Franklin Templeton has added its BENJI tokenized money market fund to MoonPay Trade, giving institutional clients a new route between stablecoins and tokenized fund products.

According to a statement released Tuesday, the partnership will allow institutional users to swap USDC, USDT, and other stablecoins for Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money market fund via MoonPay’s on-chain trading platform. The companies said the arrangement is also expected to serve as the basis for a deeper strategic relationship between Franklin Templeton and MoonPay.

Franklin Templeton brings BENJI to MoonPay trade

The integration gives BENJI holders a direct path into stablecoin liquidity, while also creating an on-chain entry point for institutions seeking exposure to tokenized money market products. Franklin Templeton said the setup can support treasury management, portfolio rebalancing, collateral use, and liquidity provision.

Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton’s head of innovation and digital assets, said tokenized money market funds become more useful when they can move at the speed and with the programmability of digital asset networks. Kaul added that working with MoonPay creates another trusted gateway between stablecoin liquidity and tokenized fund exposure.

MoonPay said the deal also expands its institutional business beyond crypto, fiat, and stablecoins. The announcement comes after Caroline Pham, former acting chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, joined MoonPay Institutional as CEO.

MoonPay builds out institutional onchain trading

Pham said tokenized money market funds can improve liquidity and capital efficiency when institutions can access the on-chain financial system. She said MoonPay’s partnership with Franklin Templeton on liquidity and collateral solutions illustrates the infrastructure now supporting institutional digital asset adoption.

MoonPay introduced MoonPay Trade in late May as an institutional on-chain execution platform. The company said the platform gives enterprises and institutions a single API to access more than 200 blockchains, cross-chain routing, trade execution, settlement, collateral movement, and tokenized asset transactions, all under compliance controls.

MoonPay Trade also relies on infrastructure from recent MoonPay acquisitions. These include Decent for cross-chain routing and liquidity, DFlow for trading technology, and Sodot for crypto key management.

BENJI expansion continues across crypto platforms

Franklin Templeton, which reported about $1.74 trillion in assets under management in its latest quarterly report, has become one of the largest traditional asset managers active in tokenization. It’s Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, known as FOBXX or BENJI, launched in 2021 as the first U.S.-registered mutual fund to use a public blockchain.

The asset manager has also expanded BENJI through other crypto partnerships. Franklin Templeton has worked with Payward, the parent company of Kraken, on tokenizing additional traditional investment products. It has also partnered with Binance to support BENJI as off-exchange collateral.

In April, Franklin Templeton agreed to buy 250 Digital, a CoinFund spinoff, to grow its crypto investment business. The firm is also working with Ondo Finance to tokenize a group of ETFs.

MoonPay links onchain access with ChatGPT app

As previously reported by crypto.news, MoonPay launched a dedicated app inside ChatGPT’s App Store on May 22. The app allows users to create crypto purchase links without leaving OpenAI’s chatbot, while MoonPay described itself in its announcement as the first crypto onramp integrated in ChatGPT.

As per the report, MoonPay, the ChatGPT app supports Bitcoin, XRP, Ethereum, Solana, USDC, and more than 100 other digital assets across over 30 chains. After the chatbot generates a checkout link, users complete KYC and payment on moonpay.com using a card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or bank transfer.

Zama, a privacy-focused blockchain protocol, has committed to accelerating its regulatory-compliance program after a U.S. court lifted a temporary freeze on roughly $12.5 million in USDC held in its confidential cUSDC wrapper. The move ends a disruption tied to a dispute involving Overnight Finance and highlights the ongoing tension between privacy-preserving infrastructure and centralized stablecoins that can be frozen by issuers under court order.

Co-founder Rand Hindi announced on X that the court determined the freeze to be unwarranted and that the cUSDC contract, along with all underlying USDC, has returned to normal operation. The deposit in question, approximately $12.5 million, was made into Zama’s confidential USDC wrapper on May 11. Hindi noted that the freeze was tied to a litigation amid a dispute unrelated to Zama, and that the umbrella effect—where the disputed account represented the majority of the contract’s value—created a blanket freeze request through Circle.

