Kraken parent Payward will plug Franklin Templeton’s BENJI tokenized money market fund into its platform as collateral and cash management, letting clients earn yield on idle dollars on‑chain.
Summary
- Kraken’s parent company Payward has struck a strategic partnership with Franklin Templeton to bring tokenized stocks, yield products and the BENJI money market fund onto blockchain rails for institutional and select retail clients.
- Franklin Templeton’s BENJI tokenized money market fund will be integrated into Kraken’s platform as collateral and cash management infrastructure, while Payward’s xStocks framework — which has processed over $30 billion in transaction volume since launch — will co-develop new on-chain actively managed products.
- The deal lands as Franklin Templeton deepens its crypto footprint through the acquisition of crypto investment firm 250 Digital and the expansion of its Franklin Crypto division, signaling that one of the world’s largest asset managers is treating blockchain distribution as a core business line rather than a side project.
Kraken’s parent company Payward and Franklin Templeton have announced a strategic partnership to tokenize traditional financial products and distribute them through Kraken’s exchange infrastructure, according to reporting by Decrypt.
BENJI meets xStocks in a $30B tokenization partnership
The immediate deliverable is an integration of Franklin Templeton’s BENJI tokenized money market fund into the Kraken platform, where it will function as collateral and a cash management tool for institutional clients — effectively letting professional traders park idle capital in a yield-bearing, on-chain dollar instrument without leaving the Kraken ecosystem.
BENJI, which Franklin Templeton launched in 2021 on the Stellar blockchain before expanding to Polygon, Arbitrum and other networks, is one of the longest-running tokenized money market funds in the industry and a direct competitor to BlackRock’s BUIDL, which recently crossed $2.3 billion in assets under management. By embedding BENJI into Kraken’s collateral framework, Franklin Templeton gains a distribution channel that reaches both institutional desks and the exchange’s large retail base in jurisdictions where the product is available, while Kraken gains a regulated, yield-generating dollar instrument it can offer as an alternative to idle USDT or USDC balances sitting in trading accounts.
Beyond BENJI, the two firms plan to use Payward’s xStocks framework as the foundation for new on-chain actively managed products, making Franklin Templeton’s investment strategies available to institutions and retail investors in specific jurisdictions. xStocks, a previous crypto.news story noted, has processed over $30 billion in transaction volume since launching last year, building a tokenized equity infrastructure that now spans more than 50 U.S. stocks and ETFs and positions Kraken as one of the leading venues for on-chain traditional asset exposure outside of dedicated RWA platforms like Ondo Finance.
Franklin Crypto, 250 Digital and the race to own on-chain distribution
The Payward partnership is one piece of a broader push by Franklin Templeton to build a vertically integrated crypto and tokenization business. The firm has advanced its dedicated crypto division, Franklin Crypto, through the acquisition of crypto investment firm 250 Digital, adding research, portfolio management and distribution capabilities that complement its existing tokenized fund products. Franklin Templeton’s XRPZ spot ETF also led Monday’s XRP ETF inflow data with $13.6 million in a single day, making it the top product in a five-fund cohort that collectively pulled in $25.8 million — the largest daily XRP ETF inflow since January 5, 2026 — as covered in a recent crypto.news story.
Taken together, Franklin Templeton now has a spot XRP ETF, a tokenized money market fund on multiple chains, a crypto investment arm via 250 Digital, and a distribution partnership with one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges. That stack puts it in a structurally different position from most traditional asset managers, which are still debating whether to file a single tokenized product rather than building an end-to-end on-chain distribution network. As a crypto.news story on BlackRock’s second tokenized fund SEC filing with Securitize showed, the race among the largest traditional asset managers to own on-chain distribution is now openly competitive, with BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Fidelity all moving simultaneously on tokenized product lines that would have been considered experimental as recently as 2023. For Kraken, landing Franklin Templeton as a product partner rather than just a custody client is the clearest signal yet that xStocks is evolving from a tokenized equity venue into a full institutional financial product platform with Wall Street names behind it.
