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Investment Giant Franklin Templeton’s CEO Holds Bitcoin, Ether and Other Tokens in Her Portfolio: Report
Jenny Johnson added she believes a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) will be a better way of gaining BTC exposure as opposed to direct investment.
Updated Mar 8, 2024, 6:01 p.m. Published Dec 4, 2023, 12:52 p.m.
Jenny Johnson, the CEO of investment manager Franklin Templeton (BEN), said in an interview with Fortune that she holds bitcoin [BTC], ether [ETH], uniswap [UNI] and sushi [SUSHI] in her portfolio.
She said the investments are “small for [her] overall portfolio.”
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“They’re all standard: ethereum, a little bitcoin, SushiSwap, Uniswap. I have a couple of different things like that,” she said. Johnson has spoken bullishly about the prospects of blockchain technology in disrupting the financial system but referred to bitcoin as a “distraction” from this.
“I can tell you, if bitcoin ever became so big that it became a threat to the U.S. dollar as the reserve currency, the U.S. would limit … the use of bitcoin,” she said at CoinDesk’s Consensus Festival in April this year. “Currencies are very important for governments … to manage their economies. They will not cede their currency to this concept of a global currency.”
Read more: Jenny Johnson Has 76-Year-Old Franklin Templeton Learning Blockchain Tricks
Johnson added that a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) would be a better way of gaining bitcoin exposure than direct investment.
“But I think bitcoin has some challenges. It’s hard to anchor to any kind of investment thesis,” she said .” It tends to be a risk-on/risk-off type of asset. You just want to ensure clients are responsible in allocating bitcoin.”
Franklin Templeton, which has around $1.5 trillion in assets under management, offers an OnChain U.S. Government Money Market Fund (FOBXX), supported on Stella and Ethereum layer 2 blockchain Polygon.
The firm did not immediately respond to CoinDesk’s request for further comment.
Read More: Institutional Traders Split Between Bitcoin, Ether: Bybit Research
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