Franklin Templeton’s digital asset journey began in 2019. Their study focused on how blockchain could improve operational efficiencies and reduce costs through distributed ledger technology. This strategic move places the firm at the leading edge of a financial transformation powered by blockchain, tokenization, and decentralized protocols.
Whether used for transit planning or basic infrastructure decisions, blockchain technology encourages open participation, decentralized ownership, community-led governance, and platformism. Our partner Franklin Templeton has fully embraced this paradigm shift. They created the patented Gemio wallet solution, the Benji infrastructure stack, and a blockchain-based transfer agent. These tools allow companies to create tokenized securities and maintain a record of fund ownership through the public blockchain.
The firm's exploration into digital assets began with testing distributed ledgers for managing investor records and company transactions for mutual funds. This effort resulted in a greater appreciation of the ways blockchain could help simplify operations and create new possibilities. In 2019, Franklin Templeton filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a tokenized version of a U.S. government money market fund, signaling its commitment to innovation in the digital asset space.
Blockchain’s open architecture, which makes it possible for various applications to interoperate, encourages consumer choice, enables innovative consumer engagement, and creates powerful network effects. This webbed relationship — along with the development of tokenization — is deeply changing finance and investment across the globe. The programmability of financial assets creates new and important questions around the role of “code as law.”
Blockchain and its numerous protocols represent an enormous evolutionary step in the current era dubbed the “Computer Age.” They further extrapolate on the fantastic underpinnings of computing, networks, cryptography, and communications. Bitcoin and blockchain technology provides an opportunity for a more open-source, decentralized economy directed from bottom-up by peer-to-peer transactions and interactions, without requiring intermediaries.
Franklin Templeton’s digital asset infrastructure, which is natively developed and operated within the blockchain ecosystem, illustrates a forward-thinking approach to the innovation. Combined tokenization and on-chain capital markets are set to revolutionize the way the world’s economy functions, opening up untapped channels of opportunity.
