Franklin Templeton Extends BENJI Treasury-Fund Access Through HashKey in Asia

Franklin Templeton has opened another distribution lane for one of the most established tokenized Treasury products in the market, bringing its Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Liquidity Fund to HashKey Exchange’s Earn channel in Asia. The rollout gives eligible digital-asset investors on HashKey access to a blockchain-enabled share class of a fund that invests primarily in U.S. government money market instruments and U.S. dollar cash assets. For the broader RWA market, the significance is not just that another venue listed a tokenized fund. It is that a regulated exchange is increasingly being used as the front end for short-duration, yield-bearing onchain cash management products that look a lot more like treasury infrastructure than crypto speculation.

According to HashKey’s announcement, the collaboration began with the launch of grBENJI on August 24 and is aimed at institutional and professional investors rather than a broad retail audience. The company said the product is available only to professional investors and is not being offered to the Hong Kong public, a detail that underscores how much of the tokenized-fund market still runs through tightly controlled distribution channels even as the underlying rails are programmable and always on. That combination of traditional product restrictions with blockchain settlement is becoming a recurring pattern across the higher-quality end of the RWA stack: familiar fund structures, regulated counterparties, and a digital wrapper that improves transferability, reporting, and operational speed.

The underlying fund is not a new experiment. Franklin Templeton has been operating an onchain version of this government liquidity strategy since 2021, and RWA.xyz describes BENJI as the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to use blockchain-integrated technology to process transactions and record share ownership onchain. That history matters because many tokenized Treasury products are still judged on two separate axes at once: the quality of the underlying assets and the credibility of the issuer’s servicing, compliance, and shareholder-record infrastructure. Franklin Templeton entered the segment early enough that BENJI is now less a proof of concept than a long-running operating case for how a traditional asset manager can package cash-equivalent exposure for digital-asset-native distribution.

Current market data reinforces that point. RWA.xyz lists BENJI with a net asset value of $1.00, total asset value a little above $702 million, and annualized seven-day and 30-day yields around the mid-3.5% range at the time of writing. The asset page also shows BENJI represented across multiple networks including Stellar, Base, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Polygon, Aptos, and Solana. That multichain footprint is strategically important. The more tokenized cash and Treasury products can circulate across the networks where traders, funds, and crypto applications already operate, the easier it becomes for institutions to treat them as a standard operating balance rather than as a niche wrapper sitting off to the side of the market. Distribution through an exchange channel like HashKey helps bridge that last-mile problem between product availability and actual investor usage.

HashKey’s side of the partnership is just as important as Franklin Templeton’s. The firm positioned the listing as an answer to growing demand for compliant real-world-asset yield inside regulated digital-asset venues, and that framing is consistent with where the category has been moving all year. The contest in tokenized Treasuries is no longer only about who can launch a fund first or who can mint on the most chains. It is increasingly about who controls distribution, onboarding, compliance workflows, and treasury management interfaces for professional users. HashKey’s role as a licensed platform in Hong Kong gives Franklin Templeton a regulated access point into a regional investor base that wants dollar yield exposure without stepping outside digital-asset infrastructure.

That makes this launch meaningful beyond its immediate size. In practice, tokenized Treasury funds are evolving into a core liquidity layer for digital-asset firms, wealth platforms, and onchain investment products that need a low-volatility place to park cash between trades, subscriptions, settlements, or collateral moves. Every additional distribution partnership chips away at the operational friction that used to separate traditional money-market products from crypto-native balance sheets. If a professional investor can access a regulated Treasury strategy from within the same environment used for digital-asset custody, trading, and reporting, the product stops looking like a special case and starts looking like base financial plumbing.

The next question is whether that plumbing remains confined to professional channels or gradually broadens into wider regional availability as rules and market structures mature. HashKey and Franklin Templeton both signaled that they want the relationship to extend beyond a single fund over time, which is the more important takeaway for RWA watchers. If tokenized government-liquidity products become the first successful beachhead for deeper fund distribution on regulated crypto platforms, the real story will not be one listing on one exchange. It will be the steady conversion of onchain funds from headline-grabbing launches into everyday treasury and cash-management infrastructure across Asia’s digital-asset market.