Franklin Templeton Taps Wallet Service Provider to Support Tokenized Shares

Franklin Templeton Investments, the global investment firm looking to track shares of a money market fund on the Stellar blockchain, has tapped wallet service provider Curv to help safeguard its shares.

The companies announced Thursday that Curv would be responsible for helping Franklin Templeton build the transaction signing and management system for its fund. Curv, which developed a series of multi-party computation protocols, seeks to remove the need for private keys, which it calls a "single point of failure" on a blockchain platform, according to a press release.

Itay Malinger, Curv CEO and co-founder, told CoinDesk that his company's software solution would also help the company scale its system.

"[Franklin Templeton] needs an infrastructure stack that will first of all secure the assets right, because it's a public blockchain, and also be able to manage a scale of tens or hundreds of thousands of addresses," he said.

These addresses will either be associated with an end customer or with a processing point.

Franklin Templeton first revealed in September that it planned to track the shares of its fund using the Stellar blockchain, though there are no plans to actually invest in any cryptocurrencies.

Malinger said the firm is one of the first to tokenize its shares directly on a public blockchain.

Curv's tools will be able to be able to communicate with the Stellar network, on top of its security features. The issue for financial institutions is that they need a platform that can manage the accounting and other regulatory requirements, Malinger said.

These regulatory issues stretch across different jurisdictions as well, he said.

"If I'm a traditional finance player and I want to enter this thing called blockchain, I want to start either creating bitcoin or I want to be able to tokenize this security," he said.

In a statement, Franklin Templeton executive vice president Roger Bayston said another concern for his firm was maintaining clients' trust.

"We expect blockchain to play a big part of business going forward and we need partners that enable and build trust to grow investor adoption of digital assets," he said.

Curv's software solution best met the firm's security and scaling needs, according to the statement.

“In comparison to traditional tech stacks evaluated, Curv’s cryptography changes what is possible in digital asset custody, delivering to our clients instant availability and total autonomy over their investments," Bayston said.