Franklin Templeton pushes BENJI distribution into Asia through HashKey Exchange

Franklin Templeton is pushing its tokenized cash-management strategy deeper into Asia through a new distribution arrangement with HashKey Exchange, putting one of the oldest onchain treasury products in front of another pool of professional digital-asset investors. HashKey said its Earn channel began offering the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Liquidity Fund, known onchain as BENJI, on Aug. 24, marking a new step in how regulated fund products are being packaged for crypto-native market access.

The development matters because BENJI is not a newly created experimental wrapper. It is Franklin Templeton’s blockchain-integrated money fund, structured around U.S. government money market instruments and dollar cash assets, and it has already been one of the most visible examples of a traditional asset manager bringing a regulated yield product onchain. By adding the fund to a licensed exchange distribution surface in Asia, the partnership shifts the conversation from proof of concept toward repeatable distribution: not just tokenizing fund shares, but plugging them into the operating rails where crypto investors already park collateral and hunt for short-duration yield.

HashKey’s announcement frames the launch as a professional-investor product rather than a mass-market retail rollout, and that distinction is important. The firm said the BENJI offering is not being made available to the public in Hong Kong and is limited to eligible investors. Even so, the move broadens the addressable market for tokenized treasury exposure in a region where regulatory pathways for digital assets are opening unevenly, venue by venue. For HashKey, which operates under Hong Kong licenses and has been positioning its platform around regulated market infrastructure, the product strengthens the case that exchange-based wealth and yield shelves can extend beyond native crypto into compliant real-world asset inventory.

The underlying fund also arrives with enough scale to make the launch more than symbolic. RWA.xyz data reviewed on Aug. 25 shows BENJI with roughly $702.1 million in total asset value, placing it among the larger tokenized U.S. Treasury products in market circulation. The same dataset shows the fund represented across Stellar, Base, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Polygon, Aptos and Solana, a multi-chain footprint that helps explain why distributors are treating it less like a single-network experiment and more like portable financial infrastructure. RWA.xyz also showed a 7-day annualized yield near 3.57% and a 30-day transfer volume of about $17.5 million at the time of review, underscoring that the product is active, not dormant.

That combination of regulated underlying assets and blockchain-native settlement is the real strategic point. Franklin Templeton has spent several years building BENJI as an onchain fund format rather than a sidecar marketing exercise, while HashKey is trying to turn regulated exchange access into a distribution edge. When those pieces meet, the result is a product that can sit closer to how digital-asset firms actually manage treasury balances: inside custody, exchange and collateral workflows, instead of in a separate traditional brokerage stack. In practical terms, that can reduce operational friction for firms that want dollar-linked yield without leaving the venues and wallet environments where they already move capital.

It also adds competitive pressure across the tokenized-cash segment. BENJI now sits in a field that includes BlackRock’s BUIDL, Ondo’s OUSG and a growing list of short-duration treasury and money-market structures designed for onchain use. Distribution is increasingly becoming the differentiator. Asset managers have already shown they can issue tokenized fund interests; the harder challenge is getting those products embedded into exchanges, wealth platforms, payment stacks and institutional treasury workflows where they can gather steady balances. HashKey’s Asia channel gives Franklin Templeton one more regulated route into that battle.

There are still clear limits. A licensed exchange listing does not erase jurisdictional constraints, investor eligibility checks or the need for strong redemption, disclosure and operational controls. Tokenized money funds remain closer to institutional cash tools than open consumer savings products, and adoption will depend on whether platforms can make onboarding, settlement and reporting as seamless as the onchain pitch suggests. The fact that HashKey is positioning BENJI within an Earn product rather than as a free-floating speculative token is a reminder that this market is being built around controlled access and compliance gates, not just secondary-market liquidity.

Still, the launch is a meaningful signal for the next phase of RWA distribution. The tokenization story is no longer only about whether a fund can be represented onchain; it is increasingly about whether established issuers can place those products inside the daily workflows of digital-asset capital. Franklin Templeton and HashKey are effectively testing that thesis in Asia with a product that already has history, scale and a regulated wrapper. If that model works, more of the RWA market will start to look less like isolated issuance and more like integrated financial plumbing.