The $1.5 trillion asset manager will run active crypto strategies under a new Franklin Crypto unit, with part of the acquisition settled in tokenised money-fund shares — a first for traditional finance M&A.
Franklin Templeton is launching Franklin Crypto, a standalone division dedicated to digital-asset investment management, anchored by its acquisition of 250 Digital — the liquid-strategies arm spun out of crypto venture firm CoinFund. The deal, announced on 1 April, is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.
Financial terms were not disclosed, but one detail stands out: part of the purchase price will be settled in BENJI tokens — units of Franklin Templeton's on-chain US Government Money Fund, which trades as a tokenised money-market vehicle on public blockchain infrastructure. Using tokenised fund shares to pay for an acquisition is, as far as anyone in the industry can confirm, unprecedented in traditional-finance M&A. It is one thing to advocate for tokenisation in investor presentations; it is quite another to use it to close a deal.
Christopher Perkins will lead the new division. Ginns, formerly of CoinFund, will serve as Chief Investment Officer. Together with Franklin Templeton Digital Assets veteran Tony Pecore, the team is tasked with combining crypto-native investment expertise with the firm's global distribution network — a combination that, on paper, should appeal to the pension funds and sovereign wealth vehicles that Franklin Crypto is explicitly targeting.
Franklin Templeton is not new to digital assets. The firm has approximately $1.8 billion in digital-assets under management as of 31 December, and its tokenised US Government Money Fund has become one of the largest on-chain money-market vehicles in the industry. The BENJI token — the fund's blockchain-native representation — already trades across multiple networks and has been integrated with platforms including Uniswap. What the firm lacked was an active trading capability in liquid crypto markets. 250 Digital fills that gap.
The acquisition fits a pattern that has been building since late 2025. Mastercard paid $1.8 billion for stablecoin-infrastructure firm BVNK in March 2026. Stripe acquired Bridge, a stablecoin payments venture, in a deal that valued the startup north of $1 billion. According to industry estimates, crypto M&A deals are expected to exceed $37 billion this year — a figure that would have seemed absurd two cycles ago but now reflects a market where regulated incumbents are buying their way into crypto rather than building from scratch.
Robert Crossley, Franklin Templeton's Global Head of Industry Advisory Services, noted "growing interest from more established investors who are thinking about diversification and long-term outcomes" — the kind of diplomatic phrasing that translates, roughly, to: the allocators who sat out the last cycle are asking questions now.
The strategic logic is straightforward. Active management in crypto remains a relatively uncrowded field at the institutional level. Most of the capital that has flowed into digital assets through spot bitcoin ETFs — more than $56 billion in net inflows to date — has gone into passive vehicles. Franklin Crypto is betting that as the asset class matures, institutional allocators will want the same active strategies they use in every other market: macro-directional positioning, relative-value trades across tokens, and tactical allocation across DeFi protocols.
Whether that bet pays off depends on whether institutional appetite for active crypto exposure materialises at scale, or whether the gravitational pull of cheap, passive ETF products proves too strong. The record ETF outflows in February showed that institutional conviction can evaporate quickly when macro conditions shift. Franklin Crypto will need to demonstrate that active management can deliver returns that justify the premium — and the operational complexity — over a simple ETF allocation.
The BENJI token settlement, meanwhile, may prove to be the more consequential detail in the long run. If a $1.5 trillion asset manager can use tokenised fund shares to close an acquisition, the argument that real-world asset tokenisation is still experimental becomes harder to sustain. Franklin Templeton has been one of the most credible institutional voices on tokenisation for years; now it is putting its own balance sheet behind the thesis.
