Japan’s SBI Holdings is planning to create a joint venture investment company with U.S. asset manager Franklin Templeton with a focus on digital assets. SBI will have a 51% stake to Franklin Templeton’s 49%.
The Nikkei first reported the news saying it was in preparation for offering digital asset ETFs in Japan following the launch of spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs in the United States. Franklin Templeton has ETFs for both cryptocurrencies and is eyeing a potential Solana ETF. In Europe there’s a staked Solana ETP managed by 21Shares with a market capitalization of more than $1 billion, making it Europe’s third largest crypto ETP.
Frankling Templeton and SBI are two of the incumbents that are most engaged with web3, not just blockchain.
SBI set up an umbrella group SBI Digital Asset Holdings to manage some of its digital asset initiatives. Separately, it operates a Bitcoin miner SBI Crypto which at one point made up a significant proportion of Bitcoin’s hash rate, currently accounting for just over 2%. SBI also runs a crypto exchange SBI VC Trade and owns one of the largest international cryptocurrency market makers, B2C2. On the tokenization side, it launched the first Japanese secondary market for security tokens, ODX START.
Franklin Templeton was the first major incumbent to launch a tokenized money market fund FOBXX on a public blockchain in 2021. It started by using the Stellar blockchain but extended it to Polygon, Aptos, Arbitrum and Avalanche. It was the largest on chain money market fund (AUM $402m) until shortly after BlackRock launched BUIDL. However, the asset manager’s interest extends beyond tokenization and it is deeply engaged in cryptocurrency research. In order to understand the area, it operates nodes on a dozen blockchains.