HashKey Exchange has begun distributing Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money market fund, grBENJI, through its Earn channel.

The fund holds U.S. government money market instruments and dollar cash, with returns tracking short-term Treasury yields.

The product is restricted to professional investors, with no offering to the public in Hong Kong.

Franklin Templeton has started distributing its tokenized money market fund through HashKey Exchange, giving clients of the Hong Kong platform access to a blockchain-wrapped pool of U.S. government debt.

The Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Liquidity Fund, traded as grBENJI, invests primarily in U.S. government money market instruments and dollar cash assets, and is now available on HashKey’s Earn channel. Franklin Templeton manages $1.8 trillion in assets and has operated a tokenized version of the fund since 2021, when it became the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain to record share ownership.

The product is available only to professional investors and is "not available for offering to the public in Hong Kong," underscoring that this is a distribution agreement aimed at institutional and other qualifying clients rather than a retail launch.

What the fund actually pays

Returns on this type of product track the short end of the Treasury curve. RWA.xyz currently lists the BENJI token as yielding around 3.6% over seven and 30 days at a net asset value of $1.00, with just over 1,100 holders, although published figures for the fund’s size vary considerably depending on whether a single token or the full suite is counted.

Haiyang Ru, chief executive of HashKey Exchange BG, said the listing was intended to meet institutional demand for compliant real-world asset yield. Chetan Karkhanis, Franklin Templeton’s senior vice president for digital assets client engagement, said the firm planned to expand "beyond tokenized money market funds into other tokenized products over time," using HashKey’s platform across Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Dubai and Bermuda.

In May, Franklin Templeton agreed to a strategic collaboration with Payward, the parent of crypto exchange Kraken, covering tokenized equities, custody and actively managed yield products, with BENJI set to be integrated into Kraken as collateral and a cash management tool for institutional clients. The firm has also brought the token to BNB Chain following a tie-up with Binance, and struck deals with DigiFT in May and MoonPay Trade in June, the latter allowing institutions to swap stablecoins directly into the fund. Together, these moves show how the fund is being used not just as a cash-like product, but also as part of a broader distribution strategy across crypto exchanges and tokenization platforms.

Franklin Templeton has also expanded its crypto business alongside the distribution push, launching Franklin Crypto through its acquisition of CoinFund spinoff 250 Digital, which closed in June. Franklin Templeton used BENJI tokens as part of the payment for that deal, describing the transaction as a step toward conducting mergers and acquisitions on-chain.