Franklin Templeton's tokenized money market fund on the Stellar network has crossed $1.1 billion in value after a $200 million net inflow, making the chain the asset manager's second-largest venue for digital asset operations behind BNB Chain and pushing it past Ethereum.
The surge, reported by the RWA Foundation using Token Terminal data, came together with a last-minute $100 million addition to the BENJI fund just before the report was finalized. Analysts at ZeusRWA, a platform that tracks real-world asset liquidity, said the timing caught them off guard.
"Franklin Templeton decided to add another hundred million just as we were about to publish the report," the firm's researchers said.
Real-world assets, or RWAs, are traditional instruments such as money market funds and short-term debt that are issued as tokens on a blockchain. Franklin Templeton has built a business around pairing conventional investment products with distributed-ledger rails, and the Stellar fund has become its largest such deployment outside BNB Chain.
Stellar and the XRP Ledger share a common origin: both were created by blockchain pioneer Jed McCaleb. Their paths have since diverged sharply in institutional adoption. On XRPL, Franklin Templeton's footprint is confined to the sgBENJI fund, which holds about $200 million.
Liquidity on Stellar is concentrated in a handful of platforms. Spiko accounts for roughly half of the roughly $2 billion tokenized fund market on the network, while Ondo, which counts BlackRock among its backers, and Realiz each manage close to $500 million.
Note: Figures reflect tokenized fund assets on the Stellar network as cited in the RWA Foundation report.
The holder base tells a similar story. Stellar has roughly ten times as many unique RWA token holders as XRPL, and its monthly asset distribution volume runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, compared with $22 million on the rival chain.
The gap is widest in stablecoins. Both networks host a comparable number of stablecoin tokens, but the dollars issued on Stellar are put to work: the chain settles $20.48 billion in stablecoin transfers each month, mostly for commercial payments. On XRPL, the equivalent monthly payment volume is $9 million, suggesting those tokens sit idle in balances rather than moving through payment channels.
Stellar's momentum in the second half of 2026 has been fed by integrations with established financial infrastructure. Chainlink's price oracle service is now live on the network, and a joint venture with the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, the central clearing and settlement utility for U.S. securities, is expected to let traditional finance products launch directly on-chain by the first half of 2027.
For Franklin Templeton, the milestone signals that tokenized cash-management products can attract institutional money at scale outside the largest public blockchains. For the broader RWA sector, Stellar's lead over XRPL in holders, distribution and payment activity offers a case study in how network design and integrations shape where issuers choose to deploy. Whether that advantage holds will depend in part on the DTCC venture delivering on its 2027 timetable.
