Institutional users can swap stablecoins for Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund via MoonPay Trade. The partnership creates a direct on-chain pipeline for liquidity and collateral.
Franklin Templeton has integrated its BENJI tokenized money market fund into MoonPay Trade, giving institutional clients a direct on-chain route between stablecoin liquidity and the fund’s shares. Users can swap USDC, USDT, and other stablecoins for BENJI via MoonPay’s institutional execution platform, the companies said Tuesday.
The setup creates a bidirectional pipeline: holders of BENJI can exit into stablecoins, while institutions holding stablecoins can enter the tokenized fund without a fiat detour. The announcement positions the arrangement as the foundation for a broader strategic relationship between the two firms.
The simple read is a new distribution channel. MoonPay Trade, an institutional on-chain execution platform launched in late May, already offers a single API across more than 200 blockchains, cross-chain routing, trade execution, settlement, and collateral movement under compliance controls. BENJI, officially known as the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (ticker FOBXX), was the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain when it launched in 2021. Adding it to MoonPay Trade means institutional clients can now toggle between stablecoins and a registered money market fund at on-chain speed.
The better market read focuses on mechanism and dependency. MoonPay Trade’s infrastructure rests on three recent acquisitions: Decent for cross-chain routing and liquidity, DFlow for trading technology, and Sodot for crypto key management. Every swap from stablecoin to BENJI shares passes through that stack. For an institution holding BENJI, redemption into stablecoins follows the same path. The pipeline is only as reliable as the weakest link in those systems.
MoonPay Trade executes swaps on-chain, meaning settlement and finality depend on the underlying blockchain network (likely Ethereum or a compatible chain, given BENJI’s blockchain origination). The platform handles KYC, compliance, and payment rails – supporting cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and bank transfers – before the on-chain swap occurs. For an institutional user, this reduces the number of counterparties between a stablecoin wallet and a fund share from several to one.
Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton’s head of innovation and digital assets, said tokenized money market funds become more useful “when they can move at the speed and with the programmability of digital asset networks.” Kaul added that working with MoonPay creates “another trusted gateway” between stablecoin liquidity and tokenized fund exposure.
Franklin Templeton described the integration as supporting treasury management, portfolio rebalancing, collateral use, and liquidity provision. Caroline Pham, former acting chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) who joined MoonPay Institutional as CEO, said tokenized money market funds can improve “liquidity and capital efficiency” when institutions can access the on-chain financial system. She called the partnership a demonstration of “infrastructure now supporting institutional digital asset adoption.”
For an institutional treasury holding stablecoins, the ability to move into a money market fund without leaving the blockchain lowers friction. The fund shares themselves can be used as collateral in on-chain lending or derivatives markets – provided the counterparty accepts BENJI as eligible collateral. Franklin Templeton has already been working with Kraken on tokenizing additional traditional products and with Binance to support BENJI as off-exchange collateral. The MoonPay integration extends that network.
Risk is concentrated on MoonPay’s platform reliability. Any downtime, security incident, or regulatory action against MoonPay could constrain BENJI’s liquidity pipeline. The platform’s cross-chain routing and key management layers (Decent, DFlow, Sodot) are relatively new and untested at institutional scale.
BENJI competes directly with other tokenized money market funds, including BlackRock’s BUIDL. The advantage of the MoonPay integration is distribution breadth. MoonPay Trade accesses more than 200 blockchains, meaning an institution can acquire BENJI from wallets on different networks without manual bridging. Franklin Templeton’s earlier partnerships with Kraken, Binance, and Ondo Finance suggest an aggressive distribution strategy that treats every major crypto platform as a node for fund entry and exit.
The announcement also follows MoonPay’s launch of a dedicated app inside ChatGPT’s App Store on May 22, supporting Bitcoin, XRP, Ethereum, Solana, USDC, and over 100 other assets across 30+ chains. That app lets users generate crypto purchase links inside OpenAI’s chatbot.
What reduces risk for the integration:
What would make the setup riskier:
Practical rule: A direct on-chain pipeline between stablecoins and tokenized money market funds reduces execution risk for institutional rebalancers but adds dependency on the exchange’s infrastructure. The trade-off is efficiency for concentration risk.
Bottom line for traders: This integration tightens the link between stablecoin liquidity and institutional-grade money market funds. For crypto market structure, it reduces the need for stablecoin-to-fiat conversions when rotating into yield-bearing products. The next catalysts to watch are MoonPay Trade’s uptime metrics, any regulatory guidance on stablecoin-to-fund swaps, and whether competitors like BlackRock follow with similar distribution deals.
For broader market context, see AlphaScala’s crypto market analysis and coverage of Coinbase’s ETF rails for stablecoin reserves.
Prepared with AlphaScala research tooling and grounded in primary market data: live prices, fundamentals, SEC filings, hedge-fund holdings, and insider activity. Each story is checked against AlphaScala publishing rules before release. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.