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Franklin Templeton made it official on June 22, 2026. The firm finalized its acquisition of 250 Digital and immediately stood up Franklin Crypto, a dedicated digital asset management division built to chase institutional money flowing into crypto.
The deal pulls the entire 250 Digital investment team into Franklin Templeton’s orbit, along with the liquid cryptocurrency strategies those people had been running under CoinFund. Franklin Templeton isn’t just housing these strategies — it’s putting its own capital directly into them. That’s a meaningful distinction. It’s one thing to offer clients access to crypto through a third-party wrapper. It’s another to back the strategies with balance sheet money. And Franklin Templeton is doing the latter. As of May 31, 2026, the firm manages $1.78 trillion in assets, so the signal here isn’t subtle.
The firm’s crypto journey started back in 2018.
That’s worth sitting with for a second. While plenty of traditional asset managers spent 2018 through 2022 watching crypto from a safe distance — or quietly dismissing it — Franklin Templeton was already running blockchain experiments. It was an early mover on using public blockchains for fund transactions, one of the first U.S.-registered funds to try that. So Franklin Crypto isn’t a panicked pivot. It’s probably more like the logical endpoint of eight years of internal groundwork.
Who’s Running Franklin Crypto
Christopher Perkins leads the division. Seth Ginns sits alongside him as Chief Investment Officer. Tony Pecore, who came up through Franklin Templeton Digital Assets, rounds out the core team. All of them report into Sandy Kaul, who runs innovation for the broader firm. It’s a mix of crypto-native experience and institutional muscle — which is kind of the whole point.
CEO Jenny Johnson has made clear she’s enthusiastic about the acquisition. She’s framed it as a strategic strengthening of the firm’s digital asset capabilities, not a side experiment. Whether the market takes it that way is another question, but the leadership structure alone signals Franklin Templeton wants Franklin Crypto treated as a serious division, not a skunkworks project buried somewhere in the org chart.
The team structure matters here. Perkins and Ginns bring specialized crypto execution chops. Pecore bridges the crypto-native side with Franklin Templeton’s existing institutional DNA. Kaul provides the innovation oversight. It’s not a random collection of hires — it looks like a deliberate build.
What Franklin Crypto Actually Does
The pitch to institutional clients is straightforward: actively managed cryptocurrency exposure inside a regulated, globally distributed framework. That’s different from passive index products or spot ETF wrappers. Active management means the team is making calls — on positioning, on timing, on which parts of the crypto market to lean into. That’s a harder sell to compliance departments at pension funds and endowments, but it’s also potentially a more lucrative one if the strategies perform.
Franklin Templeton plans to roll out managed cryptocurrency strategies globally. No specific launch dates were given for individual products, and the firm didn’t break down which markets get access first. Unclear, at least for now, whether certain jurisdictions see earlier rollouts than others.
But the institutional angle is the real story. Big asset managers have been circling crypto for years. Some launched spot Bitcoin ETFs. Some set up custody solutions. Franklin Templeton is going further — it’s building an active management shop with its own investment team, its own CIO, and its own capital behind the strategies. That’s a different category of commitment.
The broader context: institutional appetite for digital assets has grown sharply, and large investors increasingly want access through managers they already know, with compliance infrastructure they already trust. Franklin Templeton is betting that Franklin Crypto can fill that gap. It’s not the only firm trying to do this, but few come in with $1.78 trillion in existing AUM as a calling card.
A Long Time Coming
Franklin Templeton’s blockchain work since 2018 laid the foundation for exactly this kind of move. The firm didn’t stumble into crypto — it built toward it, step by step, through years of experimentation with on-chain fund infrastructure. The 250 Digital acquisition accelerates the timeline, but the direction was already set.
The CoinFund connection is worth noting. The liquid crypto strategies now sitting inside Franklin Crypto were previously managed under CoinFund’s umbrella. By absorbing the team and the strategies together, Franklin Templeton avoided the messy transition that happens when you try to rebuild investment processes from scratch. The people who built the strategies are still running them — just inside a much bigger institution now.
Sandy Kaul’s role as Head of Innovation gives Franklin Crypto a direct line to the firm’s broader technology and product thinking. That probably matters more than it sounds. Active crypto management isn’t static — the market moves fast, new protocols emerge, regulatory environments shift. Having innovation oversight baked into the division’s reporting structure gives it some room to adapt without waiting for slow institutional approvals.
Christopher Perkins and Seth Ginns now have the institutional backing to scale what 250 Digital was doing at a fraction of the size.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Franklin Crypto and when did it launch?
Franklin Crypto is Franklin Templeton’s new dedicated digital asset management division, launched on June 22, 2026, following the firm’s acquisition of 250 Digital.
Who leads Franklin Crypto?
Christopher Perkins heads the division, with Seth Ginns as Chief Investment Officer and Tony Pecore on the team; all report to Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton’s Head of Innovation.
How much does Franklin Templeton manage overall?
As of May 31, 2026, Franklin Templeton manages $1.78 trillion in assets across all its divisions.
