Digital Assets

There are unique opportunities and challenges in investing in digital assets. For those interested in this exposure, Franklin Templeton Investment Solutions explores the significance of including digital assets, such as bitcoin, first into benchmarks.

This bulletin is a roundup of some of the most important news and developments in the digital assets space, along with overall activity and price action for the top cryptocurrencies, blockchains and NFTs for the month.

Ethereum is in many ways similar to a company with business revenues, expenses and profits. Ethereum’s native token—Ether (ETH)—may be attractive to own for their potential investment performance and diversification potential versus traditional assets.

The Franklin Templeton Digital Asset team, Escape Velocity and Harvard Business School explore decentralization as a catalyst for disruption in cloud services.

Ethereum’s extensive developer community and its leading role in sectors like decentralized finance, non-fungible tokens and gaming highlight its significant impact on the decentralized digital economy and its position at the forefront of Web3 innovation.

This article examines Bitcoin layers—a decentralized financial system for decentralized money.

The Franklin Templeton Digital Asset team believes cryptocurrencies are much more than the misconceptions that often surround them and as the asset class matures, investors need to move beyond myths and evaluate cryptocurrencies with a nuanced, informed perspective.

This article examines the advantages of Ethereum as a protocol economy and how one could gain exposure to this breakthrough technology asset.

Learn how technological advances have shifted economic dynamics over different eras, and why the protocol economy may represent the most meaningful evolution yet.

In this issue of Disruptive Technology Views, we explore the advantages of public blockchains versus the disadvantages of private blockchains and outline the benefits of decentralized finance over traditional finance as they relate to the security lending markets.

Bitcoin has been at the forefront of the blockchain revolution, changing how investors perceive and hold their assets. This article explores the investment case for bitcoin, focusing on its main facets as a digital commodity and proxy to capture the beta of the emerging protocol economy. Furthermore, it delves into why now might be an opportune time to invest in bitcoin.

Franklin Templeton Digital Assets expects to see continued strength and renewed interest in crypto as an asset class in 2024.

Innovative technologies associated with the crypto domain are beginning to cross over and be piloted as part of the traditional financial infrastructure. Tracking developments in 2024 to determine how rapidly these experiments progress will be critical, according to Franklin Templeton Digital Assets.

The genuine value of crypto and blockchain lies in their ability to reduce the cost of trust via eliminating trusted intermediaries and enabling a trust-minimizing system. This core benefit is further amplified by the additional capabilities and applications these technologies bring.

Though many investors have dismissed the growth potential offered by crypto in the wake of the 2021–2022 sell off and in response to high-profile failures and actions against leading crypto firms, the space has continued to develop. Franklin Templeton Digital Assets discusses what might lie ahead for crypto.

The purpose of this paper is to give non-technical and non-crypto investors an understanding of proofs technology.

Years-to-Profitability (YTP) serves as a crucial metric in evaluating the profitability and sustainability of layer 1 (L1) blockchains.

This primer will provide an overview of Web3 and emerging digital assets, and related terms and technology. Its aim is to equip the reader with the foundational understanding necessary to appreciate the potential impact on the future of the financial industry, and also on economies and society more widely.