Coinbase’s L2 Base welcomes Franklin Templeton’s tokenized fund

Coinbase’s Ethereum scaling solution has acquired $1.5 trillion Wall Street firm Franklin Templeton, its first major asset manager.

Franklin Templeton announced that users will be able to buy and sell shares of the OnChain U.S. Government Money Market Fund (FOBXX) on the layer-2 network Base.

FOBXX, which has $410 million in assets, has already launched on five other blockchains, including Arbitrum, Polygon, Avalanche, Aptos and Stellar, making Base the sixth blockchain to support Franklin Templeton’s tokenized Treasury fund.

The announcement represents another transition between traditional and decentralized financial markets. Fellow asset manager BlackRock recently launched its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, also known as BUIDL, on the Ethereum (ETH) mainnet, partnering with ETH native protocols like Ethena Labs.

The new chain is unlocked. Benji, our proprietary blockchain-integrated recordkeeping system, is now live @basis! With this announcement, Franklin Templeton becomes the first asset manager to develop Base.

Base is a layer 2 blockchain built on Ethereum designed to provide low-cost,… pic.twitter.com/tC7lLvxTOT

— Franklin Templeton Digital Assets (@FTDA_US) 31 October 2024

While BlackRock launched its layer 1 network and maintains the largest on-chain money market, Franklin Templeton focused on layer 2 networks for its FOBXX fund.

L2 runs layer 1 blockchains but provides cheaper and faster transactions. Therefore, they offer optimized environments for on-chain currency markets and tokenized treasuries. Franklin Templeton’s FOBXX was the first money market fund to use decentralized technology for trading, and the firm chose L2 Arbitrum as its first home.

Launching on Coinbase’s tier-2 could further boost Base’s growth. According to DeFiLlama, the network has attracted more than $2.6 billion in user deposits since it went live in 2022 and was the fifth largest decentralized finance blockchain at the time of writing.

Launched by the largest US-based crypto exchange, Base also ranks as Ethereum’s top scaling solution based on active addresses, total value locked, and 24-hour volume.