The episode underscores a broader institutional debate: how privacy-preserving protocols can coexist with the centralized controls that stablecoin issuers retain. As Hindi put it, the situation could have affected any protocol holding freezable assets, including decentralized exchanges, lending protocols, and bridges. The court’s decision to unwind the freeze is seen by Zama as a proof point that targeted responses may be possible within existing legal frameworks, even when assets are stored in pooled, centralized wrappers.

Key takeaways

• The U.S. court lifted the temporary freeze on about $12.5 million in USDC held in Zama’s cUSDC wrapper, allowing normal operations to resume.
• Zama intends to accelerate its compliance roadmap, expanding automated enforcement of issuer-level freezes and adding governance and monitoring tools.
• Under the proposed framework, if Circle freezes a USDC address, the corresponding confidential USDC tied to that address would be frozen, while the protocol aims to preserve access for unaffected users.
• The incident has not deterred institutional interest; Zama remains committed to launching its cUSDC product, including shielding $5 million of USDC from its treasury, later this month.

Unwinding the freeze and what it means for privacy-enabled rails

According to Hindi, the court concluded that freezing an entire smart contract pool imposed disproportionate harm on users not implicated in the dispute. He noted that Zama’s architecture preserves visible sender and recipient addresses while encrypting balances and amounts, enabling the protocol to isolate the disputed account without disrupting others. In his view, this capability—to target enforcement without broad collateral damage—demonstrates a critical distinction between centralized stablecoins stored in pooled contracts and more granular, privacy-preserving designs that can limit collateral effects of legal actions.

Jeremy Bradley, Zama’s chief operating officer, elaborated that the case serves as a cautionary tale for any protocol holding centralized, freeze-capable assets. He told Cointelegraph that the exact dynamics could apply to automated market makers, lending protocols, bridges, and other actors holding USDC in pooled contracts. The core takeaway, he argued, is that the absence of targeted freezing tools can leave protocols exposed to court orders that affect many users at once rather than isolating a single account.

“The same court has now lifted the freeze, determining that it was unwarranted,” Rand Hindi wrote on X. “The cUSDC contract and all underlying USDC have returned to normal operation.”

Those reflections echo a broader legal-question backdrop: how to reconcile the privacy of user balances with the transparency typically required by issuers and regulators. The Cointelegraph report on the initial freeze highlights how the interplay between user privacy and regulatory requests can escalate quickly in pooled custody scenarios. The ongoing dialogue around targeted compliance tooling—versus blanket freezes—remains central to how the ecosystem evolves.

Accelerating compliance: what Zama is changing this year

In response to the incident, Zama outlined a plan to accelerate its compliance program. The team’s roadmap now foregrounds automatic enforcement of compliance actions tied to underlying asset issuers, with a focus on limiting the blast radius of a freeze. Under the proposed approach, Circle’s action to freeze a USDC address would automatically cascade to freeze the corresponding confidential USDC holdings within Zama’s protocol, rather than requiring a blanket halt across the entire pool.

Bradley described the changes as an enhancement of an existing design principle: programmable compliance. The team intends to establish a compliance council and bring in additional transaction-monitoring tools to bolster observability and governance. He argued that the incident has shifted urgency from planning to execution, enabling institutions to engage with Zama with greater confidence that the protocol can respond to legal requests without compromising privacy for non-involved users.

Even as Zama doubles down on privacy, the project remains committed to working with Circle and other ecosystem participants to navigate the legal realities of stablecoins within a decentralized framework. Bradley emphasized that Circle’s actions were a response to a court order, and the broader challenge lies in building tools that allow precise, targeted responses rather than sweeping restrictions that impact all users of a pooled contract.

Beyond the governance and tooling improvements, Zama reiterated its intention to push forward with the launch of its cUSDC product later this month, including a plan to shield $5 million of USDC from its treasury. The company frames this as a testbed for how confidential assets can be reconciled with issuer-level controls in a real-world setting, potentially offering a blueprint for other privacy-oriented protocols facing similar regulatory pressures.

