Franklin Templeton and Kraken’s Payward team to create Wall Street tokens

Kraken Payward’s parent will connect Franklin Templeton’s BENJI token money market fund to its platform as collateral and cash management, which will allow customers to earn a yield with bare dollars on the ‑chain.

Kraken’s parent company Payward and Franklin Templeton have announced a strategic partnership to acquire traditional financial products and distribute them using Kraken’s exchange infrastructure, according to a report by Decrypt.

BENJI teams up with xSstocks in $30B token partnership

The immediate deliverable is the integration of Franklin Templeton’s BENJI money market fund with the Kraken platform token, where it will serve as a collateral and cash management tool for institutional clients – effectively allowing professional traders to park idle capital in a productive, tradable instrument without leaving the Kraken ecosystem.

BENJI, Franklin Templeton launched in 2021 on the Stellar blockchain before expanding to Polygon, Arbitrum and other networks, is one of the longest-running capital market funds in the industry and a direct competitor to BlackRock’s BUIDL, which recently surpassed $2.3 billion in assets under management. By embedding BENJI into Kraken’s collateral framework, Franklin Templeton gains a distribution channel that reaches both institutional desks and a large retail base in locations where the product is available, while Kraken gains a regulated, yield-generating dollar instrument that it can offer as an alternative to passive USDT or USDC balances sitting in trading accounts.

Beyond BENJI, the two firms plan to use Payward’s xSstocks framework as the basis for new actively managed products, making Franklin Templeton’s investment strategies available to institutional and retail investors in certain areas. xStocks, a previous crypto.news story noted, has processed more than $30 billion since its launch last year, building a tokenized equity infrastructure that now includes more than 50 US stocks and ETFs and positions Kraken as one of the leading on-chain traditional asset exposures outside of dedicated RWA platforms such as Ondo Finance.

Franklin Crypto, 250 Digital and the race to own distribution in the series

The Payward partnership is part of Franklin Templeton’s broader plan to build a vertical integrated crypto business and tokens. The company has expanded its dedicated crypto division, Franklin Crypto, with the acquisition of crypto investment firm 250 Digital, adding research, portfolio management and distribution capabilities to complement its existing token wallet products. Franklin Templeton’s XRPZ ETF also led Monday’s XRP ETF inflow data with $13.6 million in one day, making it the top performer in a group of five funds that received $25.8 million — the largest daily XRP ETF inflow since January 5, 2026 — as compiled in a recent crypto.news story.

Taken together, Franklin Templeton now owns an XRP ETF, a multi-chain tokenized money market fund, a crypto investment arm through 250 Digital, and a distribution relationship with one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world. That stack puts it in a structurally different position than most traditional asset managers, who still argue that a single token product should be filed rather than an end-to-end distribution network. As the story crypto.news on BlackRock’s second tokenized fund SEC filing with Securitize showed, the race between the largest traditional asset managers to be the owner of the on-chain distribution is open to competition, with BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and Fidelity all moving simultaneously in the tokenized product lines that could be considered for testing just as 2023 temple partner Kranton as a partner of Cranton, partner of Token Krandy. The client is the clearest sign yet that xStocks is changing from an equity token space to a full institutional financial product platform with Wall Street names behind it.