Franklin Templeton and BlackRock RWA race raises new risks

Franklin Templeton migrates $1.5 billion Benji platform to BNB Chain

Franklin Templeton, which manages $1.68 trillion in assets, confirmed over the weekend of July 17 - 19 that more than $1.5 billion of its Benji tokenized platform is now natively running on BNB Chain.

This amount represents 61.7% of the total value tracked by Benji on the nine public chains it operates and replaces the Stellar chain, which originally hosted most of Benji's Treasury products, including Franklin OnChain U.S. government money funds with the code FOBXX. Since its launch, BlackRock's BUIDL fund has dominated the on-chain Treasury product space, and Franklin Templeton's expansion directly responds to this gap in the on-chain Treasury market.

Key data

Franklin Templeton total assets under management: $1.68 trillion;Benji assets are now located in BNB Chain: more than $1.5 billion; proportion: 61.7%;Benji operated networks: Stellar, Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Aptos, Base, Solana, BNB Chain (9 total); competitor funds: BlackRock BUIDL.

Why Franklin Templeton needs to surpass Stellar to catch up with BlackRock

The Stellar chain is cheap and fast to trade, so when Benji first tokenized treasury bonds, it became a reasonable starting point. However, based on the settlement speed alone, asset management companies cannot really operate after putting funds into the chain. BlackRock's BUIDL fund leads in part because it is built on infrastructure that provides direct access to existing institutions and DeFi tools.

BNB Chain runs on top of the Ethereum virtual machine, so liquidity aggregators, lending protocols, and hosting systems that organizations rely on elsewhere can be integrated with Benji shares without the need for custom bridges. SCRYPT, which has received a Swiss license, has incorporated Benji shares based on BNB Chain into its own treasury management, a use case that is feasible precisely because of this compatibility. BNB Chain's deep stablecoin liquidity and existing institutional tools provide Franklin Templeton with a way to close the gap, a possibility that a payment-only chain like Stellar has never provided.

BlackRock has performed similar operations on BNB Chain

BlackRock made a similar bet more than a year ago. BUIDL launched its share category on BNB Chain in November 2025, tokenized through Securitize and Wormhole, and was approved as over-the-counter collateral for transactions by binance institutions in the same announcement. This collateral integration provides BUIDL holders with a use case for directly linked currency security trading infrastructure. In contrast, Franklin Templeton's centralized layout on BNB Chain currently produces the clearest institutional use cases only through Swiss licensed infrastructure provider SCRYPT. The two funds now compete for the same network and the same institutional audience, but Franklin Templeton has not yet gained direct access to Binance trading infrastructure like BUIDL.

Centralization issues embedded in multi-chain strategies

Distributing Benji among nine public chains is intended to reduce reliance on a single chain. However, now 61.7% of the fund's value is concentrated in one chain. The risk characteristics of this centralization are completely different from those of Stellar. Stellar has built a decentralized reputation over years of operation, while BNB Chain has a historical association with a large centralized exchange operator. Such connections can be problematic if regulators in a major jurisdiction take tough action against the network or related entities. Regulatory actions against BNB Chain will not only affect the scattered parts of Franklin Templeton's chain, but will also directly impact most of its assets. 61.7% of the funds are concentrated on one network, weakening the decentralized logic on which Benji's nine-chain structure relies, although the platform remains technically active on the other eight chains.

Independent research on the broader field of tokenization also confirms this pattern. A July 2026 analysis by Yellow.com found that most real-world asset issuers first choose the chain with the most complete institutional tools for deployment, and only add secondary networks when requested by specific partners. This means that cross-chain distribution across the industry is more like a marketing narrative than an operational reality. Franklin Templeton's Benji's centralization on BNB Chain is in line with this overall model, rather than being a maverick.

Analyst and Industry Views

BNB Chain's core team said over the weekend that the migration established its network as a leading venue for tokenized institutional products. Industry commentators have described Stellar as a chain that proves tokenization is feasible, and believe Benji's transfer is a choice between liquidity first and original infrastructure loyalty. Institutional analysts, including CoinLedger, are generally optimistic about this trend, believing that tokenized funds are entering an active use phase rather than idle phase, which will prompt other asset managers to follow suit.

What should other asset managers look at when weighing chain centralization

Franklin Templeton is not the only company operating tokenized products and will ultimately face a trade-off between operational advantages and centralization risks. Any fund built on a single highly liquid chain to compete with BlackRock's BUIDL will face the same ceiling once its balance sheet is so large that regulators begin to view the underlying network as a systemically relevant factor in the asset class. This strategy has not yet been tested by a real-scale regulatory response to specific network failures. When a nine-figure or ten-figure tokenized treasury bond position is placed on a single alternative network, and the network itself goes wrong-whether it's a security breach or enforcement action against the underlying infrastructure-that's the real test. Cross-border settlement initiatives such as Project Agorá and mBridge are already working to eliminate third-party bridging risks between jurisdictions, and these frameworks will need to treat single network dependencies as a separate risk category in the future, distinguished from the multi-chain deployments they were originally designed to encourage.