Franklin Templeton execs: tokenization's biggest winners are equities, not meme coins

Institutions chase real revenue, not meme coins

Seth Ginns, CIO at Franklin Crypto, says the most exciting development he sees is broader institutional interest building around fundamentals rather than speculation. He points to "really good revenue growth" and "value capture in tokens, reasonable multiples" as the draw, arguing this resembles equities investing more than the token speculation institutions have avoided.

"Institutions aren't that excited about investing in memecoins. They're excited about investing in real businesses early in their life cycle in a new secular growth industry." — Seth Ginns

Anthony Pecore, SVP and Director of Digital Asset Management at Franklin Templeton, frames this within what the team calls a "tokenization super cycle." He says tokenized assets like Benji, Franklin's money market fund live since 2021, are increasingly used as collateral, driving usage and KPIs that eventually convert into investable liquid-token assets.

Benji's rocky start and the "table stakes" shift

Pecore recounts internal skepticism when Franklin first tokenized its money market fund, describing "plenty of odd looks" from colleagues. The project moved forward with SEC consultation, and ownership of the fund now exists purely on-chain with no secondary book of records. He says the fund has "proven itself," with many competitors now launching similar tokenized money-market products, making them "table stakes for a lot of asset managers."

Both guests pushed back on a narrative they heard at a recent event describing tokenization as "a path to nowhere." Pecore argues the opposite: tokenization is making finance more capital efficient and unlocking idle capital, with liquidity flowing into protocols and on-chain applications that then re-rate TVLs and addressable markets more broadly.

Where the value will be captured: equities, disaggregation, and wallets

Ginns takes what he calls the contrarian side of the tokenization debate, arguing that assets which already benefit from deep liquidity — equities and treasuries — stand to gain the most from 24/7 markets, more so than pre-IPO tokenized equity, which has drawn more hype. He points to historical examples, like oil liquidity responding to weekend geopolitical events, as evidence markets find liquidity when something material happens.

He also describes a longer-term possibility of "equity disaggregation," where separate profit pools within a company could be traded individually, letting investors bet on one business line while shorting another, such as betting on H100s while shorting Blackwells. Pecore adds that debt structures could follow a similar path, with bonds collateralized by cash flows from specific projects. Looking seven years out, Pecore envisions an account-free world where all assets sit in a single wallet, aided by AI agents, though he stresses "the buck stops with the portfolio manager" as a fiduciary matter. Ginns closes by calling the broader shift a "financial singularity," the convergence of traditional finance and the on-chain economy.