Franklin Templeton CEO says rival tokenized funds miss the point of blockchain

Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson took a swing at the competition at TOKEN2049 Singapore. Her argument: many rival tokenized funds are digital copies of traditional products that don’t capture what blockchain actually offers. Native versus copy The conference ran October 7-8, 2026. Johnson used it to draw a line between Franklin Templeton’s tokenized offerings and what she characterized as “digital twin” funds elsewhere in the market. Franklin Templeton’s pitch is that its BENJI product works the other way around. The fund’s records are natively based on public blockchains, so the chain is the source of truth rather than a reflection of one. Johnson pointed to two practical benefits of that design. The first is real-time yield calculation, with BENJI supporting per-second yield accrual. The second benefit is cost. Johnson highlighted a transaction cost of $1.13 for BENJI, compared with approximately $150 per transaction under traditional methods. How BENJI got here BENJI is not a new experiment. Franklin Templeton launched it in 2021 as the first US-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain for its ownership records. Since then, the product has expanded across multiple c...