Payward, the parent company of cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, and Franklin Templeton, one of the world's largest asset managers with approximately $1.7 trillion under management, announced a strategic partnership on Tuesday to develop tokenised financial products for institutional investors.
The collaboration spans tokenised equities, custody services, actively managed yield products and direct access to institutional crypto liquidity through Kraken's over-the-counter and prime brokerage desks. Kraken will integrate Franklin Templeton's BENJI tokenised money market funds into its platform, where they can serve as collateral and cash management tools for institutional trading clients.
The significance is not in any single product but in who is building together and what it implies about the direction of financial infrastructure. Franklin Templeton is not a crypto-native startup experimenting with blockchain. It is a 79-year-old asset manager that oversees retirement savings, pension funds and institutional mandates across the world. Its decision to co-develop actively managed investment products that live on blockchain networks, tradeable around the clock and programmable through smart contracts, represents a level of institutional commitment to tokenisation that moves the concept firmly beyond proof of concept.
Payward brings the infrastructure. Kraken's xStocks platform, which offers tokenised one-to-one representations of US stocks and ETFs, has processed more than $30 billion in trading volume since launching in 2025. The company has also partnered with Nasdaq to develop tokenised equity structures that support automated corporate actions, proxy voting and dividend distribution, the plumbing that would need to exist for tokenised securities to function as genuine replacements for traditional settlement systems rather than synthetic wrappers.
The partnership fits within a broader acceleration. Franklin Templeton partnered with Ondo Finance in March to tokenise five of its exchange-traded funds for on-chain distribution. It launched a dedicated crypto division through the acquisition of 250 Digital, settling part of that transaction in BENJI tokens. Apollo Global Management has partnered with Morpho to support blockchain-based lending. BlackRock's tokenised Treasury fund, BUIDL, crossed $2.5 billion in assets earlier this year.
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The common thread is that the world's largest asset managers are no longer asking whether tokenisation works. They are asking how quickly they can move products on to blockchain rails before a competitor does it first.
For Kraken, the partnership strengthens its positioning ahead of a planned initial public offering. Payward has confidentially filed for a listing and is seeking fresh funding at a $20 billion valuation. A collaboration with Franklin Templeton on institutional-grade products signals to public market investors that Kraken is evolving from a crypto exchange into a broader financial infrastructure company.
The recap
- Collaboration to advance tokenized investments and institutional digital finance.
- Integration of BENJI global tokenized money market funds.
- Co-design of a new suite of tokenized yield products.
