Franklin Templeton Closes 250 Digital Acquisition, Launches Franklin Crypto for Institutional Allocators

Franklin Templeton has closed its acquisition of 250 Digital and switched on Franklin Crypto, a new active digital-asset arm aimed at pensions, sovereign wealth funds, and other institutional allocators. The close lands inside the second-quarter target the firm set when it announced the deal on April 1.

The transaction brings the 250 Digital investment team and all liquid cryptocurrency strategies previously run by CoinFund Management under Franklin Templeton, per the announcement reported by The Block.

Franklin Templeton manages roughly $1.78 trillion in assets, and the firm said it would invest in the inherited strategies as part of the agreement. Part of the consideration is being paid in BENJI tokens tied to the firm's on-chain money-market fund, structuring the deal partly on chain.

CoinFund Spinoff

250 Digital was spun out of CoinFund earlier this year by Christopher Perkins and Seth Ginns, both former managing partners at the venture firm. Perkins will head the new Franklin Crypto unit and Ginns will serve as chief investment officer, leading the team alongside Franklin Templeton Digital Assets veteran Tony Pecore and reporting to Sandy Kaul, the firm's head of innovation, according to the April 1 release.

The unit's stated mandate is active management across what Franklin Templeton calls the multi-trillion-dollar digital asset market, an explicit step beyond the firm's existing passive and tokenized-treasury exposure.

BENJI and DRIP ETFs

Franklin Templeton Digital Assets already manages roughly $1.8 billion in global assets, anchored by the Franklin OnChain US Government Money Fund, ticker FOBXX and known on chain as BENJI. BENJI launched in 2021 as the first US-registered mutual fund to use blockchain technology to process transactions and record share ownership, and the platform has since expanded across multiple chains and into stablecoin swap rails through a recent integration with MoonPay.

The firm's tokenized treasury AUM has crossed $2.5 billion this year, up roughly 100% year to date. Franklin Templeton last week also filed with the SEC for two Bitcoin DRIP ETFs that would reinvest US stock dividends into bitcoin exposure, with an initial 5% bitcoin allocation and an effective date as early as Sept. 1.

The launch gives Franklin Templeton three distinct institutional crypto product lines: BENJI as the on-chain cash and tokenized-treasury layer, the proposed Bitcoin DRIP ETFs as a passive-allocation wrapper for equity portfolios, and Franklin Crypto as the active-strategy arm pitched at pensions and sovereign wealth funds. CEO Jenny Johnson said in the April announcement that the deal positions the firm among a small group of global asset managers with a dedicated, institutional-grade crypto investment management team.

Financial terms of the 250 Digital deal were not disclosed.