Franklin Templeton Stops Dipping Toes, Takes the Full Crypto Plunge With 250 Digital Acquisition

Franklin Templeton isn’t just flirting with crypto anymore—it’s swiping right, sending a voice note, and moving in with the whole damn blockchain. The $1.4 trillion asset giant just dropped a bombshell: it’s acquiring 250 Digital, a crypto-native investment shop spun out of the legendary CoinFund, in what can only be described as a full degen flex. This isn’t a pilot program or a “let’s see what this Web3 thing is about” memo—it’s a full-scale invasion, boots on the digital ground, with a flag planted firmly in the fertile soil of decentralized finance. The message is clear: Franklin’s not waiting for the market to come to them. They’re building the damn market.

Enter Christopher Perkins and Seth Ginns, the dynamic duo now tapped to helm Franklin Crypto, the firm’s freshly minted digital division that sounds like a startup that just raised a Series A on a whitepaper scribbled in a Tokyo karaoke bar. Perkins takes the wheel as head of the unit—think of him as the captain of this moonbound rocket—while Ginns slides into the Chief Investment Officer seat, likely already stress-testing yield curves on Layer 2s. Rounding out the new leadership posse is Tony Pecore, because no proper crypto heist—or in this case, corporate integration—happens without at least three people with overlapping LinkedIn headlines. The whole operation will report to Sandy Kaul, Franklin’s innovation overlord, who probably now has “managing decentralized chaos” somewhere in her job description.

The deal is penciled to close in Q2 2026, assuming the regulators don’t stage a dramatic intervention like a central bank version of the Avengers. You know, “We don’t trust this BENJI token thing. We’re putting a stop to it.” But barring any government-issued plot twists, the transition will go live next year, making Franklin one of the first old-school financial titans to fully integrate a native crypto team rather than just outsourcing it to some dev house in Estonia.

As of December 31, 2025, Franklin Templeton Digital Assets was already playing with $1.8 billion in digital toys—no small potatoes, even by Wall Street’s bloated standards. The team boasts over 50 specialists who don’t just “understand blockchain” but actually build on it, write smart contracts, and presumably argue about EIPs at lunch. This isn’t your grandpa’s back-office IT crew; these are the folks who know the difference between a zk-proof and a zero-productivity meeting. They’re handling both investment strategy and the actual tech plumbing, because in crypto, if you’re not building, you’re just spectating.

Here’s where it gets spicy: the acquisition will settle part of the payment on-chain—yes, on-chain—using BENJI tokens. That’s right. Not dollars, not euros, not even a stablecoin like USDC playing dress-up as cash. We’re talking BENJI, the native token of the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX), which launched back in 2021 like a stealth NFT drop before anyone knew what NFTs were. FOBXX holds the crown as the first U.S.-registered mutual fund built on blockchain infrastructure, using the tech not for memes or monkey JPEGs, but for actual transaction processing and share ownership records. So when Franklin says “on-chain,” they’re not flexing for the Twitter crowd—they’ve been doing the work since before “GM” was a thing.

Using BENJI for M&A settlement is like paying for a yacht with Bitcoin: unnecessary, audacious, and exactly the kind of move that makes TradFi exec