Franklin Templeton Expands Money Market Fund to Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer-2 Base

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Franklin Templeton’s flagship crypto product is now available on a new digital asset network—this time, Coinbase’s Base, an Ethereum scaling network.

The Wall Street titan announced the expansion of its OnChain U.S. Government Money Market Fund (FOBXX) to the crypto exchange’s layer-2 network on Thursday.

Base is Coinbase’s Ethereum scaling network. The blockchain was incubated and launched by America’s biggest crypto exchange to let developers speedily and cheaply build new crypto products.

New chain unlocked. Benji, our proprietary blockchain-integrated recordkeeping system, is now live on @base! With this announcement, Franklin Templeton is the first asset manager to build a tokenized fund on Base.

Base is a layer 2 blockchain built on Ethereum designed to… pic.twitter.com/lRij7HchSl

— Franklin Templeton Digital Assets (@FTDA_US) October 31, 2024

Coinbase’s product has become popular, and in its Q3 earnings on Wednesday, the exchange said that Base had “solidified its position as the leader in on-chain activity.” The number of transactions it processed rose 55% quarter-over-quarter, the company told shareholders.

The Nasdaq-listed FOBXX is a digitized fund that lets customers put cash into U.S. government securities, cash and repurchase agreements.

Investors can buy shares of FOBXX and hold them in digital wallets via Franklin Templeton’s Benji Investments mobile app.

The product is also available on Avalanche, Arbitrum, Stellar, Polygon, and Aptos.

Franklin Templeton first got involved in the digital asset space back in 2019, when it started digitizing shares for a money market fund on the Stellar blockchain.

It also announced a digital asset venture fund back in 2021, and operates Ethereum and Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

Edited by Andrew Hayward