Franklin Templeton launches its tokenized money fund on Aptos

• Franklin Templeton has launched the OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX) on Aptos.
• FOBXX currently has a market cap of over $435 million, second among tokenized US Treasuries behind BlackRock fund BUIDL.

Franklin Templeton has expanded its OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX) to the layer-1 blockchain Aptos.

The $1.6 trillion asset manager, which also offers the Franklin Bitcoin ETF (EZBC) and Franklin Ethereum ETF (EZET), announced the launch of FOBXX on Aptos on Wednesday, October 2, 2024. It’s another milestone for the company after its recent expansion of the tokenized money fund to Avalanche.

FOBXX launched in 2021 and is a US Treasury-backed fund that brings the benefits of tokenized real-world assets to investors.

With its expansion to Aptos, the fund has expanded to a non-Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) and adds to institutional investor access through Franklin Templeton’s platform Benji Investments.

FOBXX will be represented by Franklin’s BENJI token on the Aptos network, helping to merge traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralised finance (DeFi). Franklin brought its money market fund to Polygon and Stellar blockchain networks in April 2024.

The firm then expanded it to Arbitrum in August 2024.

Tokenized treasuries market growth

According to data from RWA.xyz, FOBXX is currently the second largest tokenized fund with over $435 million in assets.

The top US Treasury-backed asset is the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL), which launched on Ethereum and currently has over $518 million in assets under management.

Investors have increasingly looked to tap into opportunities in the RWA market. This has seen treasury-related products such as the Ondo U.S. Dollar Yield (USDY), Hashnote Short Duration Yield Coin (USYC) and OpenEden TBILL Vault (TBILL) attract a growing number of holders.

USDY, USYC and TBILL have market caps of $420 million, $280 million and $116 million respectively. Ondo launched its USDY fund on Sui in March.

Meanwhile, the total value of tokenized US treasuries, cash-equivalents and bonds, per RWA.xyz, has grown to over $2.27 billion.

That’s up from around $769 million on January 1, 2024, when FOBXX incidentally accounted for over $325 million of the total market value.

BlackRock’s BUIDL launched in March 2024 and hit $500 million market cap in July.