Franklin Templeton moved $1.5B of its Benji platform onto BNB Chain. That sum equals 61.7% of Benji’s total tracked value. The move directly answers BlackRock’s lead in tokenized Treasuries.
Franklin Templeton, the asset manager overseeing $1.68 trillion, confirmed over the weekend of July 17-19 that more than $1.5 billion of its Benji tokenization platform now sits natively on BNB Chain.
$1.5B of Franklin Templeton (@FTDA_US) Benji Investments now sits on BNB Chain.
This establishes BNB Chain as the leading blockchain ecosystem for tokenized products of one of the world’s largest asset managers. pic.twitter.com/edFVfqqnpR
— BNB Chain (@BNBCHAIN) July 17, 2026
That sum accounts for 61.7% of everything Benji tracks across the nine public blockchains it operates on, and it displaces Stellar, the chain that originally hosted the bulk of Benji’s treasury products, including the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund known by its ticker FOBXX. BlackRock’s BUIDL fund has held a commanding lead in on-chain Treasury products since it launched, and Franklin Templeton’s expansion reads as a direct response to that gap in the on-chain Treasury market.
MetricFigureFranklin Templeton total AUM$1.68 trillionBenji assets now on BNB Chain$1.5 billion+Share of total Benji value on BNB Chain61.7%Networks Benji operates onStellar, Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Aptos, Base, Solana, BNB Chain (9 total)Competing fundBlackRock’s BUIDLStellar handles payments cheaply and quickly, and that made it a sensible launchpad for Benji when the platform first tokenized Treasury products. But settlement speed alone gives an asset manager nowhere to put that capital to work once it lands on-chain, and BlackRock’s BUIDL fund built its lead partly by sitting on infrastructure that plugs directly into existing institutional and DeFi tooling.
BNB Chain runs on the Ethereum Virtual Machine, so the liquidity aggregators, lending protocols and custody systems institutions already rely on elsewhere can integrate with Benji shares without custom bridge work. Swiss-licensed SCRYPT has already folded BNB Chain-based Benji shares into its own treasury management, a use case that only works because that compatibility exists. BNB Chain’s deep stablecoin liquidity and existing institutional tooling gave Franklin Templeton a route to close that gap that a payment-only chain like Stellar never offered.
BlackRock made a similar wager over a year earlier. BUIDL launched its own BNB Chain share class in November 2025, tokenized through Securitize and Wormhole, and gained acceptance as off-exchange collateral for institutional trading on Binance in the same announcement. That collateral integration gave BUIDL holders hat collateral integration gave BUIDL holders a trading use case tied directly to Binance’s exchange infrastructure. Franklin Templeton’s BNB Chain concentration, by contrast, has so far produced its clearest institutional use case through SCRYPT, a Swiss-licensed infrastructure provider. Both funds now compete for the same network and the same institutional audience, but Franklin Templeton has yet to secure a tie to Binance’s trading infrastructure as direct as the one BUIDL already holds.
Spreading Benji across nine public blockchains was meant to reduce dependence on any single chain, yet 61.7% of the fund’s value now sits on one of them. That concentration carries a different risk profile than Stellar ever did. Stellar has built a reputation for decentralization over years of operation, while BNB Chain carries historical ties to a major centralized exchange operator, and that association matters if regulators in a major jurisdiction move aggressively against the network or entities connected to it. A regulatory action targeting BNB Chain specifically would not just affect a diversified slice of Franklin Templeton’s on-chain exposure; it would hit the majority of it directly. A 61.7% concentration on one network undercuts the diversification argument Benji’s nine-chain structure was built on, even though the platform technically remains active on eight other chains.
Independent research on the broader tokenization sector backs this pattern. A July 2026 analysis from Yellow.com found that most RWA issuers deploy first on whichever chain offers the strongest institutional tooling and add secondary networks only when specific partners request them, meaning multi-chain distribution across the sector functions more as a marketing narrative than an operational reality. Franklin Templeton’s Benji concentration on BNB Chain fits that broader pattern rather than standing apart from it.
Franklin Templeton is not the only manager running tokenized products that will eventually face this same tradeoff between operational advantage and concentration risk. Any fund building on a single high-liquidity chain to compete with BlackRock’s BUIDL will hit the same ceiling once its balance sheet grows large enough that regulators start treating the underlying network as systemically relevant to that asset class.
This strategy has not yet been tested by a regulatory response to a network-specific failure at real scale. That test arrives once a nine or ten-figure tokenized Treasury position sits on a single alternative network and something goes wrong with that network specifically, whether through a security exploit or an enforcement action targeting the underlying infrastructure. Cross-border settlement initiatives such as Project Agoráand mBridge are already working to strip out third-party bridge risk between jurisdictions, and those frameworks will need to those frameworks will need to treat single-network dependency as a distinct risk category, separate from the multi-chain deployment they were designed to encourage.
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