Bybit and Franklin Templeton Let Institutions Use Tokenized Fund Shares as Trading Collateral

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• Bybit and Franklin Templeton announced a partnership letting institutional clients pledge Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money-market fund shares as collateral on Bybit
• The tokenized shares, issued through Franklin Templeton’s Benji Technology Platform, are held in off-exchange custody via Bybit’s ByCustody platform while their value is mirrored into a client’s Bybit trading account
• The arrangement lets eligible institutions access USDT or USDC trading credit lines while continuing to earn yield on the underlying fund shares

Bybit and Franklin Templeton announced a strategic collaboration in a release distributed on PR Newswire on September 28, 2026, letting institutional clients pledge shares of Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money-market fund as collateral for trading on Bybit. The tokenized shares are issued through Franklin Templeton’s Benji Technology Platform, the asset manager’s blockchain-integrated transfer agency infrastructure.

Under the arrangement, eligible institutional clients hold their Benji-issued fund shares in off-exchange custody through Bybit’s ByCustody platform, while the value of those holdings is mirrored into the client’s trading environment on Bybit. That structure lets clients pledge the shares to access trading credit lines denominated in USDT or USDC, without moving the underlying fund shares onto the exchange itself.

Because the fund shares remain in custody rather than being liquidated or transferred to the exchange, clients can continue earning yield on the underlying money-market fund position while simultaneously using its value as collateral for active trading, a structure designed to let institutions avoid choosing between holding a yield-bearing asset and having capital available to trade.

“As institutional adoption accelerates, investors expect the same flexibility and risk management standards they are accustomed to in traditional markets,” said Yoyee Wang, Bybit’s global head of RWA and traditional finance partnerships. Franklin Templeton, which manages $1.7 trillion in assets, framed the partnership as part of its broader push to expand access to tokenized investment products through venues its institutional clients already use.

Bybit, which says it serves more than 80 million users worldwide, has been expanding its institutional-facing infrastructure over the past year, and this collateral arrangement extends that push specifically toward asset managers offering tokenized real-world assets, a category that has grown rapidly as traditional financial institutions look for ways to bring existing fund products onto blockchain rails without abandoning the custody and compliance standards their clients expect.

Tokenized money-market funds have emerged as one of the more actively adopted categories of real-world asset tokenization, since the underlying instrument is already highly liquid and low-risk, making it a natural candidate for use as trading collateral once it can be represented and transferred on a blockchain while keeping the custody arrangements traditional institutional clients require intact.