Blockchain for funds: Franklin Templeton’s Luxembourg breakthrough

Franklin Templeton (FT) has achieved a significant milestone, as Luxembourg is now home to the . Catriona Kellas, international legal lead, digital projects at Franklin Templeton, explained at the Alfi Global Asset Management conference held on 25 March 2025 that tokenisation involves using blockchain technology to record assets such as shares.FT has adopted a model where they issue shares natively and directly onto the blockchain, a journey that began with proof-of-concept works around 2018. According to Kellas, their initial foray resulted in the first retail mutual fund in the US to be issued on the blockchain in 2021, a money market fund.FT has now received CSSF approval in Luxembourg for a fully tokenised fund, launched in the first quarter of 2025.Cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology are not the same“All cryptocurrencies use the DLT [distributed ledger technology], but not all instruments using DLT are cryptocurrencies,” pointed out Kellas. She remarked that...