The Princess of TradFi Quietly Built an $800 Million On-Chain Empire — But She’s No Match for the Knight of Late Capitalism
While everyone is hypnotised by Bitcoin ETFs and halving cycles, Jenny Johnson — the Princess of TradFi — has been busy building a blockchain empire right under your nose.
But let’s get the story straight. Jenny didn’t build Franklin Templeton from scratch. She inherited the kingdom from her father, Charles Johnson, who forged Franklin into a Wall Street powerhouse over decades. When Charles stepped aside, Jenny stepped up — determined not to let the old fortress crumble in the coming digital wave.
In 2021, she launched FOBXX, the first tokenised U.S. money market fund. Nearly $800 million now moves across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base, and Stellar, with real-time yield accrual and near-instant settlement. It’s what DeFi always promised, but scaled by the legacy behemoths.
FOBXX is built for institutions — the corporate treasuries who can’t wait three days for money to settle or leave millions frozen in a collateral pit while batch files get reconciled overnight. Jenny saw it coming, and moved first in TradFi to rebuild the rails.
But here’s the truth: even the Princess of TradFi is no match for the Knight of Late Capitalism.
Michael Saylor.
When Microsoft needed financial advice, they didn’t ring up Franklin Templeton. They called Saylor. The same Saylor you know from my other writing — the patron saint of Bitcoin, the ruthless operator who front-ran an entire financial system by pivoting his corporate balance sheet while everyone else was still reading the manual.
He showed the world how to move billions on-chain, before TradFi even noticed the chain was the future. Jenny Johnson, for all her legacy muscle, is still catching up to the man who saw the entire collapse of collateralized illusions coming from a mile away.
That’s the difference between inheriting a kingdom and conquering one.
And if you think Franklin Templeton’s $800 million is the only institutional move that matters, look deeper:
Apollo just crossed $100 million in tokenised private credit. Their Diversified Credit Fund (ACRED), built on Securitize, is fully on-chain and backed by tangible credit assets. No speculative yield games — just tokenised credit, scaled on blockchain rails.
But that’s only half the signal. Apollo also invested in Plume, a Layer 1 designed from scratch for real-world assets. They aren’t just playing inside vaults — they’re picking where the vaults will live next.
That’s what I’ve been calling Vaultseason all year — and it’s already institutionally funded.
Jenny sees it. Apollo sees it. Saylor saw it before they even picked up the scent.
So ask yourself:
Do you want to fight for scraps in the next meme rally, or front-run the infrastructure of a financial system that’s being rebuilt in real time?
I’m breaking down the Vaultseason thesis, why Franklin Templeton may still be too slow, and how Plume could reshape TradFi’s power map — all over on Substack. If you want to stay ahead of the headlines, subscribe free here.
The Princess of TradFi Quietly Built an $800 Million On-Chain Empire — But She’s No Match for the… was originally published in The Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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