T. Rowe Price Launches Multi-Crypto ETF Including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP

T. Rowe Price launched TKNZ, the first actively managed crypto ETF, where five managers pick between 5 and 15 coins rather than tracking a fixed index.

TKNZ underweights Bitcoin at 41% versus its 55% market share while giving XRP three times its proportional weighting in the fund.

Hyperliquid, up roughly 150% this year, earned 10 times its market share in TKNZ, making it the fund's boldest momentum-driven overweight.

TKNZ charges 0.75% a year until May 31, 2027, then 0.90%, against 0.25% for BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF.

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For 89 years, T. Rowe Price has been the definition of careful money. The firm manages about $1.9 trillion, most of it in retirement accounts and pension plans, and it built that business by staying away from anything that looks like a gamble. On Thursday, July 16, that same firm launched a crypto fund on NYSE Arca holding Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC), Ethereum (CRYPTO:ETH), XRP (CRYPTO:XRP), and more.

The fund trades under the ticker TKNZ, and it is the first crypto ETF where a team of managers picks the coins and decides how much of each to hold, rather than tracking a single coin or following a fixed index. So why is a firm this cautious choosing crypto by hand, how much of each coin did it buy, and what does that mean for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP?

An ETF is a fund you buy like a share. Rather than opening an account on a crypto exchange, moving money into it, and holding the coins yourself, you buy a slice of a fund that does all of that for you. It appears in your normal brokerage account next to your stocks, and you can sell it the same way you'd sell a stock.

Every crypto ETF on the market works one of two ways. Most ETFs hold a single coin, so a Bitcoin ETF buys Bitcoin and nothing else, and your money tracks only BTC. The other ETF types hold a basket of coins, and the size of each holding is decided by how big that coin is. These are called passive or index ETFs, because they follow a fixed rule rather than anyone's judgment. Every crypto has a total value, and the fund copies those proportions exactly.

Bitcoin is about 55% of all crypto by value, so it gets about 55% of the fund, and a coin worth 1% of the market gets 1% of the fund. T. Rowe Price has now built the first crypto ETF that works differently. The ETF trades under the ticker TKNZ, and it holds between five and 15 cryptocurrencies at a time—and five managers decide which coins get in and how much money each one receives. They can add to a coin that's running, cut one they think has gone too far, or sell out of it entirely as their research changes.

The firm says the fund is built to catch momentum-driven rallies and rotations between crypto assets, which is a polite way of saying the team will chase whatever is working. TKNZ charges 0.75% a year, and that's a discounted rate running until May 31, 2027, after which it rises to 0.90%. BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF charges 0.25%, so users are paying roughly three times as much for the same fund structure.

The fund owns the actual coins rather than futures contracts, with a crypto bank called Anchorage Digital holding them. There's also no leverage or staking yet, although the prospectus leaves room to add it later. The SEC cleared the fund in June, and it began trading on July 16 with about $15 million.

T. Rowe Price was founded in 1937 by Thomas Rowe Price Jr., the investor credited with pioneering growth investing. The firm built its business managing retirement money through patient, research-heavy stock picking, and it kept that approach even through the decade when cheap index funds took over the industry. T. Rowe Price has always picked its investments by hand.

So when the firm finally moved on crypto, it didn't copy the passive trackers everyone else built. Blue Macellari, who runs the fund, said at launch that active management plays "an incredibly meaningful role" in an asset class this volatile.

Macellari has led the firm's digital assets desk since 2022, and her four co-managers bring 60 years of investing experience between them. T. Rowe Price launched a crypto index in October 2025 as a test run, then filed for TKNZ the same month, while the crypto market was crashing around it.

Bitcoin has fallen roughly 45% over the past year, and most firms don't launch a crypto product into a market like that. Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas said the timing was deliberate, with T. Rowe Price waiting for the dust from October's selloff to settle before going live.

The fund's opening portfolio puts 40.75% in Bitcoin and 18.42% in Ethereum, with BNB at 11.01%, Solana at 9.44%, and XRP at 9.37%. Hyperliquid takes 6.45%, Stellar gets 3%, and Dogecoin rounds out the crypto holdings at 1.28%, alongside slivers of the USDC stablecoin and cash.