Franklin Templeton moved roughly $150 million of its tokenized money-market fund onto the XRP Ledger this week, and XRP barely reacted. The token drifted lower through the announcement window, which highlights a distinction that is easy to miss: a deposit denominated in a stablecoin does not create buying pressure on a network’s native asset.
The fund is the Singapore-domiciled OnChain U.S. Dollar Short-Term Money Market Fund. Its XRP Ledger token, sgBENJI, is paired with Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin on the DBS Digital Exchange, not with XRP. Investors move between a dollar stablecoin and a dollar-denominated fund, so the fresh capital travels through RLUSD rather than through XRP.
Why the deposit did not buy XRP
XRP’s role is limited to network fees. The ledger charges a fraction of a cent per transaction plus a small per-account reserve. Settling two subscriptions of about $75 million each consumes roughly the same amount of XRP as settling two one-dollar transfers. Had the $150 million instead been converted into XRP at the prevailing price, it would have represented well over 100 million tokens, but no such conversion happened.
The on-chain structure reinforces that reading. According to BlockchainReporter’s review of on-chain records, Franklin Templeton issued two subscriptions of 72,184,793 sgBENJI shares each, lifting the XRP Ledger balance from roughly 48 million shares to nearly 193 million, worth about $200 million at the $1.039 share price recorded in the ledger. The entire supply currently sits in one wallet controlled by the same signers as the issuer’s account. That is normal for a tokenized fund at this stage: shares are minted into an issuer wallet and delivered later as investors subscribe, so an on-chain balance does not reveal how many investors have actually received tokens.
What the deposit changes
What the deposit does change is the XRP Ledger’s standing as a venue for institutional funds. It roughly quadruples Franklin Templeton’s footprint on the ledger, and the data platform RWA.xyz now ranks the firm as the second-largest tokenized-asset platform there, behind RLUSD. The arrangement traces to a September 2025 memorandum of understanding among DBS, Franklin Templeton and Ripple, which framed the ledger as a settlement layer for a fund that could be rebalanced around the clock.
The XRP Ledger is one more chain in a widening tokenization race. Bybit already accepts Franklin Templeton tokenized money-market fund shares as off-exchange collateral, and rival managers are expanding the same playbook, including J.P. Morgan’s recent move of its tokenized funds to Solana. What distinguishes this week’s event is the scale placed on a single ledger rather than a new product category.
Two developments would turn the deposit from tokenization progress into actual demand. The first is distribution: shares moving from the issuer’s single wallet into investor-controlled addresses would show the fund reaching buyers. The second is collateral use, since DBS has said it will explore letting clients pledge sgBENJI for credit. For now, Franklin Templeton has not formally announced the allocation, and the single-wallet structure means the capital is staged on-chain rather than confirmed as investor money in circulation. The companies are expected to discuss the partnership further at Ripple Swell in New York from October 27 to 29.
Source: BlockchainReporter.