T. Rowe Price Wades Into the Crypto Arena

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and now T. Rowe Price’s bighorn sheep is exploring it.

The $1.7 trillion asset manager wants to bring an actively managed crypto index ETF to market, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The behemoth firm’s willingness to enter the nascent crypto market, expanding beyond its traditional, mutual fund roots after almost two years of spot crypto approvals, marks a big step in the acceptance of decentralized finance by legacy mutual fund providers. The fund’s numerous potential holdings also makes it unique: It would hold anywhere from five to 15 coins and aim to outperform the FTSE US Listed Crypto Index.

“[T. Rowe Price] follows a bunch of legacy firms that are already in [crypto], but what’s interesting about theirs is that it’s an index,” said Tyrone Ross, CEO of 401 Financial and Turnqey Labs. “It’s actively managed, you get broad exposure, and it’s from an almost 100-year-old name. That’s a big deal.”

Rowe, Rowe, Rowe Your Crypto Boat.

T. Rowe’s filing comes on the heels of other legacy firms launching their own funds for the first time. Tweedy, Browne, launched its first ETF, COPY, late last year, with others, including Lazard and Praxis, following suit. Meanwhile, BlackRock and Franklin Templeton continue to push for tokenization. The trend is a result of both rampant bleeding across the mutual fund class and an increasingly deregulated crypto environment, Ross said. “It’s one of those things where the regulatory skies have cleared,” he said. “A legacy name, I think that’s going to attract a lot of institutional capital.” A T. Rowe Price spokesperson declined to comment.

Other traditional mutual fund providers that launched ETFs this year include:

• Parnassus, which launched its Parnassus Core Select ETF (PRCS) and the Parnassus Value Select ETF (PRVS) in late 2024.
• First Eagle, which also brought its First Eagle Global Equity ETF (FEGE) and First Eagle Overseas Equity ETF (FEOE) to market late last year.

Crypto? I’ll Pass. Still, there are some notable holdouts, namely Vanguard and Charles Schwab, that have yet to launch their own crypto funds. Schwab said it plans to offer spot bitcoin trading in the first half of 2026, but Vanguard executives have for years spoken out against cryptocurrencies, with former CEO Tim Buckley telling CNBC in 2018 that Vanguard would “never” launch a bitcoin fund. But the future is less certain. “I’m in the camp that I don’t see Vanguard doing it,” Ross said. “But money is a powerful thing.”