00:00Adam, I want to come to you first because Tim and I were just talking earlier about the price action
00:04in Bitcoin and how it has really taken a turn for the worse.
00:08Last October was a high watermark for Bitcoin. And since then, it has struggled to hold on to some key
00:13levels like $100,000, $90,000, $80,000 and today $70,000.
00:18So I just want to start with you in terms of looking at Bitcoin. How would you describe or characterize
00:22market sentiment on Bitcoin right now?
00:26Yeah, I mean, it seems to be possibly a technical sell-off. It doesn't seem to be any kind of
00:30particular sentiment attached to it.
00:33So it could be somebody selling like a bankruptcy liquidation or a seizure that isn't visible in the market.
00:40And I think the interesting technical is the 200-week moving average, which goes up over time. It's currently around
00:48$61,000.
00:49So interesting to see that. And of course, the recent market bottom was also $60,000 going back a few
00:56months ago.
00:57Yeah, Jenny, I want you to come on in on this and just talk a little bit about how this
01:00price action has affected institutional adoption.
01:02As we mentioned a few minutes ago, Bitcoin ETF flows have seen outflows for a record 11 straight days.
01:07Sentiment has shifted.
01:10I'm just curious what you're seeing or hearing rather from institutions right now in terms of their interest around Bitcoin.
01:18So my my instinct is if there's price action on there, that's going to be much more of a retail
01:23institutions tend to be a little bit longer term once they've made a decision to to have it as part
01:30of their portfolio.
01:31They'll ride through the volatility. And what we've seen really in 2026, I'd say, is a broader interest.
01:39You know, we announced the acquisition of 250 digital.
01:43Yeah. And what's been interesting, it's a it's a crypto venture fund is we've had a couple of institutional clients
01:49who have said now that this is going to be owned by Franklin Templeton, we're comfortable.
01:52We've wanted to allocate to the space, but we wanted to have a bigger firm kind of behind it.
01:57So I think you're seeing much more interest from the institutional players to get into the space.
02:02You've got institutional demand, you've got retail demand, you've also got corporate demand for Bitcoin.
02:08Michael Saylor's strategy, as we were reporting earlier, pursued this maximalist playbook that basically made it the biggest corporate holder
02:16of Bitcoin.
02:17But as we noted, the company sold two and a half million dollars of Bitcoin after selling almost 12 million
02:22dollars of the token in late 2022.
02:25Obviously, two and a half million dollars is nothing when you compare to its overall holdings of about 60 billion
02:30dollars in Bitcoin.
02:31But, Adam, this comes at a pretty sensitive moment for Bitcoin and market psychology.
02:36Is Bitcoin maximalism dead?
02:41No, he presaged it by talking about it on recent interviews.
02:46And it was really just to convey to the market that they have the ability to pay, or it doesn't
02:53even pay the monthly interest rate on the stretch instrument.
02:58But to convey to the market that, look, you can sell Bitcoin and pay dividends with it.
03:04You may recall a while back they sold a lot of shares at the market and kept the cash to
03:09demonstrate to the market that they had a lot of cash to pay the dividends.
03:12And now they wanted to show that they could pay the dividends using Bitcoin.
03:17And indeed, they used that cash or a good part of it to buy back one of the convertible notes
03:23and reduce their debt ratio.
03:24So I think it's just, you know, trying to show the market how to value Bitcoin, that Bitcoin is liquid,
03:31and therefore to not need to keep that kind of cash reserve around in future.
03:36And, Adam, I bring this up because you're a co-founder and CEO of a treasury company yourself, Blockstream.
03:41Have you sold any Bitcoin?
03:43When would it be appropriate to do so if you haven't?
03:48So there's two companies, Blockstream's private company also has Bitcoin on a balance sheet.
03:52And Bitcoin's done a treasury, which is a separate company, and that's still waiting regulator approval, priced on close.
03:58So we're not in a position to do any actions at this point.
04:02All right, Jenny, I want to bring you back in here and talk more about this acquisition of 250 Digital,
04:08use tokenized money market fund to partially settle an M&A transaction.
04:12It sounds like it's proof of concept or I think something much bigger, as people have spoken about on our
04:19program over the last couple of months.
04:21Is the endgame that all of Franklin Templeton's corporate transactions, fund launches, acquisitions, partners, settlements eventually run on chain?
04:30Look, I believe that the financial services system will ultimately run on blockchanges because the technology creates tremendous efficiencies.
04:41You know, these guys, they're very big in the space and they were happy to receive their tokenized money market
04:47fund, which, by the way, we're about to celebrate five years.
04:50You know, the Benji product now has, it is now qualified as collateral on Kraken, so hedge funds can use
04:58it as collateral.
04:59Who are trading there on Undo, we announced a partnership with MoonPay today where you can swap from stable coins
05:08into the yield bearing tokenized money market fund, the Benji fund, and then back out.
05:13So to me, it's just the utility of being able to access a yield bearing, you know, government backed security
05:20money market fund in the crypto world.
05:24And there's a need for that. I mean, if you're a hedge fund, you want to earn whatever yield you
05:29can on the collateral that you have to post for your transactions.
05:32You know, I want to follow up on that because we are going to speak with Danelle Dixon over at
05:36Stellar in just a few minutes.
