Payward, the parent company of Kraken, and Franklin Templeton announced a strategic collaboration to build on-chain investment products for institutional markets. The partnership connects regulated money market tokens with Kraken’s trading, custody and tokenization infrastructure, creating a route for programmable cash, tokenized yield and around-the-clock settlement.
The deal matters because Payward already has meaningful tokenized-equity infrastructure in place. Its xStocks framework has processed more than $30 billion in tokenized equities since launching in 2025, giving the new collaboration an existing liquidity and market-structure base rather than starting from a blank slate.
BENJI Tokens Become Programmable Collateral
Franklin Templeton’s BENJI tokens, which represent on-chain shares of the Franklin Onchain U.S. Government Money Fund, will be integrated into Kraken’s institutional platform. That gives professional users a regulated on-chain cash instrument that can be used for collateral, lending and portfolio management.
The companies said the product suite will include tokenized money market funds, tokenized yield vehicles and actively managed tokenized equities. By combining these assets with Payward’s xStocks architecture, the partnership aims to make traditional investment products more composable inside digital markets.
The core operational benefit is settlement speed. BENJI and similar tokenized fund shares can support 24/7 movement, automated margining and real-time rebalancing, giving institutions a faster alternative to traditional batch-based fund and banking workflows.
For Franklin Templeton, the collaboration expands distribution for its on-chain fund infrastructure. For Payward, it deepens Kraken’s institutional stack by adding high-grade tokenized collateral and cash-management tools alongside custody, trading and tokenized equities.
Regulated Cash Could Compete With Stablecoin Liquidity
The partnership also represents a clearer TradFi-crypto bridge. Franklin Templeton brings fund-management and regulatory expertise, while Payward contributes exchange infrastructure, custody rails and tokenization technology, creating a combined model for regulated on-chain capital markets.
Using money market tokens as collateral could reduce settlement latency and let desks execute margin calls, collateral transfers and portfolio adjustments through programmable assets that remain available around the clock.
That could also change the role of stablecoins in institutional workflows. If BENJI and similar tokenized funds become preferred on-chain cash buffers, institutions may rely less on unregulated stablecoin balances for certain settlement and collateral use cases, shifting the composition of liquidity inside on-chain markets.
Competition in tokenized cash products is already rising, but this collaboration stands out because it links a major asset manager’s regulated fund shares with a large crypto exchange’s tokenization stack. The key test will be whether institutions actually move collateral balances into BENJI and related products at meaningful scale.
The indicators to watch are BENJI and FOBXX circulation on public chains, xStocks trading volumes and changes in collateral composition relative to stablecoins. Those metrics will show whether regulated tokenized cash becomes a durable liquidity layer for institutional crypto markets.