Franklin Templeton

At a glance

What it does

A money-market fund is a pot of very short government debt and cash that aims to hold its value at one dollar per share while paying interest. FOBXX is such a fund, registered with the SEC under the Investment Company Act of 1940, the same law that covers ordinary US mutual funds. It went live on 6 April 2021 on Stellar. Each BENJI token is one share of the fund.

Franklin Templeton keeps the register in-house. Its transfer agent, Franklin Templeton Investor Services (FTIS), decides who may hold the token and records every issue and redemption. When a holder moves BENJI from one chain to another, the transfer agent burns the tokens on the first network and mints the same amount on the second, once both addresses are on its allow-list. By 2026 BENJI ran on nine networks, including Stellar, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Polygon, Aptos, Solana and BNB Chain.

The entry ticket is small. BENJI starts at 20 USD through the Benji app, while BUIDL asks for 5 mn USD. That makes FOBXX one of the few tokenized Treasury products built with ordinary investors in mind.

How it is different

Franklin Templeton and the Stellar Development Foundation describe FOBXX as the first US-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain as its official system of record for transactions and share ownership. That is the issuer's own description, and it is stronger than what most rivals claim. The fund's registration statement describes a hybrid of book entries and on-chain records under the transfer agent's control, so the chain and the transfer agent's books work together.

The SEC's staff accepted that design in writing. On 12 August 2026 its Division of Investment Management issued a no-action letter that lets Franklin's registered funds hold FOBXX shares through the linked blockchain system without meeting parts of Rule 17f-2, under twelve conditions. The staff's reasoning rests on FTIS keeping sole control of the official ownership record. For other managers, this letter is a template for putting fund shares on a chain inside the existing rulebook.

On Stellar, BENJI has no compliance smart contract. Control comes from flags on the issuer's Stellar account, enforced by the network itself: nobody holds BENJI without authorization, authorization can be withdrawn, and tokens can be clawed back.

Where it fits

A short history of tokenization places FOBXX at the quiet start of the Treasury wave. What a tokenized real-world asset actually is uses it as the clearest case of a token that is the register. Who holds the keys reads its Stellar account and its clawback power. Which blockchains RWAs live on explains its multi-chain spread. Related profiles: BlackRock, Ondo and Superstate.

Risks and open questions

A single signer can act. I read the Stellar issuer account on 4 September 2026: clawback sits behind a threshold that any one of ten signers clears alone, while changing the account's rules needs two. In a sample of the last 200 operations I found no clawback, but the power is there.

The chain carries little trading. Cumulative peer-to-peer transfers reached about 211 mn USD by 31 March 2026, over five years, according to Franklin Templeton. That is a register in use, not a market.

Adoption is uneven. On 4 September 2026 the BENJI asset on Stellar had 1,357 authorized trustlines and 953 unauthorized ones, so many accounts that opened a line to the token were never cleared to hold it.

What to watch next

• Use of the no-action letter: whether other registered funds adopt the same twelve conditions shows if the letter becomes an industry path or stays a Franklin exception.
• Round-the-clock trading: WisdomTree won SEC relief in February 2026 for 24/7 trading of a tokenized money fund against USDC, and a similar step for BENJI would change how it is used.
• BENJI as collateral: a registered fund share accepted in DeFi lending markets would give the product a second job beyond holding cash.
• Chain count: each new network adds reach but also another deployment the transfer agent must reconcile.