Payward partners with Franklin Templeton to develop onchain investment products

Payward, the parent company of crypto exchange Kraken, is joining forces with Franklin Templeton to build out a suite of onchain investment products that bridges the gap between traditional asset management and digital finance. The partnership, announced on May 12, 2026, pairs one of the largest asset managers on the planet with one of the longest-running crypto exchanges.

Franklin Templeton manages $1.74 trillion in assets. Kraken’s parent has quietly built a tokenized equities platform that has already processed over $30 billion in volume.

What the deal actually involves

The partnership has three distinct prongs, each targeting a different slice of the tokenized finance opportunity.

First, Franklin Templeton’s BENJI suite of tokenized money market funds will be integrated directly into Kraken’s platform. These products are designed to serve as both collateral and yield-generating instruments within digital markets. Institutional traders can park capital in tokenized money market funds without ever leaving the Kraken ecosystem.

Second, the two firms plan to co-design new tokenized yield products aimed at institutional clients. Franklin Templeton brings decades of experience structuring yield products. Payward brings the rails to distribute them onchain.

Third, Franklin Templeton will introduce actively managed strategies on Payward’s xStocks framework. That’s the tokenized equities platform Kraken’s parent launched in 2025, and it has already crossed the $30 billion volume threshold.

The target audience spans institutional clients and select retail users in jurisdictions where regulations permit.

Why this matters now

Franklin Templeton established its dedicated Franklin Crypto unit in April 2026, just a month before this partnership was announced.

The BENJI suite takes existing, well-understood instruments like money market funds and wraps them in blockchain infrastructure. This lowers the trust barrier for institutional allocators who are comfortable with the underlying product but wary of crypto plumbing.

What this means for investors

For institutional players, the ability to use tokenized money market funds as collateral means capital can earn yield while simultaneously serving as margin, which improves capital efficiency in ways that traditional brokerage accounts struggle to match.

The partnership explicitly limits retail access to jurisdictions “where permitted,” which means the addressable market could be significantly smaller than the headline suggests depending on how regulators in key markets like the US and EU respond.

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