05:37You mentioned Benji. You launched that on Stellar five years ago. It was the first U.S. registrants fund on
05:42a public blockchain.
05:44Nobody on Wall Street was paying attention. Now it's nearly $2 billion in assets under management.
05:48We just heard from DTCC announcing it's putting tokenized Russell 1000 stocks, ETFs, and treasuries on Stellar, too.
05:56What was the foresight or the luck in choosing Stellar in terms of, like, how they've committed since then or
06:04how they've performed, rather, since then and why you committed to them five years ago?
06:08Yeah, first of all, it's been – well, first of all, I think we're at $2.6 billion in assets
06:14now on Benji.
06:16Stellar, it's been a great partnership. Part of it was the ability to meet certain regulatory requirements of the SEC
06:23that the chain allowed us to do,
06:25one of which was to, you know, if you had to adjust a transaction, you could actually do it. So
06:31that was important.
06:32And really, the foresight – and it ended up being very fortunate because gas fees on Stellar are quite cheap
06:38versus some of the other chains, and that's really important.
06:42But for us, the foresight was just the technology being able to – you know, the fact that you have
06:48a source of truth and you don't have the delay in data.
06:53There's so much reconciliation that goes on in financial services.
06:56And here with blockchain, we looked at it and we said, wow, we're going to be able to reduce all
07:00our costs if we can just have a single source of truth on a transaction,
07:04as well as the nature of a smart contract. So we started out in thinking, OK, money market fund's a
07:08good place to start.
07:09We now have tokenized ETFs, traditional ETFs that are listed on Kraken's exchange.
07:15So you can get in your wallet the Franklin Tevelton tokenized. We have, I think, six of them tokenized there.
07:22Adam, I want to just follow up and get your thoughts here on DTCC announcing that it's putting tokenized Russell
07:271000 stocks,
07:28ETFs and treasuries on Stellar, this public blockchain. Is it at all frustrating to you that Wall Street's first major
07:35move on to public blockchain infrastructure
07:38is happening on Stellar and not something like Bitcoin's liquid network?
07:44Well, I think that in practice, they are flexible in technology.
07:49So we'll see other chains being used, not tracking it closely, but I think that's already the case.
07:53So, you know, just going back to the previous topic of price action and Bitcoin's standard treasury.
08:00So from one point of view, well, usually Bitcoiners are interested in the price going up or Bitcoin's standard treasury.
08:07It actually enables us to buy more Bitcoin once upon regulator approval.
08:12OK, thank you for clarifying that. Really appreciate it.
08:15Jenny, I want to get your take here on overall institutional demand and interest in crypto
08:20and how that's evolved since what we saw in October, which really felt like a breaking point for Bitcoin.
08:25It had gotten to record highs. And since then, it's been a struggle.
08:29Have you seen a noticeable, a significant level of change in interest from institutional investors?
08:38So I have to be honest, I don't necessarily follow Bitcoin as much.
08:43They're definitely, as I already said, once institutions have made a decision to be in the space
08:47and you see central banks for a variety of reasons also choosing to hold gold and Bitcoin on their balance
08:53sheets.
08:54And so, you know, they don't they don't tend to react as quickly to price fluctuation once they've made the
09:02investment decision.
09:03I think what's been interesting about 2026 is I feel like it's a year where you're really seeing TradFi and
09:09DeFi come together.
09:10For the first time, we are talking to multinational banks, wire houses that clients have come to them and said,
09:18we want to hold our our crypto assets in our account here.
09:22Why should we have to have an account on a crypto exchange? We'd like to see it all in one
09:25place.
09:25And so they're trying to talk about, all right, how do we set up this infrastructure, add wallet capability?
09:30How do we do research on these these coins?
09:33That conversation a year ago didn't happen.
09:36It is now happening in every major institution that we're talking to.
09:40Hey, Adam, I just want to finish with you and we can't, you know, chat with you and not mention
09:44Satoshi.
09:45And this whole investigation from John Kerry Rue at The New York Times a couple of months ago, it has
09:50been a couple of months since then.
09:51We did learn a few weeks ago that Kerry Rue has inked this three million dollar book deal to write
09:56about the investigation into what he says is unmasking you as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.
10:02I'm wondering just in the last couple of months if you've sufficiently in your view been able, you know, you've
10:07denied it.
10:07You've denied it to us several times. If you've been able to sufficiently sort of shake that or if it's
10:11following you around right now, wherever you go.
10:15Well, it wasn't the first time. So there was the HBO documentary Money Electric previous year.
10:22And, you know, there's ongoing interest in kind of, you know, Genesis mystery from Bitcoin of who the originator was.
10:31And so it's very hard to prove a negative is the fundamental problem.
10:36So, you know, beyond assuring people, it's not.
10:38Now, of course, in the absence of information, people are, you know, going to write their own story.
10:42And there are, you know, various people who are active pre-Bitcoin or developed technology that Bitcoin uses or talking
10:50about how to design something like Bitcoin before, which is true for myself.
10:54And so people are just looking in their, you know, sort of investigation or speculation as to who was involved
11:02and then sort of making a list of the pros and cons, right?
11:05And I think as it is, you can do that for, you know, dozens of people approximately equally plausibly.
11:12So it's all sort of inconclusive in effect because the trail is very cold as Stoshi stopped participating in the
11:20forums already in 2011, which is, you know, 15 years ago at this point.
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