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Franklin Templeton, a financial services company with $1.6 trillion of assets under management, has launched its US government money fund on Solana.
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Franklin Templeton, a US-based financial services company with $1.6 trillion worth of assets under management, announced on Feb. 12 that it had launched its OnChain US Government Money Fund (FOBXX) on layer-1 blockchain Solana. The move marks the latest expansion of FOBXX, which launched in 2021, to another blockchain.
FOBXX invests nearly 100% of its assets into US government securities, cash and fully collateralized repurchase agreements with minimal credit risks. As of Jan. 31, 2025, the fund had a total of $512 million worth of assets with a seven-day effective yield of 4.2%.
“With this development, Franklin Templeton is expanding its layer-1 blockchain footprint as Solana continues to grow its institutional participant ecosystem,” a representative from Franklin Templeton told Cointelegraph.
FOBXX is available on several blockchains, including layer-1 blockchains Ethereum and Avalanche, Ethereum layer-2 blockchains Arbitrum, Base, Polygon, Aptos and others. It is considered the first US mutual fund to use blockchain technology for record-keeping and processing transactions, with one BENJI token equal to one share in the fund.
Franklin Templeton’s FOBXX launch on Solana is following on the heels of another tokenized institutional investment fund that recently debuted on the network, the Apollo Diversified Credit Securitize Fund.
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Franklin Templeton has been active in the crypto space, launching a Bitcoin (BTC) and an Ether (ETH) exchange-traded fund (ETF) in January 2024 and July 2024, respectively. The company is seeking approval from the US Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a Crypto Index ETF as well.
The asset manager has been expanding its Solana footprint. On Feb. 10, the company registered a trust in Delaware linked to a Solana ETF, one of many Solana (SOL) ETFs that have sprouted up over the past several months. However, the approval of such ETFs is complicated by lawsuits that allege SOL is an unregistered security.
Although the Solana network may be known for memecoins, there has been a growing institutional interest in the blockchain. As Cointelegraph reported, institutional investments in decentralized applications running on Solana rose 54% in Q3 of 2024 to a total of $173 million. CoinShares also noted that more wealth managers and hedge funds were allocating to SOL in 2024.
The SOL token has bounced back from a tough bear market that saw its price sink to under $10 per coin after the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX. It has a 52-week high of $265.10 following the momentum from US President Donald Trump’s memecoin launch on the network.
Related: What Solana’s critics get right… and what they get wrong
This article first appeared at Cointelegraph.com News
