Franklin Templeton is moving deeper into digital assets with an agreement to acquire 250 Digital, a cryptocurrency investment firm that emerged from CoinFund. The transaction is meant to strengthen Franklin Templeton’s institutional digital-asset platform and broaden the reach of its crypto product suite.
The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026 and will place 250 Digital inside a newly branded division called Franklin Crypto. By bringing in an established crypto team instead of building slowly from scratch, Franklin Templeton is accelerating its push into institutional digital-asset management.
A bigger platform for institutional crypto products
The acquisition adds 250 Digital’s active crypto strategies to Franklin Templeton’s existing digital-asset business, which managed about $1.8 billion in digital assets as of December 31, 2025. The combination gives Franklin Templeton a stronger operating base in crypto while connecting those strategies to a much larger global asset-management platform.
That broader platform matters because Franklin Templeton already oversees roughly $1.7 trillion in assets under management and has an existing lineup of digital products, including the Franklin Templeton Digital Holdings Trust spot Bitcoin ETF, EZBC, which carries a 0.19% fee. The firm is clearly positioning this acquisition as a way to scale regulated crypto exposure across an institutional client base it already knows well.
One of the most notable elements of the transaction is the use of BENJI tokens, which are tokenized shares of the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund, as part of the acquisition consideration. Using tokenized fund shares in an M&A deal is an unusual step and signals that Franklin Templeton wants tokenization to be part of its operating model, not just a product theme.
Franklin Crypto is being built as a broader digital-asset unit
The new Franklin Crypto division will report to Sandy Kaul, Head of Innovation, and will be co-led by Christopher Perkins and Seth Ginns, with Tony Pecore joining the leadership team. The structure shows that Franklin Templeton is treating this as a long-term business line with dedicated leadership rather than as a narrow product add-on.
Franklin Crypto is being built to serve institutional clients across several channels at once. The expanded platform will combine active crypto strategies, venture exposure, existing digital products such as EZBC and BENJI, and tokenized collateral tools designed to improve capital efficiency for institutions operating in digital markets.
That capital-efficiency angle is especially important to the strategy. By using regulated, yield-bearing tokenized fund shares as on-chain collateral, Franklin Templeton is trying to solve a familiar institutional problem: how to keep cash productive while reducing dependence on exchange counterparty risk.
Christopher Perkins captured the urgency behind the move in direct terms when he said that the true reputational risk lies in not having a digital-asset strategy. That view reflects how seriously Franklin Templeton now sees the opportunity to offer institutional clients a more complete and regulated path into crypto markets.