Franklin Templeton Migrates $1.2B Tokenized Money Market Fund to Avalanche Subnet

Franklin Templeton will migrate its BENJI tokenized money market fund — currently holding $1.2 billion in assets — to a new permissioned Avalanche subnet beginning May 1, the firm said on Wednesday. The subnet, dubbed Evergreen-T, was co-developed with Ava Labs over the preceding eighteen months and will run a custom validator set composed of Franklin, two registered transfer agents, and a rotating slot reserved for independent auditors.

What the migration actually changes

BENJI has lived on Stellar since 2021 and picked up Polygon and Base deployments in 2023 and 2024. The Avalanche subnet does not replace those networks; it becomes the primary issuance and settlement venue, with the existing chains acting as distribution endpoints via a new messaging bridge operated by Axelar.

• Intraday NAV strikes will move from four per day to continuous
• Subscription and redemption windows will extend to 22 hours, up from 7
• Transfer-agent reconciliation moves from end-of-day batch to per-block

Roger Bayston, head of Franklin Templeton Digital Assets, framed the decision in characteristically understated terms during a call with reporters.

"We have been running a real fund on public infrastructure for five years. Everything we have learned points to the same answer — you want a dedicated lane for the settlement, and you want the distribution to stay where the users are." — R. Bayston, Franklin Templeton

The 38 basis point claim

Franklin's filing estimates the all-in operational savings at 38 basis points per year, roughly $4.6 million at current AUM. The line items, according to an appendix reviewed by Blokly, are split between transfer-agent reconciliation, custody-bank messaging fees, and what the filing calls "exception handling" — the manual work required when on-chain records and off-chain cap tables drift.

Independent analysts are skeptical of the precise figure but not the direction. "You can argue about whether it's 25 basis points or 50, but the arithmetic of removing a batch job from a fund's daily lifecycle is real money at this scale," said Noelle Acheson, author of the Crypto Is Macro Now newsletter. "The question is whether other managers actually follow."

A quiet competition

BlackRock's BUIDL-II approval last week and WisdomTree's pending WTIP filing mean Franklin is, for the first time in this product category, not the first mover. State Street is rumored to be evaluating its own subnet deployment, though sources close to the firm cautioned that the decision is likely months away.

The subnet model itself is emerging as a quiet standard for regulated tokenized funds. Permissioned validators satisfy compliance requirements that a fully public chain cannot easily meet; bridges to public chains satisfy the distribution requirements that a fully private chain would forfeit. Whether the architecture holds up through the next downturn — when the cost calculus of running dedicated infrastructure gets re-examined — is a question none of the issuers have yet had to answer.

BENJI's existing holders will be migrated automatically. No action is required from investors, which is exactly how Franklin wants the story to read.