Assistants aligned to this space have noted that the lifting of the freeze demonstrates that privacy rails can operate within the legal framework when they include precise, auditable controls. The broader takeaway is not a retreat from privacy but a pivot toward interoperable, compliance-ready privacy tooling that can coexist with the stability mechanisms central to the broader crypto ecosystem.

For now, the market will be watching how quickly Zama can implement its enhanced compliance features and how other protocols that rely on centralized stablecoins respond to the lesson that blanket freezes can be mitigated through targeted, isolable actions. The unfolding developments surrounding cUSDC and programmable compliance will likely influence discussions on custody, governance, and legal transparency across privacy protocols and stablecoins alike.

As Zama advances, observers will be looking for further clarity on how targeted freezing could function in practice across different asset wrappers, and whether other issuers and protocols adopt similar approaches to balance user privacy with legitimate regulatory demands. The next milestones—Zama’s cUSDC launch, the rollout of governance and monitoring tools, and any regulatory guidance—will shape how privacy-focused infrastructure can scale safely in a tightly monitored financial landscape.

Coinbase has invested in ProShares’ GENIUS Money Market ETF as stablecoin issuers prepare for stricter reserve rules under the GENIUS Act.

BlockBeats reported on June 2 that Coinbase will invest in the ProShares fund, known by the ticker IQMM. The report said the product is designed as a money market ETF that can qualify for use as a stablecoin reserve under the U.S. stablecoin law.

The move places Coinbase deeper inside the reserve layer of the stablecoin market. Until now, Coinbase has focused heavily on stablecoin payments, distribution, developer tools, and on-chain access. With IQMM, the company is adding exposure to the systems that manage the assets backing dollar-pegged tokens.

Coinbase pushes into stablecoin reserve tools

Coinbase said stablecoins have changed how users, businesses, developers, and AI agents move money by allowing instant settlement at any hour. The company also said that payment adoption needs a stronger reserve infrastructure behind the tokens.

According to Coinbase, reserve management, liquidity management, issuance, and redemption systems will become more important as stablecoins handle more payment and settlement activity. The company said stablecoin issuers need tools built for these functions rather than relying only on older banking and cash management channels.

IQMM gives Coinbase a place in that part of the market. ProShares brings ETF infrastructure experience to the fund, while Coinbase is presenting the investment as part of its attempt to support the full stablecoin stack.

IQMM targets GENIUS Act reserve standards

ProShares designed IQMM around assets that align with the reserve framework established by the GENIUS Act. The law requires payment stablecoins to be backed one-to-one by high-quality, highly liquid assets.

The fund mainly holds short-term U.S. Treasuries with remaining maturities of 93 days or less. It also includes cash and cash equivalents. According to the report, this structure is intended to meet Section 4 reserve requirements under the GENIUS Act.

BlockBeats described IQMM as the first money market ETF designed to serve as a stablecoin reserve asset. Coinbase said products such as IQMM could help issuers manage liquidity during stablecoin creation and redemption.

Stablecoin issuers face new reserve demands

The GENIUS Act passed into law last year, created a federal framework for issuing stablecoins in the United States. The law requires issuers to back payment stablecoins fully with liquid assets such as Treasuries or cash.

However, the rules will not officially take effect until at least early 2027. Regulators are still preparing detailed requirements for stablecoin issuers.

Coinbase said reserve assets could expand beyond direct Treasury holdings as the sector develops. The company listed ETFs, money market funds, and tokenized cash-like products among the instruments that could support future stablecoin reserves.

ProShares launched IQMM in February. The fund generated $17 billion in trading on its first day, according to the provided market data.

Coinbase said stablecoins offer a better way to move money, but also that the industry needs better systems for managing the reserves backing them. Its IQMM investment extends that strategy into the financial plumbing that supports stablecoin issuance, redemption, and liquidity.

oinDesk Indices presents its daily market update, highlighting the performance of leaders and laggards in the CoinDesk 20 Index.

