T. Rowe Price defends inclusion of memecoins in active crypto ETF

T. Rowe Price, a firm managing roughly $1.9 trillion in assets, just told the crypto world that Dogecoin belongs in a serious portfolio. And it’s willing to argue about it.

The company’s new actively managed multi-token spot crypto ETF, trading under the ticker TKNZ, launched on July 16 and carries an allocation of approximately 1.26% to Dogecoin, making the Shiba Inu-themed token its sole memecoin holding.

The case for Doge in a suit

Blue Macellari, Head of Digital Assets at T. Rowe Price, laid out the firm’s reasoning in an interview conducted in early August. His argument boils down to something refreshingly simple: if you’re running an actively managed fund and you refuse to even consider an entire category of assets on principle alone, you’re not really doing active management.

Macellari argued that mature memecoins like Dogecoin provide valuable data about how blockchain networks perform under heavy, real-world trading conditions. When millions of retail traders pile into a token simultaneously, you get a stress test for scalability and reliability that no simulation can replicate.

The 1.26% allocation is small enough to be a rounding error in a diversified portfolio, but large enough to be a deliberate statement.

Inside the TKNZ portfolio

The broader construction of TKNZ reveals a fund that leans heavily on the crypto blue chips. Bitcoin and Ethereum together account for roughly 60% of the ETF’s assets. The fund typically holds between 5 and 15 tokens at any given time, with eligible assets including Binance Coin, Solana, and XRP alongside the two dominant players.

T. Rowe Price built a three-layer evaluation framework to guide its investment decisions. The process assesses technology and tokenomics first, then ecosystem adoption, and finally market momentum. Every token in the portfolio has to survive all three filters.

The management fee sits at 0.75%, with a fee waiver that runs through May 2027, giving early investors a window to evaluate the fund’s performance without paying for the privilege of active management.

TKNZ holds the distinction of being the first actively managed multi-token spot crypto ETF to reach the market.

What this means for the crypto ETF landscape

The timing of TKNZ’s launch coincides with the SEC’s ongoing work to establish generic listing standards for crypto ETFs. If those standards materialize as expected, the crypto ETF market could segment into distinct categories: large-cap funds anchored by Bitcoin and Ethereum, small-cap products hunting for alpha in newer tokens, and sector-focused vehicles targeting specific blockchain use cases like DeFi or infrastructure.

For Dogecoin specifically, institutional inclusion at any percentage is a legitimacy milestone. The token was created as satire in 2013. Thirteen years later, it sits inside a product from one of the most established names in asset management.