HSBC and Franklin Templeton demonstrate tokenised treasury yield solution for Uber

HSBC, Franklin Templeton, Tradeweb, and Fireblocks last week completed a demonstration on the Canton Network in which Uber purchased Franklin Templeton’s Benji tokenised money market fund (MMF) using HSBC tokenised deposits, settled via Tradeweb on a delivery-versus-payment basis, and subsequently liquidated part of the position over a weekend. The exercise is a proof of a live workflow rather than a theoretical design: a corporate treasurer sitting in a yield-bearing instrument until the precise moment an outgoing payment requires liquidity, including across non-business days when conventional fund-dealing windows are closed.

Tradeweb’s presence in the arrangement carries structural significance. Its 2024 acquisition of Institutional Cash Distributors (ICD), the portal many corporate treasurers already use to manage MMF allocations, positions it as a natural conduit for migrating those existing relationships onto tokenised settlement rails without forcing treasurers to adopt an entirely foreign interface.

Uber is not the only corporate name engaging this problem. Ant International has been routing corporate cash into tokenised MMFs across multiple funds, chains, currencies, and bank partners for several months. Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) added regulatory momentum on 26 October by approving 24/7 secondary trading of tokenised MMFs. With multiple participants approaching the same liquidity challenge through different structures, the market appears to be converging on a need rather than a single dominant solution, and the open question of who provides weekend liquidity when a fund manager’s dealing window is closed remains a live design variable across all approaches.