Payward, the parent company of Kraken, and Franklin Templeton have announced a strategic collaboration to bring traditional financial products onchain, pairing Kraken's crypto-native trading and custody infrastructure with one of the world's largest asset managers.
The partnership covers four areas: tokenized equities, qualified custody, actively-managed yield products, and institutional access to crypto liquidity via Kraken's OTC and Prime services. Central to the deal is the planned integration of BENJI — Franklin Templeton's suite of tokenized money market funds — into the Kraken platform, where it would serve as a collateral and cash management tool for institutional trading clients.
Payward's xStocks framework, which has processed more than $30 billion in volume since launching in 2025, will be the vehicle through which new actively managed Franklin Templeton strategies are made tradeable onchain. The two firms will also co-develop a range of tokenized yield products for institutional clients and, where regulations permit, Kraken's broader user base.
"Payward and Franklin Templeton are building toward a model of finance where the distinction between traditional assets and digital infrastructure no longer holds," said Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Payward and Kraken, in a statement on Tuesday. "What collaborations like this one unlock is a new class of products that wouldn't have been possible even three years ago."
Franklin Templeton manages $1.74 trillion in assets as of April 2026 and has been active in digital asset tokenization since 2018. "By expanding the utility of BENJI and exploring new tokenized products, our work with Payward reflects the growing need to serve both digital-native and institutional customers with solutions built for how capital increasingly moves onchain," said Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton's head of digital assets and innovation.
The announcement is the latest in a series of institutional moves by Payward. Earlier this month, the company filed an application with the OCC for a national trust company charter to offer fiduciary custody for digital assets, and separately announced a deal to acquire stablecoin payments infrastructure firm Reap Technologies for up to $600 million — a transaction that valued Payward's equity at $20 billion.
Tokenized money market funds have been one of the faster-growing categories in onchain finance. Making BENJI available as collateral within an active trading environment would extend its utility beyond passive yield and into the mechanics of institutional crypto trading — a step that could accelerate the case for tokenized treasuries as functional, liquid instruments rather than proof-of-concept experiments.
