One of the country's oldest fund companies just went deeper into crypto than most of Wall Street has dared - and the way it structured the deal says a lot about where it thinks finance is headed.
Franklin Templeton struck a deal to buy 250 Digital, a firm that runs active crypto investment strategies. The two teams will merge under a newly created arm called Franklin Crypto, with the transaction set to wrap up sometime in the second quarter.
Franklin Templeton will hand over BENJI tokens as part of the purchase price. Those tokens are digital shares of the firm's government money fund - a product that records ownership and settles transactions on a public blockchain instead of the usual back-office plumbing.
Think of it like paying for a company using slices of another investment product, except the whole thing runs on crypto rails. Settling any portion of a corporate acquisition this way is still extremely rare.
It's a sign Franklin Templeton views blockchain not just as an asset class to sell, but as a tool for how it does business.
Christopher Perkins, formerly of CoinFund, is stepping in to head up the new crypto arm. Seth Ginns takes the top investment role.
They'll work alongside Tony Pecore from Franklin Templeton's existing digital team. The whole unit answers to Sandy Kaul, who oversees innovation at the firm.
Franklin Templeton's crypto business already manages around $1.8 billion. It has been one of the more aggressive legacy firms in the space - offering ETFs, putting mutual funds on public blockchains, and teaming up with Binance.
Across the industry, big money managers are moving past the "just launch a bitcoin ETF" phase and into strategies that require real investment judgment.
BlackRock's bitcoin fund pulled in fresh capital again in March after roughly four months of stalled or shrinking flows. Morgan Stanley is putting together its own spot bitcoin product.
CoinShares, a European crypto asset manager, listed its shares on the Nasdaq the same day Franklin Templeton made its announcement.
Meanwhile, bitcoin has shed about a fifth of its value this year. Over the past half-year, the drop is closer to 40%.
Big institutions keep writing checks for crypto even as prices slide. That's a break from earlier cycles, when buying dried up the moment prices fell.
Franklin Templeton is placing a bet that the professional money moving into crypto right now is still early.
