Franklin Templeton's five ETFs went blockchain-based through Ondo Global Markets, with a total value locked in at $620 million, in the same week that the NYSE and Nasdaq announced similar moves.
Franklin Templeton and Ondo Finance have just announced a partnership to tokenize five ETFs from the global asset management company, enabling continuous trading 24 hours a day, seven days a week, independent of traditional exchange opening hours.
The portfolio includes high-yield corporate bond ETFs, growth-focused ETFs, and responsibly sourced gold ETFs, selected by Ondo based on real-world demand observed within its ecosystem. These products will operate on the Ondo Global Markets platform, which has already reached over $620 million in locked value since its launch last fall.
Sandy Kaul, Director of Innovation at Franklin Templeton, emphasized that the goal is not only to expand distribution channels but also to serve investors without traditional brokerage accounts, a group increasingly active in on-chain financial ecosystems.
The two parties will also implement training programs to demonstrate how traditional investments can be integrated into financial life on a blockchain platform. One notable limitation: US users are not eligible to trade on Ondo Global Markets, meaning this product suite is primarily positioned for the international market.
The wave of securities encryption is accelerating with the simultaneous involvement of traditional infrastructure.
Franklin Templeton is no newcomer to this field. The company launched an on-chain US government money fund on the Stellar network in 2021, then expanded to Ethereum, Polygon, Aptos, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Solana , and Base in 2024, a journey that demonstrates a systematic multi- chain strategy rather than single-chain experimentation. Ondo also deployed over 100 tokenized US stocks on Ethereum last September, laying the technical groundwork for this collaboration.
The announcement came during a week that saw a series of coordinated moves from traditional market infrastructure: the New York Stock Exchange announced a partnership with Securitize, a BlackRock-backed entity, to implement securities encryption, while Nasdaq received SEC approval to test encrypted securities in a pilot program.
The convergence of Franklin Templeton, the NYSE, and the Nasdaq in the same week paints a clear picture: tokenizing traditional financial assets is moving from experimentation to organized deployment, with Wall Street's top names betting this is an irreversible direction.
