Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson has an easy rationalization for why main monetary establishments have been gradual to embrace public blockchains: the expertise destroys their fee-based income streams.
Talking on the Proof of Speak summit in Paris, Johnson — who oversees $1.74 trillion in belongings at Franklin Templeton — told a panel audience that the resistance from conventional monetary gamers isn’t about expertise skepticism.
It’s about defending the enterprise mannequin. Banks and intermediaries that acquire transaction charges at each step of the settlement course of stand to lose that earnings the second a wise contract can deal with the identical perform at a fraction of the price.
Johnson pointed to Franklin Templeton’s tokenized cash market fund, Benji, as a concrete demonstration of the price differential. Operating 50,000 transactions by the agency’s legacy system value $1.30 per transaction. The identical quantity processed on the Stellar blockchain got here in at $1.13 per transaction — a significant discount at institutional scale.
The announcement got here as Franklin Templeton disclosed a brand new partnership with MoonPay, designed to let institutional buyers transfer between stablecoins and the agency’s tokenized fund by an on-chain workflow.Franklin Templeton’s push into digital belongings is among the most aggressive strikes by a legacy asset supervisor within the trade’s historical past. The California-based agency, which manages roughly $1.74 trillion in belongings, started constructing its devoted digital belongings crew in 2018 — years earlier than tokenization turned a mainstream focus amongst institutional gamers.
Franklin Templeton’s bitcoin and crypto push
Benji launched in 2021 because the world’s first U.S.-registered mutual fund to make use of a public blockchain as its official system of report for processing transactions and recording share possession. The fund invests predominantly in U.S. Treasury securities and makes use of blockchain strictly for operational effectivity reasonably than crypto publicity.
On the bitcoin entrance, Franklin Templeton launched the Franklin Bitcoin ETF (ticker: EZBC), a passive product that holds solely bitcoin and money, designed for buyers looking for direct worth publicity with out managing custody.
The agency additionally presents a dynamic bitcoin/ethereum individually managed account product for buyers wanting energetic allocation between the 2 largest digital belongings.
In April 2026, Franklin Templeton announced plans to amass 250 Digital, a by-product from crypto enterprise agency CoinFund, forming a brand new division known as Franklin Crypto to pursue energetic cryptocurrency funding methods at institutional scale.
The deal itself broke new floor — BENJI tokens have been used as a part of the acquisition cost, making it one of many first M&A transactions structured on-chain. The agency’s digital belongings division manages roughly $1.8 billion in belongings.
