Franklin Templeton BENJI on Stellar: The Onchain Money Fund

A short history

Franklin Templeton launched FOBXX on Stellar in April 2021, making it the first US-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain to process transactions and record share ownership. It passed $270M by March 2023, added peer-to-peer transfers in 2024 and has since expanded to other chains while keeping Stellar.

• 2021. The fund launches on Stellar. rwa.xyz records its inception as 6 April 2021. The Stellar Development Foundation and Franklin describe it as the first US-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain as its official system of record.
• March 2023. Assets pass $270M, per an April 2023 Franklin press release carried by the SDF. At this point Stellar is described as the fund's system of record.
• April 2023. Polygon becomes the fund's second blockchain, per The Block. Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Aptos, Base and Solana follow later.
• 2024. Franklin enables peer-to-peer transfers of fund shares between eligible holders, and launches a tokenised UCITS money fund in Luxembourg on Stellar (gBENJI).
• 2025–2026. A Singapore retail fund (sgBENJI) and a BVI institutional fund (iBENJI) follow. In September 2026 Bybit agrees to accept Benji shares as off-exchange collateral.

The original Stellar token was not called BENJI. Franklin's own stellar.toml still lists FOCGX, "deprecated and replaced with BENJI", from the same issuing account.

What the fund actually is

FOBXX is a US government money market fund. It invests at least 99.5% of assets in government securities, cash and repurchase agreements collateralised by them, aims for a stable $1.00 share price using amortised-cost valuation, and charges 0.20% a year after a fee waiver (0.22% before), per its August 2025 summary prospectus.

Strip away the blockchain and this is the most conservative kind of fund a US investor can buy. The summary prospectus lists a $20 minimum for most accounts, with higher minimums possible depending on the network. Individuals buy through the Benji mobile app; institutions through a web portal. Purchases and redemptions happen during normal business hours on business days.

Yield behaves differently from a conventional fund. The SDF's five-year release says BENJI distributes dividends onchain daily, 365 days a year including weekends and holidays, and that yield accrues intraday "by the second" when shares are transferred. As of 16 September 2026 the fund's seven-day current yield was 3.57%, per crypto.news.

FOBXX at a glance
Legal form	US-registered money market fund (Franklin Templeton Trust)
Holdings	≥99.5% government securities, cash, government-collateralised repo
Share price target	$1.00 (amortised cost)
Expenses	0.20% after waiver; 0.22% gross
Minimum	$20 for most accounts
Custodian (per rwa.xyz)	J.P. Morgan
7-day current yield	3.57% (16 Sep 2026)

How shares are recorded on Stellar

The fund's transfer agent keeps the official record of share ownership through what the prospectus calls a "proprietary blockchain-integrated system", combining traditional book entry with public blockchains. One BENJI token equals one fund share, and the issuer controls who can hold it through Stellar's native authorisation and clawback flags.

The important word is "official". In most tokenised funds the token mirrors a register kept somewhere else. Franklin's design makes the blockchain part of the register itself, while the transfer agent keeps control of all fund and shareholder records. That control is visible on the ledger. Franklin's BENJI issuing account on Stellar, GBHNGLLIE3KWGKCHIKMHJ5HVZHYIK7WTBE4QF5PLAKL4CJGSEU7HZIW5, which its stellar.toml identifies, has these flags set (read from Horizon on 2 October 2026):

• AUTH_REQUIRED — a trustline to BENJI is inert until Franklin authorises it, which is how only onboarded investors can hold shares.
• AUTH_REVOCABLE — Franklin can freeze a holding.
• AUTH_CLAWBACK_ENABLED — Franklin can recover shares, for example after a court order or an error.

The issuing account is also a multisig: 15 signers with a high threshold of 6. These are exactly the issuer controls that our Stellar RWA explainer describes as native ledger features, and BENJI is the textbook case. It also means BENJI cannot be dropped into a permissionless DeFi pool: every holder has to be approved by Franklin first.

Franklin is not only an issuer on Stellar. Its stellar.toml lists three Stellar validators it operates (ft-scv-1 to ft-scv-3), so it also takes part in running the network.

How big it is, and where it lives

Franklin reported FOBXX net assets of $686.64M as of 31 August 2026. rwa.xyz showed $738.1M on 2 October 2026, with 1,128 holders. Horizon showed about 500.5M BENJI on Stellar the same day, so roughly two-thirds of the fund sits on Stellar despite the multichain expansion.

