secondary depth lags

The MoonPay integration adds a new swap route for treasury and collateral workflows, but the secondary market for tokenized money market funds remains structurally thin. Deep, continuous secondary liquidity comparable to major stablecoin markets has yet to emerge.

BENJI’s cumulative peer-to-peer transfer volume surpassed $211 million as of March 31, 2026, a fraction of its $1.98 billion AUM. Activity remains concentrated in primary issuance and redemption rather than open secondary trading.

💡New Publication
IOSCO published its Final Report on the Tokenization of Financial Assets. Read it here: https://t.co/8Nd1IoOczk pic.twitter.com/peYzUlObd3

— IOSCO Press (@IOSCOPress) November 12, 2025

The International Organization of Securities Commissions (IOSCO) concluded in its November 2025 Final Report on the Tokenization of Financial Assets that tokenized MMFs have yet to deliver the secondary-market liquidity benefits their proponents anticipated, with trading remaining concentrated in issuer-controlled or partner-enabled frameworks rather than open books.