Franklin Templeton Buys Crypto Fund to Accelerate Tokenization Push

The moves by Wall Street giants to lean into tokenization are accelerating. Case in point: Franklin Templeton isn’t just building a crypto team — it’s buying one.

The $1.7 trillion asset manager announced Wednesday it's acquiring a crypto fund spun out of CoinFund, installing Citibank veteran Chris Perkins at the helm of a new division, Franklin Crypto.

While Franklin Templeton was already one of the earlier institutions to focus on crypto, and part of the original batch of 10 Bitcoin ETFs back in 2024, the move to acquire 250 Digital will accelerate the firms' offering of institutional products.

“Right now, this is a very small industry. It’s between a $2 and a $3 trillion industry," Perkins said about crypto in a new interview with Coinage. "I think that’s going to accelerate materially and exponentially in the coming years as we tokenize the $127 trillion equity market, right? How are we going to pay for those on the weekends? With stablecoins — and you’re going to see this massive convergence between equities, fixed income, crypto. It’s going to blend all together."

Crypto M&A activity and partnerships have accelerated recently as financial institutions look to bolster their offerings. Invesco, for example, recently partnered with Superstate to take over managing their nearly $1 billion tokenized treasury fund. Mastercard paid $1.8 billion to acquire stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK earlier this month in another big bet on payments.

While many crypto-native firms have spent years innovating onchain, most large allocators still need something different: structure, compliance, and risk management. Many crypto companies are looking for scale. As Perkins explains, it's a fertile ground for partnership.

“They’re looking for blended portfolios. They’re looking for yielding portfolios. They’re looking for compliant portfolios," he said. “For many institutions, they have risk now not for being in the markets… they have risk for not having a crypto strategy."

Increasingly, it's getting more difficult to tell where the line for traditional finance ends and crypto — once the wild, wild west — begins. A few of the people left in crypto may lament that fact, but to Perkins, the adoption from larger institutions is very much a shot in the arm crypto could use at a time when retail hope is fading.

“When you step back and you look at the amazing things that are happening from a fundamental perspective, the de-risking, the regulatory de-risking around the globe and the fact that every institution I know is trying to figure out how to get into this space. I think it’s a very, very interesting [time] and you can’t ignore this asset class,” Perkins said.

Coinage is a community-owned DAO letting our NFT holders become actual co-owners in one of the fastest-growing Web3 media outlets. Mint an NFT and become a member today to open a path to patronage dividends, or stake with us to support our project.