$30B xStocks Adds Franklin Templeton BENJI On Kraken

Key Points

• Payward and Franklin Templeton unveiled an onchain collaboration in Bermuda, anchored by an xStocks rail that has cleared $30 billion since 2025.
• Franklin Templeton, a tokenized-fund pioneer since 2018, will plug its BENJI money market funds into Kraken for collateral, settlement, and co-designed yield products.
• Eligible non-US wallets can already claim a tokenized Franklin Templeton Gold ETF share worth about $200, settled onchain in seconds with no paperwork.

Franklin Templeton walked onto a Bermuda stage and handed Kraken a piece of the tokenization race. The asset manager is routing its BENJI money market funds and new yield products onto Payward’s xStocks rail, which has cleared $30 billion in volume. Payward, Kraken’s parent, announced it at the Digital Finance Forum, where Co-CEO Arjun Sethi said it unlocks “a new class of products that wouldn’t have been possible even three years ago.” Strip the stagecraft and the wallet question is blunt: tokenized Treasuries and gold settling in seconds sound great, but almost none of it is permissionless yet.

Franklin Templeton’s BENJI Lands On Kraken

From the main stage in Bermuda, Payward Co-CEO Dave Ripley unveiled a collaboration between Kraken‘s parent and Franklin Templeton, one of the world’s largest asset managers and a tokenized-fund pioneer since 2018.

The deal spans tokenized equities, qualified custody, actively managed yield products, and institutional liquidity through Kraken’s OTC and Prime desks.

The headline piece is BENJI. Franklin Templeton’s suite of global tokenized money market funds will be integrated across Kraken for collateral, settlement, and other institutional use cases.

Qualified custody is the unglamorous part that makes the rest work: it lets regulated funds sit onchain in a form institutions are allowed to hold.

A second track has Payward and Franklin Templeton co-designing brand-new onchain yield products from scratch.

None of that lands in a permissionless pool. It lives inside Kraken’s regulated, account-based environment, which is the first thing a DeFi-native reader needs to register.

Where The $30B xStocks Rail Fits

Underneath the partnership sits xStocks, the framework that has processed more than $30 billion in volume since it launched in 2025.

Payward is treating it as the foundation rail for moving tokenized real-world assets onchain, and BENJI is the next cargo loaded onto it.

The clearest proof of concept was a giveaway. Every eligible attendee received one tokenized share of the Franklin Templeton Gold ETF, about $200 of gold-backed exposure, dropped straight into their account and claimable in seconds.

No paperwork, no settlement delay, no business-hours wait. For many it was the first real-world asset they could actually hold, move, and send.

Here is the yield translation. Money market funds like BENJI track short-term US Treasury bills, the same instruments that let tokenized funds out-earn permissionless lending markets such as Aave USDC, which has sat near 2.1% in recent coverage.

Strip away the press release and this is about who owns the on-ramp: the yield is real, but it lives behind Kraken’s KYC wall, not in an open pool.

You can compare how tokenized Treasuries stack up against permissionless lending across the wider market before committing any capital.

Why Kraken Wants Franklin Templeton’s Credibility

Ripley’s pitch was credibility. Franklin Templeton has issued regulated funds for decades and tokenized ones since 2018, the kind of trust a crypto exchange cannot manufacture on its own.

Co-CEO Arjun Sethi framed the endgame as a single financial system where the line between traditional assets and digital infrastructure stops mattering.

That convergence is the same story playing out as institutional funds reach DeFi rails while public wallets stay locked out of the actual products.

The catch is timing. The new yield products are still being designed, the gold drop was a one-off demo, and none of it is available to US persons.

The prize, if BENJI ever opens up, is tokenized money market yield a wallet could post as collateral instead of idle stablecoins.

What to watch is one decision: whether Payward and Franklin Templeton ship those yield products to permissionless wallets or keep them gated to verified accounts.

Franklin Templeton brought the credibility and Kraken brought the rail. Whether the co-designed yield products ship permissionless or stay locked behind KYC is what decides if any of this reaches your wallet.

For the secondary-market side of this shift, see how tokenized stocks already trade on the same xStocks venue that now anchors the deal.