A treasury fund behind an exchange Earn tab

Franklin Templeton and HashKey announced on 25 August that the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Liquidity Fund, holding US government money market instruments and dollar cash assets, will be distributed through HashKey Exchange's Earn channel. Access is limited to professional investors in Hong Kong; retail clients are excluded.

The distribution point is the news

A tokenised treasury fund is not new; Franklin Templeton launched Hong Kong's first one in November 2025 under the Monetary Authority's Fintech 2030 initiative. What is new is where it now sits. Earn is the tab an exchange customer opens to park idle balance, and it has historically been filled with lending products of varying provenance. A government money market fund appearing in that slot changes what the tab means.

HashKey operates in Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Dubai and Bermuda, which is the expansion path implied rather than announced. Chetan Karkhanis, Franklin Templeton's SVP of digital assets, said the firm looks forward to expanding beyond tokenised money market funds into other tokenised products over time.

The market it lands in

Tokenised real-world assets stood at $38.2 billion on 23 August, close to double the $20.6 billion of a year earlier. US treasury debt accounts for $15.6 billion of that.

That composition is the honest description of this sector: it is mostly government paper with a settlement layer attached. The growth is real and the underlying asset is the least exotic one available, which is a reasonable place for the category to be building from.