Franklin Templeton, a $1.5 trillion asset supervisor, has made its OnChain U.S. Authorities Cash Market Fund (FOBXX) accessible on Ethereum by way of layer-2 blockchain Arbitrum, the corporate mentioned Thursday.
That is the third blockchain the place the fund’s shares will be traded. Beforehand, the fund was tokenized on Stellar and Polygon, one other layer-2 community of Ethereum.
“The Stellar community is the Franklin OnChain U.S Authorities Cash Fund’s official document of share possession,” a spokesperson for Franklin Templeton advised CoinDesk. “The Fund might also use the Polygon and Arbitrum networks for sure accounts upon request and topic to eligibility. Arbitrum will initially be accessible to institutional wallets.”
The Wall Road funding large mentioned the enlargement will assist the mixing of decentralized finance into the standard monetary system and assist Franklin attain a brand new viewers for FOBXX.
“Increasing into the Arbitrum ecosystem is a crucial step on our journey to empower our asset administration capabilities with blockchain know-how,” mentioned Roger Bayston, head of digital belongings at Franklin Templeton, in an announcement.
The fund, which launched in 2021, was the primary to make use of a public blockchain to document transactions and possession. It stands at a $420 million market cap, making it the third-largest U.S. Treasury-linked on-chain product, in response to information from rwa.xyz
Since then, a number of different corporations have made a push into tokenization of actual world belongings (RWAs) by bringing their funds onto blockchain rails. The most important ones embrace BlackRock, the world’s largest asset supervisor, and crypto-native startups Securitize and Ondo Finance, all of which have launched tokenized funds lately.
BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) is the most important such fund by market cap. BUIDL runs on the primary Ethereum chain and Securitize manages the tokenized shares and retains official possession information.
