The Canton Network, a blockchain designed for use by institutional firms, announced Wednesday that Franklin Templeton’s tokenized platform will be available on its blockchain.
Franklin Templeton offers institutional investors a handful of tokenized investment products through its Benji technology platform, including a tokenized money market fund, the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX).
“This milestone expands the availability of regulated, tokenized financial instruments on Canton and strengthens its role as the premier blockchain network for institutions,” the Canton Network stated.
The Canton Network lists HSBC, BNP Paribas, JPMorganChase and Citadel Securities among its clients. The network’s Canton coin offers institutional investors certain privacy protections, delivering “the asset mobility and composability promise of public blockchains, but with the configurable privacy controls that institutional participants require,” according to the company’s web site.
“Integrating our Benji technology platform with the Canton Network allows us to deliver a private blockchain option alongside the interoperability clients expect, without compromising on the transparency and security that define our approach,” said Roger Bayston, Franklin Templeton’s head of digital assets, in a statement. “Together with a team that deeply understands the institutional market structure and its quirks, we’re building a foundation that can unite traditional financial rigor with the innovation of tokenized markets.”
The Benji platform, a proprietary blockchain-integrated stack, allows the administration of tokenized investments. Franklin Templeton launched the first U.S. registered tokenized mutual fund on the platform in 2021.
A spokesperson for Franklin Templeton said the company integrates new blockchain networks into the Benji platform and has deployed tokenized products across 10 different blockchains, depending on where it sees demand for different products.
“We’re starting to see retail interest really ignite the demand for tokenized equities, for tokenized ETFs, for tokenized investment funds,” Sandy Kaul, head of innovation at Franklin Templeton, told CIO in August. “What we expect is that we will see the institutions follow onto these new rails because it will be more efficient for them. They’ll be able to have less operational capital posted because you’re going to have immediate settlement of assets rather than having to fund the 24-hour or longer settlement cycle.”
Kaul noted that many institutional investors have a financial infrastructure barrier that has made it hard for them to make investments in tokenized assets, as they often do not have the digital wallets needed to hold the assets.
“That’s why they’re not directly investing in the crypto funds or in the crypto space—because they don’t have that wallet-based system to manage those investments,” Kaul said at the time. “With the clarity coming from the regulators that we’re going to be able to list real world assets—tokenize real world assets—alongside crypto assets, that’s going to be, I think, the real starting gun for being able to launch a wallet-based system that institutions are going to want to participate in.”
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