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 Discuss summit in Paris, Johnson — who oversees $1.74 trillion in belongings at Franklin Templeton — advised a panel viewers that the resistance from conventional monetary gamers will not be about expertise skepticism.
It’s about defending the enterprise mannequin. Banks and intermediaries that gather transaction charges at each step of the settlement course of stand to lose that revenue the second a wise contract can deal with the identical operate at a fraction of the associated fee.
Johnson pointed to Franklin Templeton’s tokenized cash market fund, Benji, as a concrete demonstration of the associated fee differential. Working 50,000 transactions by means of 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 traders transfer between stablecoins and the agency’s tokenized fund by means of an on-chain workflow.Franklin Templeton’s push into digital belongings is without doubt 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 belongings, started constructing its devoted digital belongings staff 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 document 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 traders looking for direct worth publicity with out managing custody.
The agency additionally provides a dynamic bitcoin/ethereum individually managed account product for traders wanting lively allocation between the 2 largest digital belongings.
In April 2026, Franklin Templeton introduced plans to amass 250 Digital, a by-product from crypto enterprise agency CoinFund, forming a brand new division known as Franklin Crypto to pursue lively cryptocurrency funding methods at institutional scale.
The deal itself broke new floor — BENJI tokens have 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 belongings division manages roughly $1.8 billion in belongings.
