Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson has a simple 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 property at Franklin Templeton — informed a panel viewers that the resistance from conventional monetary gamers is just not 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 sensible contract can deal with the identical operate at a fraction of the fee.
Johnson pointed to Franklin Templeton’s tokenized cash market fund, Benji, as a concrete demonstration of the fee differential. Working 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 property is likely one of the most aggressive strikes by a legacy asset supervisor within the business’s historical past. The California-based agency, which manages roughly $1.74 trillion in property, started constructing its devoted digital property workforce 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 slightly 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 value publicity with out managing custody.
The agency additionally gives a dynamic bitcoin/ethereum individually managed account product for buyers wanting energetic allocation between the 2 largest digital property.
In April 2026, Franklin Templeton introduced plans to accumulate 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 had been used as a part of the acquisition fee, making it one of many first M&A transactions structured on-chain. The agency’s digital property division manages roughly $1.8 billion in property.
