Franklin Templeton Launches EZPZ ETF for Weighted Bitcoin, Ethereum Exposure

What do you get when you combine EZBC and EZET? According to the launch of Franklin Templeton’s Crypto Index ETF, the result is EZPZ.

Representing the ticker name of Franklin Templeton’s newest crypto product listed on the Cboe BZX exchange on Thursday, EZPZ offers investors both Bitcoin and Ethereum exposure.

The product tracks price movements for the two top cryptocurrencies based on CF Benchmark’s Institutional Digital Asset Index, which debuted last year, and focuses on coins “recognized as being in conformance with major financial jurisdictions prevailing capital markets.”

That means that instead of targeting just one cryptocurrency, the index weights top coins by market capitalization. As a result, 82% of a dollar invested in EZPZ would be exposed to Bitcoin’s price, while 18% would be correlated to Ethereum’s performance.

EZPZ’s start follows Franklin Templeton’s introduction of spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs last year. The financial giant, alongside its push into the digital assets space, first launched FOBXX, a tokenized money-market fund, on Polygon and Stellar in 2021.

Roger Bayston, head of digital assets at Franklin Templeton, said in a press release that the fund’s 0.19% expense ratio will make it a cheap way for investors to tap a budding asset class.

“Blockchains are emerging as important utilities for the current and future information and data economies,” he said. “With EZPZ, we’re offering a simple, low-cost way to gain exposure to this growing and important asset class.”

Though Franklin Templeton ranks among the world’s largest asset managers, its Franklin Bitcoin ETF’s (EZBC) $708 million in assets under management (AUM) ranks just ninth among the 11 U.S.-based spot Bitcoin funds currently trading, according to CoinGlass data.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin ETF (IBIT), the dominant fund in the fledgling space, has $56.6 billion in AUM. 

The Franklin Ethereum ETF (EZET), which started trading alongside eight competitors last July, has $34 million in AUM to rank seventh among that group.

Despite lesser adoption for Franklin Templeton’s crypto ETFs, the firm’s digital assets arm is still, perhaps, at the forefront of crypto culture. 

Earlier this week, Franklin Templeton Digital Assets posted a photo on X (formerly known as Twitter) of Benjamin Franklin wearing a hat that closely resembles a uniform at McDonald’s, which Crypto Twitter often portrays as an inevitable job for down-on-their-luck traders when markets are volatile.

“Putting the fries in the bag,” the Wall Street bank said.

Edited by James Rubin