Recently, Sandy Kaul, a Senior VP at Franklin Templeton, shared her thoughts on blockchain technology and crypto, and more specifically on institutional adoption.

Franklin Resources, Inc. [NYSE: BEN) “is an American multinational holding company that, together with its subsidiaries, is referred to as Franklin Templeton; it is a global investment firm founded in New York City in 1947 as Franklin Distributors, Inc.”

On 19 April 2022, Franklin Templeton issued a press release to announce “the appointment of Sandy Kaul as Senior Vice President, to provide advisory consulting and thought leadership as part of the Franklin Templeton Institute.” The press release went on to say that Kaul would “deliver actionable intelligence and insights on the future of the investment and wealth management industry for the firm and its clients.”

Kaul’s comments were made during an interview with Real Vision Co-Founder and CEO during an interview recorded on 16 November 2022 and released on 2 December 2022.

According to a report by The Daily Hodl, Kaul said:

“I think what happened in the hedge fund industry up to and post 2008 really is instructive here… We saw almost $2 trillion in assets come in in a three year period, so a huge influx of money, interestingly, taking the industry close to $3 trillion in assets, which is right about where the digital space got to before the last collapse...

Then what you saw was a real turnover of the underlying investment base. And what we’re seeing now and what we’re picking up on now in the digital asset space is this same turnover. We’re hearing increasingly, and seeing, institutions replacing the retail money that’s being withdrawn, and institutional money starting to account for larger and larger shares of digital asset holdings...

Institutions are long-term holders. They wait for these kinds of wipeouts to come in and establish positions, and they will wait for the market to turn. To be very clear, it’s usually the most market-leading institutions that are really looking to be very creative in their portfolios and who have really shifted to this factor-driven model and realized that this digital asset space is bringing in a whole new set of what we’re calling ‘crowd factors’ at Franklin Templeton that they have never been able to get exposure to in the space.

On 19 October 2022, Jenny Johnson, President and CEO of Franklin Templeton, said during an interview on CoinDesk TV:

We have to be in the space. It’s a complicated space, and we probably won’t see the payouts in the space for five-plus years, but you have to understand it to ensure that you’re developing products that make sense.

On 8 September 2022, Franklin Templeton announced “the introduction of two new digital asset separately managed account (SMA) strategies through Eaglebrook Advisors’ (Eaglebrook) platform, a leading digital asset SMA platform operated by an SEC-registered adviser.”

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