Franklin Templeton goes ‘full degen’ with investor note on memecoins

American multinational investment firm Franklin Templeton has published an investor note on memecoins which says while they “have no inherent value or utility,” such tokens could potentially make for fast gains.

The March 14 bulletin titled “The Value Between Meme Coins and Their Native Networks” noted that memecoin price-performance was “akin to a meme going viral on the internet,” and they’ve gained popularity in the last year due to their “unique nature.”

The firm noted that memecoins require little technical knowledge, have low fees compared to other cryptocurrencies, and have the potential for quick profits but have a lot of price volatility.

Dogecoin (DOGE) was the first and largest memecoin by market capitalization, it noted and added DOGE spawned the creation of many more memecoins.

DOGE, which has long been touted by Tesla boss Elon Musk, is the tenth largest cryptocurrency with a market capitalization of $26 billion.

The Shiba-Inu dog-themed token spiked 14% over the past few hours to hit $0.189 after Musk commented that “at some point,” Tesla should enable DOGE payments.

Franklin Templeton went on to state it believes memecoins “have a strong relationship with their native networks,” citing the rise of the Solana-based BONK token in late 2023.

BONK, the first dog-related memecoin on Solana, has skyrocketed more than 5,700% over the past year.

In February, European fintech firm Revolut launched a “Learn and Earn Campaign” for the memecoin, with the extra attention sending BONK to an all-time high in early March.

The total market capitalization of all memecoins is $65.5 billion, about 2.25% of the entire crypto market, according to CoinGecko.

Related: BONK, PEPE and SHIB are a menace to crypto

Franklin Templeton was among the companies that applied for a spot Ether (ETH) exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the United States.

The trillion-dollar asset management firm’s spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETF, the Franklin Bitcoin ETF (EZBC), has lagged behind its rivals in terms of net capital inflows with just $167 million to date, just 1.4% of the total aggregate inflows of the newly launched nine funds, according to Farside Investors.

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