Franklin Templeton Eyes Stellar for Blockchain Securities

Franklin Templeton views the potential of the Stellar protocol for the issuance of blockchain-backed securities, but is not interested in cryptocurrencies.

Franklin Templeton, the US-based asset management firm, is looking at the potential of the Stellar protocol for issuing and transacting in various blockchain-based investment vehicles. However, the firm warned it is not interested in cryptocurrencies.

In aprospectusfiled this September 3, Franklin Templeton explains the policy of the so-called “Franklin Blockchain Enabled U.S. Government Money Fund”.

However, the fund will be based on other assets, and not depend on the price of XLM, the native Stellar asset. Franklin Templeton also preserved the right to delay or cancel the listing on the Stellar network as needed, and rely only on traditional accounting.

However, the intention to use a public blockchain to help with the building of an investment fund is a novelty. Businesses have the options of building permissioned or private blockchains, to avoid depending on older networks.

The Stellar network is similar to the Ripple ecosystem, using a system of verifying servers. The network has been accused of concentrating votes on a handful of servers with a high level of trust, thus limiting the pool of participants to a form of digital oligarchy.

XLM currently trades at $0.062, down by about 50% since the start of 2019. The asset is among the leading altcoins that continuously lost positions. This is despite the success of the Stellar protocol, which is used for testing by IBM, as well as becoming the platform for the newKIN tokenson the Kik chat app.