The Aptos Foundation and global asset management group Franklin Templeton have announced the integration of the Franklin OnChain US Government Monetary Fund (FOBXX) into the Aptos blockchain.
With support for the Move programming language, Aptos’ layer 1 blockchain will support Treasury-backed funds, integrating real assets into non-Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) blockchain environments.
The money market fund primarily invests in US government securities, cash, and repurchase agreements backed by government securities. To date, the fund has over $427.95 million in assets under management.
This is the first US-registered mutual fund to use blockchain technology (initially on the Stellar network) to process transactions and record ownership of shares. Each share of the fund is tokenized and represented by a BENJI token, which can be stored in digital wallets.
“To achieve that future, we need to bridge not only the TradFi and DeFi worlds, but also the EVM and non-EVM networks,” Bashar Lazaar, head of funding and ecosystem at the Aptos Foundation, said in a statement.
Aptos was founded by Mo Shaikh and Avery Ching, both of whom were involved in Meta’s Diem blockchain project. When the tech conglomerate decided to wind down the Diem project, Shaikh and Ching leveraged the technology to create Aptos.
The Aptos network saw an explosion of activity in 2024, hitting a record 115.4 million transactions in a single day in May.
Since its launch in October 2022, more than 1.7 billion transactions have been made on Aptos. According to data from DefiLlama, the blockchain currently holds $545 million in total value locked.
“We chose Aptos Network because of its unique features, which meet our rigorous criteria for the Benji platform,” said Roger Bayston, head of digital assets at Franklin Templeton.
Tokenization of funds is growing rapidly in the traditional financial products space, allowing for fractional ownership of assets. Other institutions such as BlackRock and ParaFi Capital are also tokenizing multimillion-dollar funds.