Goldman and Franklin push Treasury funds into crypto trading; Franklin's Benji assets are down two-thirds since April

Two of Wall Street's biggest money managers extended their Treasury funds into crypto trading on Monday. Goldman Sachs's roughly $100 billion Treasury fund, FTIXX, is now offered on Lynq, a settlement network used by crypto trading firms, CoinDesk reported. Separately, Bybit will let eligible institutions pledge shares of Franklin Templeton's tokenized money market funds as collateral for stablecoin credit, according to CoinDesk and Cointelegraph.

Two different routes to the same goal

Both deals solve one problem for trading firms: cash sitting idle between trades earns nothing. They go about it differently.

• Goldman is not tokenizing anything. FTIXX stays a traditional fund. Lynq, which runs on a private, permissioned Avalanche blockchain, becomes a new place to buy it, with trades handled by broker-dealer tZERO Securities. Access is limited to U.S. clients who pass tZERO's onboarding. Lynq names B2C2, Wintermute, Galaxy, FalconX, Crypto.com and Fireblocks among the firms it works with.
• Franklin's shares are tokenized through its Benji platform. On Bybit, the fund shares stay with an outside custodian, ByCustody, and their value is mirrored on the exchange so a client can borrow USDT or USDC against them while still earning the fund's yield. Franklin already offers similar arrangements on Binance and OKX.

The numbers behind the headline sizes

"$100 billion fund" and "tokenized collateral" make these sound bigger than the money actually involved today:

The Benji figure is the one the announcements leave out. Franklin keeps adding venues, but the assets on its tokenized platform have fallen by roughly two-thirds since April, according to RWA.xyz data cited by Cointelegraph. The collateral deals are a bet that making these shares more useful will bring the money back. They are not evidence that it already has. For reference, BlackRock's BUIDL, the largest tokenized money market fund, is about $2.2 billion.

The yield gap

CoinDesk reported Benji's current seven-day yield at 3.7%. Treasury's own data put the one-month bill at 4.04% and the three-month bill at 4.28% on Monday. That is a gap of about a third to more than half a percentage point below plain bills (our calculation, and money fund yields lag moves in bill rates). Lynq's chief executive said clients wanted a Treasury product with "a different yield profile" from the one other asset already on the network, which is why FTIXX was added.

What it means for crypto traders

For a trading desk, the appeal is that collateral no longer has to sit in cash or stablecoins that earn nothing. Pledging a money fund share on Bybit, or parking cash in FTIXX via Lynq, lets a desk earn close to a bill rate while staying ready to trade. It also creates a new link between crypto venues and short-term Treasury markets: the more trading margin sits in Treasury funds, the more crypto leverage depends on those funds redeeming smoothly in a stress. For now, at under $1 billion across both programs, that link is small.

None of this changes anything for retail users yet. Both programs are for eligible institutions, and Franklin and Bybit said a product for wallet users is planned but gave no details.

Sources: CoinDesk on Goldman and Lynq; CoinDesk on Franklin Templeton and Bybit; Cointelegraph; U.S. Treasury yield data. Ratios and yield gaps are our calculations. This is market information, not investment advice.