HashKey Exchange began distributing Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money market fund, the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Liquidity Fund (grBENJI), to digital asset investors in Asia on August 24, 2026, per HashKey’s release.
The Big Picture
- grBENJI invests primarily in U.S. government money market instruments and U.S. dollar cash assets, delivered through blockchain-enabled infrastructure, HashKey’s release states.
- The fund is available to professional investors only and is not offered to the public in Hong Kong, the release adds.
- HashKey holds Type 1 and Type 7 licenses from Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission under the Securities and Futures Ordinance, according to HashKey’s release.
- The tokenized-Treasury field it joins already includes BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, which carries a Moody’s Aaa-mf rating and held $2.61 billion, per RWA.xyz fund data.
Distribution, not the fund itself, is what changed here. HashKey Exchange, a licensed platform under HashKey Holdings Limited (3887.HK), added grBENJI to its Earn channel on August 24, 2026.
HashKey lists grBENJI on a licensed Hong Kong exchange
HashKey announced a collaboration with Franklin Templeton on August 24, 2026 to distribute the asset manager’s flagship tokenized money market fund to digital asset investors in Asia. grBENJI gives eligible investors exposure to U.S. government money market instruments through blockchain-enabled infrastructure rather than a traditional brokerage account.
What changed here is the channel, a licensed Hong Kong venue rather than a U.S. brokerage rail.
Those SFC licenses are what let grBENJI list on a regulated Earn channel at all. That licensing layer sits apart from the broader decentralized finance market, where lending and yield protocols compete on a permissionless model with no equivalent regime.
⚡️ LATEST: HashKey Exchange and Franklin Templeton are launching the tokenized Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Liquidity Fund in Asia via HashKey's Earn channel. pic.twitter.com/j4vUvyHSmQ
— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) August 25, 2026
SFC’s professional-investor line, not a vague regulatory gap
grBENJI is for professional investors only and is not offered to the public in Hong Kong, HashKey’s release states. That restriction traces to a specific statutory bar under the Securities and Futures Ordinance’s Professional Investor Rules.
An individual qualifies as a professional investor with a portfolio of at least HK$8 million, and a corporation qualifies with a portfolio of at least HK$8 million or total assets of at least HK$40 million. That threshold, not a gap in HashKey’s retail crypto license, is what keeps grBENJI off the exchange’s ordinary retail order books even though HashKey already runs retail crypto trading in Hong Kong.
Franklin Templeton framed the deal as reach, not product design. Its SVP of Digital Assets Client Engagement, Chetan Karkhanis, said:
Distribution, not issuance, is the contested layer
Karkhanis added that Franklin Templeton looks forward to deepening the partnership by expanding beyond tokenized money market funds into other tokenized products over time, leveraging HashKey’s multijurisdictional platform spanning Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Dubai and Bermuda, a stated ambition for future products, not a claim that today’s Earn-channel listing already runs across all five.
Franklin Templeton is not entering an open field. Asia’s crypto adoption patterns vary sharply by jurisdiction, which is why reach into HashKey’s professional client base, not size alone, is the asset Franklin Templeton is buying here. A partner with an Earn channel already built is a faster route into Hong Kong than a home-grown licensed exchange presence.
CoinLaw’s Takeaway
This launch reads as a distribution story wearing a product-launch headline. grBENJI itself is not new technology; it is finding a new regulated doorway into Asia. What changed is the channel: a licensed exchange with an SFC license and a statutory professional investor gate, not a wallet app or an unlicensed protocol.
The real ceiling is Hong Kong’s individual professional investor threshold of at least HK$8 million, not HashKey’s crypto license. The next test is whether Franklin Templeton’s other tokenized products reach HashKey’s other jurisdictions, or whether that line holds as the limit on how far tokenized Treasury products travel toward retail wallets in the region.
