Global investment management firm Franklin Templeton (NYSE:BEN) and Stellar, a blockchain development foundation, recently marked Marks the fifth anniversary of the launch of BENJI, a tokenized version of the firm’s US-registered money market fund, FOBXX, which uses Stellar’s public blockchain as its system of record.
The fund offers 24/7 access and peer-to-peer transferability, as well as near-instantaneous settlements with yields available every second.
Part of the broader suite of tokenized funds on Franklin Templeton’s Benji platform, which deploys tokenized funds across multiple blockchains, Stellar’s Benji is now valued at more than US$650 million.
In an email to The Investing News Network (INN), Sandy Kaul, head of innovation at Franklin Templeton, noted the shift in institutional attitudes toward tokenization proves the growing recognition that blockchain infrastructure can provide meaningful benefits, including collateral that remains productive when deployed.
“These capabilities significantly change the way financial products work in a way that legacy systems cannot easily support,” Kaul said. “Benji’s success over these past five years, including 140 percent investor growth, points to a broader shift in how the market is recognizing its value and ability to reshape capital flows.”
Danelle Dixon, CEO of the Stellar Development Foundation, wrote: “BENJI’s success has paved the way for many other institutions to bring assets and products to the chain. Franklin Templeton had the dream to launch BENJI five years ago, and the Stellar network infrastructure made it a reality. The per-transaction cost reductions, intraday yields, and real-time transfers you see with BENJI on Stellar are too great for institutions to ignore. Makes more business sense.”
A flight to safety amid DeFi volatility
The feat comes just 10 days after Kelp DAO suffered the biggest DeFi exploit of the year. On April 19, North Korean hackers created fake cross-chain messages, tricking the bridge into releasing 116,500 rsETH worth US$293 million to the attacked wallet.
The Kelp DAO hackers then converted the stolen rsETH tokens into more common ETH and WETH on the Ethereum and Arbitrum networks, making it easier to move and spend the funds. They used those tokens as collateral to borrow an additional US$236 million in WETH from lending platforms Aave V3 and Compound, significantly increasing their total theft.
the event has started US$292 million in liquidation And billions were drained from lending platforms.
Amid native DeFi volatility, data shared with Investing News Network showed that Benji still recorded inflows of nearly US$30 million between April 19 and April 30.
Institutional migration into nominal deposits
RWA.io status of RWA tokenization in 2026 The report provides several key findings that show that Franklin Templeton’s fund is not just an isolated success but a leading indicator of the modernization of the financial system through tokenization.
While the broader digital asset sector has been plagued with bridge exploits and DeFi hacks, institutional interest has not waned; Instead, it has shifted toward the security of the regulated banking perimeter. Unlike high-risk bridge protocols, native token products like Benzi and bank-issued deposits eliminate arbitrage risk by acting as a direct, regulated link between the investor and the asset.
Citing major global banks such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM), BNY (NYSE: BK), Citi (NYSE: C) and HSBC (NYSE: HSBC), the report determined that 87 percent of financial institutions were exploring tokenization and token deposits, having moved beyond experimentation in live production environments serving institutional clients.
As of mid-2026, these efforts have grown into larger commercial operations, with JPMorgan and Citi now processing billions in daily transactions and HSBC and Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) turning their platforms into global utilities that support everything from digital government bonds to real-time gold trading.
This flight to regulated security is driven by the fact that token deposits receive the fundamental protections of the traditional banking system, such as FDIC insurance and established AML/KYC frameworks, which are absent in many permissionless protocols.
Additionally, large-scale initiatives like Project Agora, involving over 40 institutions and seven central banks, as well as the AmBridge platform, are actively testing tokenized commercial and central bank money to eliminate so-called bridge risk, which has historically made cross-border digital transfers insecure.
By unifying funds and assets into a single, integrated ledger, these platforms remove the need for third-party bridges, which are vulnerable to exploitation.
This vulnerability was exposed on May 6 when liquidity provider TrustedVolumes was hit by an ongoing exploit that led to the withdrawal of approximately US$6.7 million, proving that even if major aggregators remain secure, investors still face hidden risks from the third-party intermediaries that power decentralized markets.
bottom line
The authors suggest that the potential for token deposits is even greater with the stablecoin market estimated to reach US$500 billion. This is because while stablecoins serve as a specialized digital payment instrument, tokenized deposits represent an upgrade to the fundamental money supply, potentially tapping into a global customer deposit base set to reach US$103 trillion in 2024.
Benji’s five-year milestone serves as a proof point for the maturity of token finance, demonstrating that blockchain infrastructure combined with strong guardrails can deliver solid benefits.
As the financial system continues to modernize, the potential for tokenization to upgrade the global money supply represents a huge market opportunity.
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Securities Disclosure: I, Megan Seiter, do not have any direct investment interest in any of the companies mentioned in this article.
