TL;DR:
- Jenny Johnson said Wall Street’s blockchain hesitation directly reflects a threat to profitable fee-based transaction models, not just slow technology adoption.
- She cited Franklin Templeton’s Benji fund on Stellar, saying public blockchain processing was dramatically cheaper than legacy systems for large transaction volumes.
- Johnson said custodians and banks still have a future because most investors want trusted third parties, regulated custody and low-cost compliance rails as digital assets expand further.
Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson has put a blunt label on Wall Street’s hesitation around crypto: the technology threatens some of the industry’s most profitable plumbing. Speaking at Proof of Talk in Paris, Johnson said public blockchains challenge fee-based models built around intermediating transactions. The disruption is aimed at the toll-takers, not merely at outdated software, because smart contracts can settle activity instantly and reduce the role of third parties that historically collected fees for moving, confirming and managing transactions. Her point made the debate less about ideology and more about margins today more directly.
Blockchain efficiency pressures Wall Street’s margins
Johnson used Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money market fund, Benji, to show why traditional firms are moving onchain despite discomfort. The fund has operated on public networks including Stellar, where she said transaction costs were dramatically cheaper than legacy rails. She cited roughly $1.30 per transaction across 50,000 transactions on the old system, compared with about $1.13 to run on Stellar. The cost comparison makes resistance harder to defend, even for firms whose economics depend on legacy transaction layers, manual reconciliation and profitable operational friction internally for years.
That tension helps explain why adoption can look both inevitable and strangely slow. Franklin Templeton, a $1.74 trillion asset manager, recently expanded its digital asset strategy through a MoonPay partnership that lets institutional investors move between stablecoins and the firm’s tokenized money market fund through an onchain workflow. The industry is building bridges while fearing what crosses them, since the same rails that lower costs for clients can weaken businesses built around custody, settlement and compliance intermediation. In other words, blockchain is not only a product upgrade, but a revenue challenge for incumbents.
Johnson still argued that banks and custodians have a future. While Blockstream CEO Adam Back emphasized bitcoin’s ability to support self-custody and financial privacy without institutional partners, Johnson said most people and enterprises want trusted third parties for peace of mind. The next phase may be regulated blockchain finance rather than pure disintermediation, with investors seeking standard, low-cost compliance rails and custody layers as wealth moves into digital assets. The paradox is clear: Wall Street may fear blockchain because it compresses profits, but it may also need blockchain to remain competitive as clients demand faster, cheaper and more transparent access to markets over time.
