Uber completed a test transaction using a tokenized money market fund, purchasing Franklin Templeton's offering on Tuesday and selling Sunday—capturing 1.5 additional days of yield that would sit idle under conventional market hours.
Traditional money market funds lock positions Friday through Sunday. Tokenized assets trade 24/7 on blockchain networks, letting institutional capital stay deployed. For a company managing billions in treasury operations, that's direct margin expansion.
The transaction involved Franklin Templeton, HSBC Holdings, Fireblocks and Tradeweb Markets on the Canton Network, a blockchain built for institutional settlement. Fireblocks CEO Michael Shaulov told Bloomberg he expects hundreds of firms to adopt this model within 18 months.
"Tokenization provides a solution for deploying idle capital in treasuries without sacrificing access to those funds," Shaulov said.
Manish Kohli, global head of payments at HSBC, confirmed the bank is positioned to intermediate these operations in the U.S. and plans to expand beyond Franklin Templeton's offerings.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon flagged tokenization as a major trend during recent earnings, noting the bank has already tokenized bonds, money market funds and real estate for select clients.
The tokenized asset market remains nascent—approximately $40 billion in total tokenized assets exist globally, per RWA.xyz data. That figure understates institutional momentum: major banks are building settlement infrastructure and custody solutions specifically for on-chain Treasury instruments and money market vehicles.
Some public companies have resisted. Microsoft, McDonald's and Walmart declined to tokenize their shares under the SEC's Innovation Exemption framework.
Separately, more than 30 traditional finance and digital asset firms participated in a DTCC live tokenization event testing how to move securities from the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation onto blockchain networks.
