Franklin Templeton Partners with Kraken Parent Company Payward to Explore Tokenization of Traditional Financial Products
Global asset management giant Franklin Templeton has announced a partnership with Payward, the parent company of Kraken, to jointly explore opportunities for the on-chain tokenization of traditional financial products.
The collaboration covers tokenized stocks, compliant custody, actively managed yield products, and aims to provide institutional-grade crypto liquidity through Kraken OTC and Prime services. The two parties will focus on launching on-chain versions of Franklin Templeton's yield products, potentially making them available to a wider Kraken user base.
Since its launch last year, Kraken's tokenized stock product xStocks has accumulated a trading volume of over $30 billion. Franklin Templeton has issued multiple crypto ETFs and launched the tokenized money market fund BENJI.
Source: Public Information
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Franklin Templeton has previously collaborated with Ondo Finance to develop on-chain financial products and launched the BENJI tokenized money market fund. This partnership with Payward/Kraken continues its path of expanding from traditional asset management to RWA infrastructure, marking another deep integration of traditional finance with crypto following projects like BUIDL.
In terms of capital pathways, Franklin Templeton will channel institutional funds and product issuance capabilities to Kraken's on-chain channels, while Kraken will provide OTC, Prime liquidity, and the xStocks user base. The motivation for both parties is to bridge traditional yield products with the crypto user base, facilitating resource binding between asset issuers and trading platforms, and accelerating the migration of institutional funds to on-chain.
Similar to BlackRock's collaboration with Securitize on BUIDL and Franklin Templeton's own crypto ETF initiatives, the current RWA sector is transitioning from single product pilots to a model of joint issuance between traditional asset management and exchanges. The $30 billion trading volume of Kraken's xStocks provides ready liquidity validation for this partnership.
Essentially, this represents a restructuring of the industry chain: the issuance and distribution of traditional financial products is shifting from centralized custody to a fusion of on-chain tokenization and compliant custody. The mechanism combines Franklin Templeton's product branding with Kraken's crypto-native liquidity, lowering the entry barrier for institutions and enhancing the accessibility of yield products, thereby concentrating pricing power from purely traditional channels to a hybrid on-chain ecosystem.
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Traditional giants are not short of funds, but lack on-chain distribution channels; exchanges are not short of traffic, but lack compliant asset supply. Tokenization is not merely moving assets online, but binding the pricing power of traditional issuers with the execution capability of crypto liquidity. When BlackRock and Franklin both go on-chain, RWA will transition from a fringe experiment to the default infrastructure of mainstream finance.