Binance Partners With Franklin Templeton to Bring Onchain MMF Collateral to Institutions

• Holders of tokenized money market funds issued via Franklin Templeton’s technology can use them as collateral on Binance under new partnership.
• The Wall Street firm has $900 million in assets under management under its tokenized Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (BENJI).

Binance has announced a new partnership with Franklin Templeton that allows investors in the company’s tokenized funds to use their shares as collateral on the exchange.

Binance and Franklin Templeton first announced they were working together last year in a partnership they said would focus on investors based outside the US. This will be the first product under the partnership, the exchange revealed.

The two parties say that the program targets established investors who would like to invest and trade on Binance, but do not want to park their assets on the exchange. Now, they can mirror those assets on the exchange, while the tokenized assets themselves remain in off-chain custody by Franklin. This eliminates counterparty risk and allows the investors to engage in trading on the world’s largest crypto exchange.

As Franklin’s Head of Digital Assets, Roger Bayston, commented, the two companies have been focused on “making digital finance actually work for institutions” under their partnership. He added:

Franklin Templeton is one of the world’s largest asset managers with $1.7 trillion under management as of the end of last month. It has become increasingly invested in digital assets, launching its first tokenized fund in 2021 on Stellar. Known as FOBXX, it was the first regulated mutual fund using blockchain to process transactions and record ownership. Since then, it has expanded the product to Ethereum, Base, Solana, Avalanche, Polygon and more.

It has also been quite active in crypto ETF sector, with products targeting Solana, XRP, Bitcoin and others, as we have reported.

Secure and Efficient Digital Markets on Binance

The two partners guaranteed that all the assets under this program would remain held offline in regulated custody and that only the shares would be pledged as collateral on the exchange. Ceffu, a Dubai-based custody platform, will provide custody and settlement services. Ceffu CEO Ian Loh says that the company’s infrastructure will enable “off-exchange collateral to support institutional participation in digital markets while maintaining strong custody and control.”

In her comments, Binance’s head of VIP, Catherine Chen, said the new product is a natural next step in the exchange’s partnership with Franklin. She added:

The announcement comes at a time when Binance has been blamed by some traders of being behind the ongoing bear market. However, as we reported, CEO Yi He and founder Changpeng Zhao have dismissed the criticism, urging traders to take responsibility for their own trading decisions.

Meanwhile, the BNB token trades at $591.6, dipping 5.2% in the past day as the overall market cap continued to drop, settling at $2.28 trillion at press time.