Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson told the TOKEN2049 Singapore conference on October 7-8 that many rival tokenized funds are simply digital copies of traditional products that fail to capture what blockchain technology actually offers.

Speaking from the main stage, Johnson drew a sharp distinction between Franklin Templeton's tokenized offerings and what she characterized as "digital twin" funds elsewhere in the market — products that wrap existing systems in a token rather than building natively on-chain.

What separates BENJI from 'digital twin' funds?

Franklin Templeton's flagship tokenized product, BENJI, takes the opposite approach. The fund's records are natively based on public blockchains, making the chain the source of truth rather than a reflection of one.

Johnson pointed to two practical consequences of that architecture.

• Real-time yield calculation. BENJI supports per-second yield accrual, something a fund that merely mirrors traditional records on-chain cannot deliver.
• Cost. Johnson cited a transaction cost of $1.13 for BENJI, compared with approximately $150 per transaction under traditional methods.

The cost comparison is the most concrete part of her argument. A figure of $1.13 against roughly $150 is easy to understand, and it gives procurement teams a hard number to put in a spreadsheet.

How did BENJI reach this scale?

BENJI is not a new experiment. Franklin Templeton launched the product in 2021 as the first US-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain for its ownership records.

Since launch, the fund has expanded across multiple chains and taken on an institutional role. Partnerships now allow BENJI shares to serve as off-exchange collateral on crypto trading platforms including Bybit and Binance — a use case that directly links tokenized fund shares to derivatives and spot market plumbing.

The total value of Franklin Templeton's tokenized money funds, including BENJI, has reached an estimated $2.5 billion. BENJI's own figures have ranged from the hundreds of millions to over $800 million during 2026.

That scale is meaningful for the young tokenization market, but it remains a small slice of a firm managing approximately $1.8 trillion in assets.

Is Franklin Templeton eating its own cooking?

The firm has also used BENJI in its own corporate dealings. In April 2026, Franklin Templeton acquired 250 Digital, a crypto investment team, from CoinFund — and paid part of the purchase price in BENJI tokens.

Using its own tokenized fund shares as acquisition currency signals operational confidence in the product, and it demonstrates a settlement path that sidesteps traditional cash transfer mechanics entirely.

What does this mean for the tokenization race?

Johnson's critique effectively splits the tokenized fund field into two camps: products built natively on public chains, where the ledger itself is the record of ownership, and products that tokenize an existing position held in legacy systems.

For asset managers weighing tokenization strategies, the distinction is more than semantic. Native architecture determines what features are technically possible — per-second yield accrual, automated collateral mobility, low-cost transfers — while wrapped products inherit the operational constraints of the systems beneath them.

With $2.5 billion already committed to natively tokenized money funds and institutional collateral integrations live on major exchanges, the competition is likely to shift from whether to tokenize toward which architecture can support collateral and settlement use cases at scale.