Measure	Value	Source, date
FOBXX net assets	$686.64M	Franklin via crypto.news, 31 Aug 2026
BENJI total value	$738.1M	rwa.xyz, 2 Oct 2026
BENJI on Stellar	~500.5M tokens, 1,375 accounts	Horizon, 2 Oct 2026
All Benji tokens on Stellar	$582.8M (3 assets)	rwa.xyz Stellar page, 2 Oct 2026
Benji suite AUM, all funds	$1.98B	SDF release, 29 Apr 2026

The Stellar numbers reconcile. Adding the balances Horizon shows under Franklin's four Stellar issuers — about 500.5M BENJI, 56.8M gBENJI, 1.2M grBENJI and 24.4M sgBENJI — gives about $583M, matching rwa.xyz's $582.8M for Benji tokens on Stellar. The account-count difference with rwa.xyz (1,375 Stellar accounts against 1,128 fund holders) is likely because Horizon counts authorised trustlines, not people; we have not verified the reason.

Other chains and other Benji funds

rwa.xyz lists BENJI on Polygon, Ethereum, Stellar, Arbitrum, Aptos, Avalanche, Solana and Base. Franklin has also built separate funds on the same platform: gBENJI (a Luxembourg UCITS money fund, Stellar only), sgBENJI (a Singapore fund on Stellar and XRP Ledger) and iBENJI (a BVI institutional fund on Ethereum and BNB Chain).

Token	Fund	Value (rwa.xyz, 2 Oct 2026)	Networks
BENJI	Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (US)	$738.1M	8, incl. Stellar
iBENJI	Franklin OnChain Institutional Liquidity Fund (BVI)	$1.71B	Ethereum, BNB Chain
sgBENJI	Franklin OnChain U.S. Dollar Short-Term MMF (Singapore)	$72.7M	XRP Ledger, Stellar
gBENJI	Franklin OnChain Money Fund (Luxembourg UCITS)	$58.0M	Stellar

The largest Benji product by value, iBENJI, is not on Stellar. The institutional growth has gone where the institutional counterparties are, mainly Ethereum and BNB Chain. That is a fair counterweight to the "Stellar is the home of tokenised funds" narrative: Stellar holds the original fund and the smaller regulated variants, not the biggest pool of money.

Who uses it

The SDF's five-year release gives some usage figures. Franklin's investor count grew 140% between April 2024 and March 2026, and cumulative peer-to-peer transfer volume of BENJI passed $211M by 31 March 2026. Franklin is also using the token itself as money: the same release says its pending acquisition of 250 Digital will use BENJI tokens as payment consideration. Institutional uses are growing too. Binance (from February 2026) and Bybit (from September 2026) accept Benji fund shares as off-exchange collateral, so a trading firm can keep earning the fund yield on assets it has pledged for margin.

These are modest numbers next to the fund's size. $211M of cumulative peer-to-peer transfers over roughly two years is small relative to a $700M fund, which suggests most holders buy and hold through the app rather than move shares between wallets.

What it means for Stellar

BENJI gives Stellar its strongest institutional credential: the first US-registered fund on a public chain, still mostly held there after expanding elsewhere. It is direct evidence that Stellar's native compliance controls work for a regulated issuer. It does not, by itself, bring liquidity to Stellar DeFi, because holders must be approved.

• Proof of the issuer model. A large regulated manager has run its share register partly on Stellar for five years, using native trustlines, authorisation and clawback rather than custom contract code.
• Network weight. Benji tokens are about $583M of Stellar's $3.44B in distributed RWAs on rwa.xyz.
• Price data. RedStone's Stellar launch, reported by Cointelegraph after February's YieldBlox exploit, included a BENJI price feed — the kind of NAV-based input a lending market needs before it could ever accept a fund share as collateral. See RWAs as DeFi collateral.
• Limited DeFi spill-over. Because every holder must be authorised, BENJI does not circulate through Stellar's AMMs or lending pools the way stablecoins on Stellar do. The permissionless side of the network, mapped in our Stellar DeFi guide, runs largely on stablecoins, XLM and AQUA instead.

The takeaway

BENJI is the clearest example of a conventional, regulated fund using a public chain for its register, and Stellar was its first home. The numbers are steady rather than spectacular: about $500M of a $700M-plus fund still on Stellar. It shows what Stellar is good at — controlled issuance for regulated assets — more than it shows a path for that money into DeFi. For how BENJI compares with BUIDL and Ondo, read tokenised money market funds compared.

Sources: Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund summary prospectus (SEC filing 497K, 1 August 2025); Franklin Templeton stellar.toml (franklintempleton.com/.well-known/stellar.toml); Stellar Horizon API (asset and account records, read 2 October 2026); Stellar Development Foundation press releases (24 April 2023 and the five-year BENJI release); crypto.news, "Franklin Templeton brings $687M tokenized fund to Bybit" (28 September 2026); rwa.xyz asset and Stellar network data (2 October 2026); The Block on the Polygon expansion; Cointelegraph via TradingView on RedStone's Stellar feeds.