Franklin Templeton CEO: Most tokenized funds are just digital replicas of traditional financial products

Odaily reports that Jenny Johnson, CEO of asset management giant Franklin Templeton, stated at the TOKEN2049 Singapore conference that tokenized funds launched by many competitors are merely digital replicas of traditional financial products and do not truly leverage blockchain's advantages in efficiency and settlement.

Johnson said that Franklin Templeton's BENJI fund directly uses a public chain to record asset ownership, enabling per-second yield calculation, with a single transaction cost of approximately $1.13, compared to approximately $150 for traditional methods.

BENJI was launched in 2021 and is the first registered mutual fund in the United States to use a public chain to record ownership. The total scale of related tokenized money market funds is currently estimated to have reached $2.5 billion.

However, the Stellar public chain where BENJI was initially deployed experienced a state archival vulnerability in 2025, resulting in anomalies in 478 on-chain data records.