Franklin Templeton, an investment management giant for financial advisors and their clients, said on Wednesday morning it had agreed to acquire cryptocurrency investment management firm 250 Digital and also launch a new division, Franklin Crypto.
250 Digital is being spun off from venture firm CoinFund and will accelerate Franklin Templeton’s expansion into digital assets.
The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed and is expected to be completed by the middle of the year.
But the deal is the latest in a flurry of recent moves by various financial advice firms to broaden retail clients' ability to buy and invest in nontraditional and highly volatile assets like cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin and others hit record highs in the fall but have slumped sharply since.
Franklin Templeton has been focused on crypto assets for some time. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Franklin “made an early entry into crypto in 2018 and has assembled a digital-assets team of more than 50 people.”
250 Digital is led by the former CoinFund executives Christopher Perkins and Seth Ginns.
Franklin Templeton has more than $1.7 trillion in assets under management, according to the company, but just $1.8 billion in its digital assets group.
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.
“Crypto’s institutional moment has arrived, and Franklin Crypto will help our global clients navigate this complex and rapidly evolving asset class by delivering the expertise, knowledge and digital asset products that meet their sophisticated investment needs,” Perkins said in a statement.
The new crypto arm will offer strategies that appeal to pensions, sovereign-wealth funds and other institutional investors, according to the Wall Street Jornal report.
Traditional wealth management and financial advice firms have been moving rapidly into the crypto space, perhaps taking their cue from the Trump administration’s support of digital assets.
For example, Bank of America at the end of last year said it was approving a 1% to 4% advisor-endorsed allocation to certain digital assets beginning early next year for clients of its Merrill, Bank of America Private Bank, and Merrill Edge platforms.
Demand for digital assets from retail investors is likely to keep increasing.
Roughly one-third, 32%, of financial advisors invested in crypto for client accounts in 2025, up from 22% in 2024, according to the Bitwise/VettaFi 2026 Benchmark Survey of Financial Advisor Attitudes Toward Crypto Assets released earlier this year.
It’s the highest allocation in the eight-year history of the survey, which included responses from 299 financial advisors from a variety of business and employment models.
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