The CoinDesk 20 is currently trading at 1941.81, down 2.6% (-51.57) since 4 p.m. ET on Monday.

Two of the 20 assets are trading higher.

Leaders: NEAR (+3.2%) and ICP (+0.7%).

Laggards: XLM (-8.4%) and AAVE (-3.9%).

The CoinDesk 20 is a broad-based index traded on multiple platforms in several regions globally.

Privacy-focused blockchain protocol Zama said it will accelerate compliance measures and proceed with its confidential USDC launch after a US court lifted a temporary freeze on about $12.5 million in USDC held in its cUSDC smart contract, according to a Tuesday X post by co-founder Rand Hindi.

The freeze, first reported by Cointelegraph on Saturday, stemmed from a temporary restraining order obtained in connection with an ongoing dispute involving stakeholders of an unrelated project, Overnight Finance. Circle froze the funds after receiving the court order, even though Zama was not a party to the case, according to Hindi’s account.

“The same court has now lifted the freeze, determining that it was unwarranted,” Hindi wrote. He added that the protocol’s cUSDC contract and all underlying USDC had returned to normal operation.

The incident highlights tensions between privacy-focused blockchain infrastructure and centralized stablecoins whose issuers can freeze assets under court order.

Hindi argued that the episode “could have happened to any protocol holding freezable assets,” including decentralized exchanges, lending protocols and bridges.

Zama USDC freeze lifted. Source: Rand Hindi

According to Hindi, approximately $12.5 million in USDC was deposited into Zama’s confidential USDC wrapper on May 11.

He said the deposit address later became the subject of litigation and a temporary restraining order connected to a dispute involving Overnight Finance. Because the deposit represented more than 99% of the contract’s total value shielded, plaintiffs sought a blanket freeze order through Circle, he said.

Jeremy Bradley, Zama’s chief operating officer, told Cointelegraph the court ultimately concluded that freezing an entire smart contract pool imposed disproportionate harm on uninvolved users. He said Zama demonstrated that, because its protocol preserves visible sender and recipient addresses while encrypting balances and amounts, the disputed account could be isolated and frozen directly without affecting other users.

Bradley said the case illustrates how protocols holding centralized stablecoins in pooled contracts may be exposed to similar risks. “Automated market makers, lending protocols, bridges, and anyone holding USDC in a pooled contract is effectively one court order away from this exact situation,” he said.

Related: SEC Commissioner Peirce defends crypto privacy tools against surveillance push

Zama to accelerate compliance roadmap

In response, Zama said it will accelerate its compliance roadmap, including introducing automatic enforcement of compliance actions taken by underlying asset issuers.

Under the proposed framework, if Circle freezes a USDC address, the corresponding confidential USDC held by that address would also be frozen. The protocol also plans to establish a compliance council and integrate additional compliance and transaction-monitoring tools.

Bradley said the measures accelerate an existing roadmap rather than represent a change in strategy. “We always designed the protocol with programmable compliance in mind,” he said, adding that the incident made deploying those tools more urgent and would help provide institutions with greater confidence in the protocol’s ability to respond to legal requests.

Despite the incident, Hindi said Zama remains committed to building on USDC and plans to launch its cUSDC product later this month, including shielding $5 million of USDC from its own treasury.

Bradley said the episode has reinforced interest from institutional users rather than dampened it, arguing that the court’s decision to lift the freeze demonstrated that the protocol can operate within existing legal frameworks while preserving privacy features.

He added that Circle was acting pursuant to a court order and that the broader issue was the lack of tools for carrying out targeted freezes without affecting entire smart contract pools.

Asia Express: North Korea denies crypto hacks, Upbit’s bank tests Ripple

Strategy’s (MSTR) first bitcoin BTC$67,641.17 sale since 2022 may have been tiny relative to its massive $58 billion holdings, but the market’s reaction could signal a broader shift in crypto markets, according to Standard Chartered’s head of digital asset research, Geoff Kendrick.

