Franklin Templeton, a heavyweight in traditional stock and bond-fund management, said it would buy a spinoff from the venture firm CoinFund to expand its cryptocurrency-investing offering.

Franklin, known for marketing mutual funds for individual investors, made an early entry into crypto in 2018 and has assembled a digital-assets team of more than 50 people. 250 Digital, whose spinoff from CoinFund was announced in January, is led by the former CoinFund executives Christopher Perkins and Seth Ginns.

The new crypto arm, to be named Franklin Crypto following the close of the deal, will offer strategies that appeal to pensions, sovereign-wealth funds and other institutional investors, said Sandy Kaul, Franklin's head of innovation.

Terms of the transaction weren't disclosed.

The 79-year-old Franklin was among 10 or so asset managers launching the first batch of U.S.-listed bitcoin exchange-traded funds in 2024. It has a partnership with Binance that offers investors Franklin's tokenized money-market fund as collateral on the crypto exchange.

Many traditional financial firms have recently expanded their crypto offerings, spurred in part by the second Trump administration's open support of digital assets. The price of bitcoin and other tokens touched record highs this past fall, only to fall into a slump that has stretched into 2026. Bitcoin has dropped around 45% since peaking above $126,000, and the broader market for digital assets has lost roughly $2 trillion in market value.

"This big selloff that we had in the crypto markets is creating a very unique opportunity that really made us all decide that this is the right time to pull the trigger, " Kaul told The Wall Street Journal. "Because I think that there's going to be a lot of interest in creating more of a stable home for many of these top crypto trading talents."

Wall Street is no longer running for the exits as crypto prices dip. While the 2022 crypto crash saw a wave of high-profile implosions that shook investor confidence, the current market cycle has appeared more resilient, notably lacking systemic collapses of major lenders or exchanges.

Perkins and Ginns are Wall Street veterans who previously worked at Citigroup and Jennison Associates, respectively.

"Institutions of all flavors, there used to be reputational risk for them being in this space. Now they have reputational risk for not being in the space," Perkins said in an interview. "My job is to build solutions for these clients."

Franklin Templeton had more than $1.7 trillion in assets under management as of February. Shares of Franklin Resources, the manager's parent company, have declined about 1% this year.

Write to Vicky Ge Huang at vicky.huang@wsj.com
source: https://www.tradingview.com/news/DJN_DN20260401002829:0/