Why Franklin Templeton Thinks Wall Street Is Underestimating Crypto’s Impact
Franklin Templeton’s Chris Perkins says Wall Street is underestimating crypto’s impact as tokenization reshapes markets
By: Zack Guzman
September 16, 2026
Wall Street spent years debating whether crypto deserved a place inside the financial system.
Franklin Templeton increasingly thinks that debate has it backwards. The more important question may be how much of the existing financial system eventually starts behaving like crypto.
For Chris Perkins, head of Franklin Crypto, the shift is already underway.
“Every institution is integrating blockchain technology in one way, shape or form,” Perkins told Coinage. “Market structure is changing overnight. We will be in an era of 24-seven markets. If you're not 24-seven capable, you'll be left behind and someone else is going to eat your lunch.”
That is a notably aggressive prediction coming from Franklin Templeton, one of the world's largest traditional asset managers. But Franklin has increasingly been putting money behind that conviction, too.
Earlier this year, Franklin Templeton completed its acquisition of 250 Digital, the crypto investment firm spun out of CoinFund that Perkins previously led, folding its strategies and team into the newly created Franklin Crypto unit. The deal was another signal that the traditional asset manager is not treating crypto as a side experiment.
Perkins said the timing is particularly telling.
“The market fundamentals continue to improve. Sentiment's not so great,” he said. “And here's Franklin doubling down on their commitment.” But the biggest opportunity Perkins sees is not necessarily another rally in Bitcoin. It is tokenization.
Franklin Templeton has been working on that thesis for years through Benji, the technology platform behind its Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund. The idea is straightforward: Take familiar financial products and rebuild them on blockchain rails so they can gain some of the capabilities crypto markets have enjoyed for years.
As Perkins put it, the attraction is not tokenization for tokenization's sake.
“What can we do better with tokens that we couldn't do better in the past?” he said.
A stablecoin takes something as old as the U.S. dollar and makes it transferable around the clock. A tokenized money market fund can potentially take that same idea further, allowing an investor to hold a yield-bearing asset while moving or deploying it in ways traditional financial plumbing was never designed to accommodate.
“If you're a big treasurer and you're moving money around, like why would you want to leave money on the table?” Perkins said.
“As we solve those issues, liquidity is going to go from 0 to 1, like overnight,” Perkins said. “Then the whole place will tokenize. So I just think that the models are too low.”
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Some of Wall Street's largest companies are already beginning to make that argument for him.
Robinhood Markets has pushed aggressively into tokenized stocks and around-the-clock trading, part of a broader bet that investors increasingly expect markets to operate more like the internet — continuously rather than according to bankers' hours.
Coinbase is making a similar bet from the other direction, trying to expand beyond simply buying and selling crypto and toward a financial system where traditional assets can increasingly interact with blockchain infrastructure.
Even BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has emerged as one of the biggest institutional proponents of tokenization, pushing deeper into tokenized funds and blockchain-based financial infrastructure.
In other words, some of the world's largest financial firms are beginning to import one of crypto's most basic features: markets that simply do not close.
As that continues to happen with more and more assets moving onto blockchains, Franklin Templeton's Head of Digital Assets and Innovation Sandy Kaul previously predicted the overall market could grow by a factor of 10 as that process plays out.
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