BENJI’s 5-Year Growth Story Signals Flight to Safety in Tokenization
Global investment management firm Franklin Templeton (NYSE:BEN) and Stellar, a blockchain development foundation, recently marked the fifth anniversary of the launch of BENJI, a tokenized version of the firm’s US-registered money market fund, FOBXX, which uses Stellar’s public blockchain as its system of record.
The fund offers 24/7 access and peer-to-peer transferability, as well as nearly instantaneous settlement alongside yield that accrues every second.
Part of Franklin Templeton’s broader suite of tokenized funds on the Benji platform, which deploys tokenized funds across multiple blockchains, Stellar’s BENJI now holds over US$650 million in value.
In an email to The Investing News Network (INN), Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton’s head of innovation, noted a shift in institutional behavior toward tokenization that proves a growing recognition that blockchain infrastructure can deliver meaningful advantages, including collateral that stays productive while deployed.
“These capabilities vastly change how financial products work in a way that legacy systems simply cannot support,” Kaul added. “BENJI’s success over these past five years, including 140 percent investor growth, points to a broader shift in how the market is recognizing its value and potential to reshape how capital flows.”
Denelle Dixon, Stellar Development Foundation’s CEO, wrote: “BENJI’s success has led the way for many other institutions to bring assets and products onchain. Franklin Templeton had the vision to launch BENJI five years ago, and the Stellar network’s infrastructure made it a reality. The per-transaction cost reductions, intraday yield and real-time transfers you see with BENJI on Stellar just make too much business sense for institutions to ignore.”
A flight to safety amidst DeFi instability
This milestone occurred just 10 days after Kelp DAO suffered the largest DeFi exploit of the year. On April 19, North Korean hackers created fake cross-chain messages, tricking the bridge into releasing 116,500 rsETH, worth US$293 million, to attacker wallets.
Kelp DAO hackers then swapped the stolen rsETH tokens into more common ETH and WETH on the Ethereum and Arbitrum networks to make the funds easier to move and spend. They used those tokens as collateral to borrow an additional US$236 million in WETH from lending platforms Aave V3 and Compound, greatly increasing their total theft.
The event triggered US$292 million in liquidations and billions in withdrawals from lending platforms.
Amidst native DeFi instability, data shared with the Investing News Network showed that BENJI still recorded roughly US$30 million in inflows between April 19 and April 30.
