Behind the Suits is our interview series with the institutional partners building on BNB Chain: how they got here and how their products work, told by the people doing the building.

TL;DR

• BENJI, Franklin Templeton's onchain money market fund, was the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to keep its official share register on blockchain. It has run every day since 2021.
• Most tokenized products are “digital twins.” BENJI is natively onchain: the blockchain record is the official record.
• The Benji Technology Platform integrated with BNB Chain in September 2025. Franklin Templeton now accounts for roughly $1.5 billion in tokenized value on the network (rwa.xyz).

When Franklin Templeton's Benji Technology Platform integrated with BNB Chain last September, the announcement carried the headline facts: one of the world's largest asset managers, with $1.6 trillion under management, bringing its tokenization stack to the network. Ten months later, Franklin Templeton products account for roughly $1.5 billion in tokenized value on BNB Chain. What the announcement couldn't carry is the reasoning: why an asset manager of that size spent seven years building toward this, and what it takes to run a regulated fund on a public blockchain every day of the year.

The flagship is the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, ticker BENJI, the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to use blockchain technology to process transactions and maintain its official share register. That last detail matters more than it sounds. Most tokenized products are mirrors: ownership lives on a traditional system and gets reflected onchain. For BENJI, the blockchain record is the official record. Combined with the controls institutions expect (a registered transfer agent, audited smart contracts, regulated custody), it's the kind of design that makes public blockchains safe for serious money.

We spoke with Roger Bayston, Head of Digital Assets Ecosystem Development at Franklin Templeton, about the road from a 2018 research project to core infrastructure.

What milestones defined Franklin Templeton's journey into digital assets?

“Our journey started in 2018, well before tokenization was a mainstream conversation in asset management,” Bayston says. “The early work was genuine R&D: we wanted to understand what distributed ledgers could actually do for an asset manager, starting with the costly reconciliations and duplicate ledgers that weigh on capital markets.”

“The defining milestone came in 2021, when we launched what was the first U.S. registered mutual fund to use blockchain-integrated technology to process transactions and record share ownership. That fund has run continuously, every day of the year, ever since. From there, the milestones have been about breadth, extending the platform across multiple blockchains and building out fund structures for different markets and client types around the world, and more recently bringing our work onto BNB Chain.”

How has the digital assets strategy evolved?

“It's moved through three phases,” Bayston says. “First, exploration, asking whether moving records onto a blockchain could make our business more efficient. We chose to tokenize a government money market fund as the test case because its daily yield and stable value made it a clean way to prove the concept. Second, commercialization, as the regulatory picture became clearer we went from experiment to a live, compliant system that can trade, manage risk, administer custody and maintain the shareholder record onchain. Third, expansion, both across networks and across asset types.”

“Along the way we became participants in the networks we use, running our own validating nodes, and we've expanded our crypto research and investment capabilities. The throughline is that we're not experimenting at the edges anymore; we're operationalizing this as core infrastructure.”

What role should traditional asset managers play in bridging TradFi and DeFi?

“Our role is to bring the rigor of regulated finance onto open infrastructure, not to leave it behind,” Bayston says. “As a registered transfer agent, we maintain full control of the official ownership record, so if something needs to be corrected, it can be. That's the kind of investor protection institutions and regulators expect, and it's exactly what's needed for this technology to be trusted at scale.”

Then comes the distinction that separates BENJI from most of the tokenization market. “Most tokenized products today are ‘digital twins,' where ownership is really tracked on a parallel traditional system and only mirrored onchain,” he says. “We took the harder path of building genuinely onchain, because that's what unlocks the real benefits. The job of a manager like ours is to be the bridge: pairing decades of regulatory and investment discipline with the efficiency and openness of these networks, so that trusted products work in modern markets.”

What drew Franklin Templeton to BNB Chain?

“Our philosophy is to meet investors where they're already active, and BNB Chain has a large, engaged base of both retail and institutional users,” Bayston says. “Practically, it also offers the things that make tokenized real-world assets work at scale: fast settlement, high throughput and low transaction costs, alongside tooling designed to support regulated products. That lets us extend access to our offerings to a community that's genuinely active onchain.”

On BNB Chain, those characteristics come with numbers attached: block times of 0.45 seconds, finality in 1.125 seconds, and fees low enough that per-transaction cost stops being a design constraint.

“Just as important is how we show up on any network,” he adds. “Security and compliance sit at the front of everything we do, and as a registered transfer agent we retain full control of the official ownership record, we work with third-party firms to audit our smart-contract code, and assets stay in regulated custody. Our approach is to bring that discipline to wherever our clients want to engage, and adding BNB Chain supports the broader interoperable, multi-chain strategy we're building.”

How do BNB Chain's speed, costs, and user base benefit clients?

“The technical characteristics translate directly into client benefits,” Bayston says. “Low fees and high throughput are what make it realistic to do things onchain that simply don't work when every transaction is expensive or slow, things like continuous settlement and the kind of real-time, even intraday, yield mechanics we've built. Fast finality supports the always-on nature of these markets, which don't keep banking hours. And a large, active user base means the access we're extending actually reaches people who are participating onchain today.”

“For clients, that adds up to efficiency, reach and optionality: the ability to hold and move trusted, yield-bearing assets in a modern, around-the-clock environment.”

Where is the greatest potential for RWA tokenization?

“The nearest-term, highest-conviction area is tokenized cash and government money market funds, because the utility is already proving out,” Bayston says. “A good example is using tokenized, yield-bearing money market fund shares as collateral, letting institutions keep assets in regulated custody and still put them to work, rather than parking idle balances. That solves a real pain point.”

“From there, we expect the aperture to widen considerably. Over time we think a very wide range of assets moves onto blockchain rails, for transparency, speed, efficiency and cost, but ultimately because that's where customer preference is heading. The biggest potential isn't any single asset class; it's tokenization becoming foundational, underpinning fund structures, private assets and cash management alike.”

What excites you over the next 6–12 months, and what does institutional success look like?

“I'm most excited about the maturing of the infrastructure: real-time settlement becoming routine, better interoperability across networks, and growing regulatory clarity, which is what gives institutions the confidence to commit,” Bayston says. “We're also seeing institutional interest migrate toward the regulated, trusted end of the spectrum, which is healthy.”

“As for what real institutional success looks like, it's when the technology becomes invisible. Success is when onchain is simply how products are built and used, measured by genuine utility and everyday adoption rather than speculation. When clients are using these tools without thinking about the rails underneath, that's when we'll know this has truly arrived.”

What's next

Behind the Suits will continue with more guests coming up with more conversations with the institutions building tokenized funds, stablecoin infrastructure, and onchain yield products here.

In the meantime, see how RWAs are scaling on BNB Chain, explore our institutional solutions, or connect with our BD team to bring your products onchain.