Payward and Franklin Templeton Announce Strategic Collaboration to Advance Tokenized Assets and Institutional Digital Finance

Payward, the parent company of global crypto platform Kraken and developer of the xStocks tokenized equities framework, and Franklin Templeton, a global investment manager and leader in digital asset innovation, announced a strategic collaboration to bring traditional financial products onchain and expand their utility across digital asset markets.

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The program pairs Franklin Templeton’s global asset management and tokenization expertise with Payward’s crypto-native trading, custody and onchain infrastructure. Spanning tokenized equities, qualified custody, actively-managed yield products and direct access to institutional crypto liquidity via Kraken’s OTC and Prime services, it is one of the clearest demonstrations yet of how traditional finance and digital asset markets are converging in practice.

Central to the collaboration is tokenization. Payward’s xStocks framework – which has processed over $30 billion in volume since launch in 2025 – will explore the launch of new actively managed investments onchain with Franklin Templeton, making strategies from one of the world’s largest asset managers tradeable onchain. Payward and Franklin Templeton will work on the launch of tokenized yield-focused products, available to institutional clients and, where permitted, Kraken’s broader user base. These products will be designed to offer professionally managed strategies with transparency, flexibility, and programmability.

“Payward and Franklin Templeton are building toward a model of finance where the distinction between traditional assets and digital infrastructure no longer holds,” said Arjun Sethi, Co-CEO of Payward and Kraken. “The convergence between these two worlds is only going to deepen, and what collaborations like this one unlock is a new class of products that wouldn’t have been possible even three years ago: assets that carry the credibility of multi-decade managers and the programmability of digital infrastructure.”

Alongside these programs, Kraken will work to integrate BENJI, Franklin Templeton’s suite of global tokenized money market funds, across the platform for a variety of institutional use cases to improve utility and capital efficiency in digital markets.

“The focus should be on making onchain assets more functional for the full range of market participants once they are there,” said Sandy Kaul, Head of Digital Assets & Innovation at Franklin Templeton. “By expanding the utility of BENJI and exploring new tokenized products, our work with Payward reflects the growing need to serve both digital-native and institutional customers with solutions built for how capital increasingly moves onchain.”

Franklin Templeton is a pioneer in digital asset investing and blockchain innovation, combining tokenomics research, data science, and technical expertise to deliver cutting-edge solutions since 2018. Learn more at Franklin Templeton Digital Assets.

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