Wyoming Becomes First State to Issue Stablecoin

The state of Wyoming partnered with Franklin Templeton to create the first state-issued stablecoin. Launched Wednesday, the Frontier Stable Token provides accountability and oversight that a privately issued stablecoin might not, according to a statement from Franklin Templeton.

Franklin Templeton will serve as the reserves management partner for the stablecoin, with affiliate Fiduciary Trust Co. International serving as custodian.

Abbreviated FRNT, the token is publicly available on Kraken, a Wyoming-based cryptocurrency exchange, and can be purchased on multiple blockchains. FRNT reserves will be held in in a trust by the state of Wyoming and will be invested exclusively in U.S. dollars and short-duration Treasurys managed by Franklin Templeton.

Stablecoins are digital assets whose value is pegged to a stable asset, such as the U.S. dollar.

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The token will provide instant settlement of transactions and will be available to Wyoming citizens and “all retail investors, innovative institutions and forward-thinking governments across the globe,” according to a statement from Franklin Templeton.

“Our collaboration with the State of Wyoming demonstrates what’s possible when the public and private sectors work together to create a compliant, trusted framework for digital assets,” said Franklin Templeton President and CEO Jenny Johnson in a statement.

In the state’s press release, Converse County Treasurer Joel Schell explained that payments made electronically and via stablecoin could reduce $70,000 in credit card fees his office paid on $3.4 million in credit card transactions in 2025.

The Wyoming legislature in 2023 passed the Wyoming Stable Token Act, which authorized the state to issue its own stablecoins. The state allocated $5.8 million in its 2024 budget toward the project. A request for proposal process began in December 2024, with vendors selected in February 2025. The initial launch of the FRNT token began in August 2025 for testing, with the public launch occurring this week.

The deal is one of several involving stablecoins, tokenization and other digital assets. Also Wednesday, JPMorganChase & Co. announced the launch of its JPM Coin USD deposit token—a tool for institutional clients to receive settlements of tokenized dollar deposits on a public blockchain—situated on Coinbase’s base blockchain.

Implications for Institutional Investors

Money market funds and other yield-producing investments have been among the first types of products to be offered in tokenized form, but Franklin Templeton expects more asset classes to be digitalized and managed on the blockchain in the coming years.

“Right now, you don’t have any options in this wallet-based ecosystem to buy a diversified portfolio, and that’s the first gap that we think needs to be filled,” Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton’s head of innovation, told CIO in August. “That’s the first gap we think that needs to be filled.”

Kaul noted at the time that many institutional investors lack digital wallets, a prerequisite for institutional adoption of digital assets, and those need to become more mainstream to allow for additional digital investment.

“I want to be able to have a diversified portfolio that has equities and bonds and gold and other assets besides crypto to make sure that I am having a better risk-adjusted return for the long-term in my investing portfolio,” Kaul said last year. “The first set of products that we want to launch is what is going to be able to offer investors of different risk tolerances to have a diversified portfolio. Once we get that basic building block launched and available, then we can start to become more and more specialized in the products we’re offering, but right now, we’re missing just the basic investing capabilities for professionally managed portfolios in the [digital] wallet-based ecosystem.”