In a note to clients, Kendrick pointed out that ether (ETH) significantly outperformed bitcoin BTC$67,641.17 on the day the sale was announced, despite broader weakness in crypto prices. Since Monday, ETH has appreciated 5% relative to BTC.

Among sessions when bitcoin declined, the move ranked among the largest ETH-versus-BTC gains since the start of 2024, he noted.

“I see [Monday] as being the start of ETH outperformance versus BTC,” Kendrick wrote.

The call comes as investors continue debating whether ether can regain momentum after lagging behind bitcoin for much of the past two years. Since September 2022, when the Ethereum network transitioned from a mining-centric proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake model, ETH has depreciated 66% versus BTC, reaching a five-year low in April 2025. That downtrend, however, has shown signs of shifting, as ETH has bounced more than 60% from the lows over the past year.

Kendrick, who has a long-term ETH price target of $4,000 by the end of 2026 and $40,000 by 2030, said he expects the ETH-BTC ratio to climb to 0.04 by year-end from around 0.028 currently, implying ether would outperform bitcoin by more than 40% even if both assets move higher or lower.

This isn’t the first time Kendrick has forecasted ETH outperforming bitcoin. Earlier this year, he had a similar call, citing the passage of U.S. Clarity Act, which he said would create a regulatory framework for the sector and boost digital assets such as ETH, as it would unlock the next chapter for decentralized finance.

Bitcoin vs. Ethereum digital asset treasuries

While Strategy’s bitcoin sale has rattled the market, Kendrick argued that the significance of the transaction isn’t the $2.5 million in BTC that changed hands, but what it reveals about the different economics of bitcoin and ether treasury firms.

Strategy (MSTR) and other bitcoin treasury companies rely largely on bitcoin price appreciation and capital markets activity to support their business models. Because bitcoin does not generate yield, treasury firms may occasionally need to sell holdings or raise capital to cover expenses and obligations.

Read more: Strategy sparked panic with bitcoin sale, but analysts say it was ‘immaterial’

Meanwhile, ETH can be staked to earn yield, currently around 3% annualized, providing a source of income without requiring firms to liquidate assets.

For example, Tom Lee’s Bitmine (BMNR), the largest Ethereum treasury, amassed a $11 billion ETH stash without issuing any debt. While that bet is deeply underwater, the firm estimates its staking operations generate roughly $258 million in annualized revenue, with projected rewards approaching $300 million annually through its MAVAN staking platform.

Kendrick argued that staking income makes ether treasury companies more self-sustaining than their bitcoin-focused peers. While Ethereum treasury firms such as Bitmine and SharpLink Gaming (SBET) currently trade at lower premiums than Strategy (MSTR), he expects investors to reward them for generating recurring income from their holdings, helping close that valuation gap over time.

Read more: Saylor’s Strategy sold bitcoin for the first time since 2022. These firms are still buying

Bitcoin occupies a fascinating classification gray zone: part commodity, part currency, part technology asset, part macro hedge. Far from being a mere philosophical curiosity, that ambiguity is the defining feature of how the asset trades.

Because no shared understanding of what bitcoin fundamentally is has yet taken hold, no consistent framework exists for how it should behave. Different investor cohorts bring their own interpretations to the table, and the market becomes a vibrant battleground of competing narratives. That tension, more than any single variable, shapes bitcoin’s price.

In practice, the most influential of these cohorts — macro and institutional capital — has come to treat bitcoin as a liquidity-driven asset, and that choice carries broad implications for how the asset behaves today. Once investors reach a real agreement about bitcoin’s primary function, its price will find firmer footing. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting closer.

Bitcoin’s perpetual identity crisis

Bitcoin suffers from a continuous identity crisis, and understanding that struggle is key to understanding the asset itself. One group of investors views it as “digital gold,” expecting it to serve as a hedge against inflation and currency debasement. For them, bitcoin should appreciate during periods of monetary expansion or geopolitical stress, offering the same kind of protection that traditional stores of value have historically provided.

