Franklin Templeton's Sandy Kaul: $3B onchain now, aiming for $5B-plus by year end

Franklin Templeton's onchain build-up and the institutional FOMO thesis

Sandy Kaul, Head of Digital Assets and Innovation at Franklin Templeton, says the firm has been "thrilled that the markets have been a little low key" because it has used the quiet period to accumulate talent and build out its crypto investing team, with "exciting launches next year." She frames this as the early stage of what she calls one of the best investment opportunities "for people's portfolios probably for the next two generations," noting institutions remain "extremely underexposed" relative to their exposure to AI.

On concrete numbers, Kaul says Franklin Templeton is currently "just over 3 billion" in onchain assets, with a goal to get "well over five" by year end and potentially double or triple that figure by the same time next year. She credits the firm's 80-year global brand combined with being digitally native, pointing out it has run a tokenized fund "24/7 since April of 2021." A key operational lesson she shares is that regulated products require fiat cash for subscriptions and redemptions even though "in crypto everyone subscribes and redeems to investments using stable coins or crypto." She also highlights that Franklin Templeton's money market fund now calculates interest intraday, down to specific hours and seconds, which she says means "there is no such thing as idle capital now."

Strong hands, compounding sectors, and the KYC unlock

Kaul argues the past year has washed weak-handed speculators out of the market, leaving "strong hands" who have better entry points and are less likely to be shaken out. She says investors who wait until a bull run is obvious "put yourself at a real disadvantage," and that patience now will be rewarded later. The host agrees institutional capital is "stickier, less swayed by volatility," which Kaul endorses fully, adding that attention paid to prediction markets and tokenized securities has caused people to "ignore crypto," which she says is a mistake: "this is the time to position."

Looking past Bitcoin, Kaul names decentralized digital identity, agentic AI with micropayments, and post-quantum security infrastructure as areas she sees as ripe for exponential compounding. On identity specifically, she describes advocating, as former co-chair of the CFTC's digital asset subcommittee, for "event-based KYC AML" tied to a user's signing key, replacing static checks that firms today might only update "once every 18 months." She says achieving composability of KYC/AML across chains requires shared smart contract templates and standards, which she argues is the unlock needed to open up "the entire 150 trillion of assets that trade globally," as the industry moves from firms like Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, and Fidelity each building their own infrastructure toward a shared network model.