Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson said at TOKEN2049 in Singapore that many tokenized funds launched by rivals are little more than digital replicas of traditional financial products, rather than structures that make full use of blockchain-based efficiency and settlement. Johnson contrasted those offerings with Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund, which she said records asset ownership directly on a public blockchain.
According to Johnson, BENJI can calculate yield on a per-second basis, with a transaction cost of about $1.13 per trade, versus roughly $150 through traditional processes. She also said BENJI, launched in 2021, was the first registered mutual fund in the United States to use a public blockchain to record ownership.
The remarks came as the broader tokenized money market fund segment has grown to an estimated $2.5 billion. At the same time, the report noted that Stellar, the public blockchain where BENJI was initially deployed, experienced a state archival bug in 2025 that led to anomalies in 478 on-chain data records.
Asset management giant Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson said at TOKEN2049 in Singapore that many tokenized funds introduced by competitors are merely digital copies of traditional financial products and do not fully use blockchain’s advantages in efficiency and settlement.
Johnson said Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund records asset ownership directly on a public blockchain, allowing yield to be calculated by the second. She put the transaction cost at about $1.13 per trade, compared with about $150 under traditional methods.
BENJI’s launch and structure
BENJI was launched in 2021 and is the first registered mutual fund in the United States to use a public blockchain to record ownership, according to the report.
The total size of related tokenized money market funds is now estimated at $2.5 billion.
Earlier issue on Stellar
The report also noted that Stellar, the public blockchain where BENJI was initially deployed, had a state archival bug in 2025 that caused anomalies in 478 on-chain data records.
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