Tokenized money market funds could be the next ‘killer app’
Franklin Templeton’s Roger Bayston tells Blockworks that stablecoins and market funds ‘complement’ each other
JHVEPhoto/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
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Franklin Templeton is introducing intraday yield to Benji users.
Basically, investors can “own a tokenized security for part of the day, transfer it to another investor, and still earn yield for the period they were a shareholder.”
Franklin Templeton’s Roger Bayston explained: “To actually splice the day, to be able to do that, opens up market opportunities and things like collateral markets, where money may be moving in and around multiple times a day, but as long as you’re in Benji, you can earn the interest for that part of the day, and it begins to find application and other things too.”
And investors can now purchase tokenized securities using stablecoins.
Bayston told me this announcement is just one of the many things he and his team are working on. They have been “heads down” to focus on bringing new utilities to Benji.
Right now, there’s about $7 trillion in money market fund assets in the US, and there’s room to improve them.
“So crypto-native private funds that have been using stablecoins as collateral for their structured transactions can now begin to use Benji in that construct…that collateral market activity that’s all brand new use cases for money markets; and we see the future where the TradFi markets will begin to use these same feature sets, because these have benefits of moving money really quickly, and that money continuing to earn, right? Continuing to work for you during that whole process,” he explained.
And, look, I know what you’re thinking: These tokenized funds aren’t the sexiest crypto use case, but there’s clearly a lot of capital to tap there.
Besides, Bayston believes that if “stablecoins were a killer app for blockchains in general, tokenized money funds are going to be another one because they complement each other.”
He admitted that he’s spending a lot of time looking at how one can get liquidity between the two.
“Money funds are five business days. Stablecoins are 24/7, and so there is liquidity between those two things, which I think is a future opportunity for market makers and market participants by and large,” he said.
But he’s also learning that it’s not just about tokenization this year.
“I think what we’re learning in 2025 is the use of a lot of different assets on blockchain rails can be effective as collateral, and…if you’re acting as collateral, that means you’re borrowing something against it. Well, this is the business of banks, right? So the banks have a lot of interest in building infrastructure or beginning to utilize infrastructure where a number of different assets become easier to deal with in the collateral management process,” he explained.
So far, banks have shown a lot of interest in figuring out how all of this works, especially in different scenarios like a collateral liquidation.
“They do see this as a way of using new and other types of assets, using these blockchain rails for the truth of record and the ease of transferability of those ownership things as a new ecosystem for collateral, which allows them to do what their basic business is, which is lend,” Bayston said.
So perhaps a bit in the weeds, but it’s an area of potential adoption we haven’t quite explored yet.
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