Wall Street asset manager Franklin Templeton is considering launching a new altcoin-focused crypto fund. 

The private fund would be catered to institutional investors, and may also potentially offer staking rewards, according to a report Thursday in The Information citing people with direct knowledge of the plans.

Franklin Templeton, the American finance behemoth that manages some $1.6 trillion in assets, is no stranger to crypto. The firm has been involved in digital assets since 2018; it launched a spot Bitcoin ETF in January, and will be among the first issuers of recently-approved spot Ethereum ETFs. 

By diving beyond those two blue-chip cryptocurrencies into the realm of altcoins, the Wall Street titan appears to be signaling a comfort with the types of tokens that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has long classified as unregistered securities.

But Thursday's move comes, crucially, in the wake of the SEC’s abrupt approval of spot Ethereum ETFs last month—despite the regulator having allegedly classified Ethereum internally as an unregistered security for over a year. Experts took the about-face to signal the proverbial opening of a floodgate, and predicted that other altcoins will soon become integrated with American financial markets. 

Edited by Andrew Hayward