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

Coinbase’s Ethereum scaling solution has onboarded its first large wealth manager, Franklin Templeton, the $1.5 trillion Wall Street firm.

Franklin Templeton announced that users can trade shares of its OnChain U.S. Government Money Market Fund, FOBXX, on the layer-2 network Base.

FOBXX, with $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 crossover between traditional and decentralized finance markets. Fellow asset manager BlackRock recently launched its USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund, also known as BUIDL, on Ethereum’s (ETH) mainnet partnered with ETH-native protocols like Ethena Labs.

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

L2’s run off layer-1 blockchains but provide cheaper and quicker transactions. As such, they offer optimized environments for on-chain money markets and tokenized treasuries. Franklin Templeton’s FOBXX was the first money market fund to employ decentralized technology for trading, and the firm picked L2 Arbitrum as its first home.

Launching on Coinbase’s layer-2 may further boost Base’s growth. Since going live in 2022, the network has attracted over $2.6 billion in user deposits and was the fifth-largest decentralized finance blockchain at the time of writing, according to DeFiLlama.

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