Another cohort approaches bitcoin as a high-growth, high-volatility technology proxy. In this framework, bitcoin behaves less like a defensive asset and more like a confident bet on innovation, adoption and network effects. These participants tend to respond to macro signals much the way equity investors in growth stocks do.

A third group treats bitcoin primarily as a trading instrument. For these participants, the asset’s fundamental nature is largely beside the point. What matters is momentum, liquidity, leverage and sentiment. Time horizons are short, conviction is fluid and positioning can shift rapidly on price action alone.

Each framework implies a distinct rationale for owning bitcoin, and entirely different triggers for buying and selling. A “digital gold” investor may accumulate during downturns, while a momentum trader exits at the first sign of weakness. A macro fund may trim exposure in response to tightening financial conditions, while long-term holders see that same environment as a compelling opportunity.

The result is a market where price isn’t anchored to a single narrative but pulled in multiple directions at once. Bitcoin doesn’t behave consistently because its participants aren’t operating under a shared set of assumptions.

Bitcoin’s shifting correlations (to gold, stocks, macro liquidity, SaaS valuations, to name a few) are best understood as a direct consequence of this identity crisis.

When liquidity is abundant and risk appetite is strong, bitcoin tends to behave like a high-beta equity, rising alongside other speculative assets. During periods of stress, however, it frequently sells off in tandem with equities. That behavior challenges the “digital gold” thesis, at least in the short run, as the asset fails to deliver the downside protection typically associated with safe havens.

And yet, there are genuine moments when bitcoin attracts flows consistent with a store-of-value narrative. In certain macroeconomic environments (particularly those marked by concerns about currency debasement or geopolitical instability), investors do allocate to bitcoin as a meaningful hedge.

Why bitcoin faces a unique categorization problem

Most asset classes eventually converge around a dominant valuation framework. Equities, for example, are valued on expected cash flows, while bonds are priced relative to yields and interest rates. These frameworks give investors a common language, helping markets find equilibrium.

Bitcoin has no such anchor, at least not yet. It doesn’t generate cash flows, it isn’t widely used as a medium of exchange, it doesn’t map cleanly onto technology platforms like Meta or Apple, and it lacks gold’s centuries-long track record. In the absence of a clear benchmark, investors are free to impose their own models. Put simply, there’s no shared framework to help the market settle on a stable interpretation of value.

Regulatory divergence adds another layer of complexity. Authorities around the world don’t define bitcoin the same way — El Salvador made it legal tender, while U.S. regulators largely treat it as a commodity. It’s difficult for investors to fully commit to a single framework when the regulatory environment remains unsettled.

What the future holds for bitcoin

In practice, bitcoin’s behavior is shaped less by long-term believers and more by the marginal buyer, meaning the participant whose actions set the price at any given moment. Increasingly, that marginal buyer is institutional capital operating within a macroeconomic framework.

These investors don’t approach bitcoin as an ideological asset. They treat it as one component within a broader portfolio, allocating based on liquidity conditions and signals from central banks. Within that context, bitcoin is categorized as a risk-sensitive asset.

When liquidity expands (through lower interest rates, quantitative easing, or improving financial conditions), bitcoin gets bid up alongside other risk assets. When liquidity contracts, it gets sold as part of broader de-risking. This dynamic explains why bitcoin so often trades in line with equities and other growth-sensitive instruments, even when its underlying narrative — a digital currency with a hard cap on supply — suggests it should behave quite differently.

The dominance of this cohort doesn’t resolve bitcoin’s identity crisis, but it does impose a working framework on price behavior. As long as macro-driven capital remains the marginal buyer, bitcoin will tend to reflect liquidity conditions more than any single fundamental narrative.

But convergence toward a dominant identity is coming. It could occur for a number of reasons, ranging from financial advisors finally becoming comfortable with the asset’s concept to the dollar massively devaluing (and thereby leading everyone to see bitcoin as a safe haven). Either way, when it arrives, bitcoin’s price behavior is poised to stabilize in a meaningful, lasting way.