The first joint offering by Franklin Templeton and Binance has gone live, following the two companies’ strategic partnership announced last September. The new off-exchange collateral program allows eligible institutional clients to use tokenized money market fund shares issued through Franklin Templeton’s Benji platform as collateral for trading on Binance.
Finally, Institutional-Grade Collateral That Actually Stays Put
The core innovation of this off-exchange collateral program is what it prevents, not just what it enables. Traditionally, institutional traders faced an uncomfortable choice: keep their yield-bearing assets safely in custody but isolated from trading, or move them onto an exchange to free up margin, accepting significant counterparty risk. This new structure eliminates that trade-off entirely.
Using Ceffu’s custody infrastructure, the tokenized Franklin Templeton shares remain securely held off-exchange. Only a mirrored representation of their value lives within Binance’s trading engine, securing positions while the underlying assets continue generating yield in a regulated environment.
The Template for the Era of Convergence
This isn’t just the launch of a new product; it’s a test of how traditional trillion-dollar asset managers can engage with a centralized crypto exchange natively. Here is shown how an off-exchange collateral program allows real-world assets (i.e., regulated/yield-producing fund shares) to work as credible and efficient forms of collateral in digital markets that never close.
This program provides a way for Binance to meet the demands of institutional investors with a risk framework that does resemble traditional financial institutions. On the other hand, for Franklin Templeton, it proves the Benji platform can pipe traditional products into entirely new use cases without compromising custody or compliance.
