T. Rowe Price, the Baltimore-based asset manager overseeing $1.9 trillion, has taken a position few of its institutional peers have been willing to touch: a slice of memecoin exposure inside a regulated exchange-traded fund. The firm's Active Crypto ETF, trading under the ticker TKNZ, launched in July as the industry's first actively managed multi-token spot crypto fund, and it currently holds Dogecoin at 1.26% of the portfolio alongside a roughly 60% combined weighting in Bitcoin and Ethereum and a smaller allocation to Binance Coin.
Blue Macellari, T. Rowe Price's head of digital assets and the fund's lead portfolio manager, said excluding an established token purely on principle would have undercut the entire premise of running an actively managed fund. "We wanted true active management," Macellari said. "I'm not going to stand on principle and say, 'I'm going to be an intellectual snob,' and if a memecoin performs, my investors aren't going to participate."
A stress test, not a punchline
Macellari's case for Dogecoin rests less on price momentum and more on what memecoin trading reveals about the network underneath it. "When we look at a chain that has had a memecoin season, it's the closest we can get to seeing a true stress test of a network," she said, arguing that the bursts of retail activity memecoins generate expose whether a blockchain can actually handle high transaction volume without breaking down. "It needs to be cost-effective to send $100 million in stablecoins. But it also needs to be cost-effective to send $3."
That framing draws a line between Dogecoin and the newer wave of speculative tokens still working through SEC review. Other large-cap memecoins have struggled to translate exchange attention into sustained price recovery, which is part of why Macellari repeatedly stressed that TKNZ's current memecoin exposure is limited to tokens “that have been around for years and are among the largest crypto assets by market capitalization” rather than newer, thinner-volume entrants.
Related: US Spot Bitcoin ETFs Extend Inflow Streak to Five Days With $98.85M
Betting on judgment over exclusion
TKNZ's stock-picking approach applies a three-layer framework to every token it considers: the underlying blockchain technology and token economics, the health of the ecosystem built on top of it, and prevailing market momentum. T. Rowe Price is waiving its 0.75% management fee through May 2027, an incentive structure common among newly launched active ETFs competing for early inflows against cheaper passive alternatives.
Other asset managers have been moving in a similar direction. Canary Capital filed for a dedicated spot ETF tracking Pepe in April, giving the SEC until roughly the end of 2026 to rule on it, while the regulator's approval of T. Rowe Price's multi-token structure has already opened the door for Shiba Inu to gain its first regulated U.S. ETF exposure through a similar vehicle. Macellari expects the crypto ETF market to keep splintering into large-cap, small-cap and sector-specific products as the regulatory picture becomes clearer. "We think good judgment and good decision making and active management probably matters more in crypto than any other asset class," she said.
Why memecoins keep finding their way into serious portfolios
The debate T. Rowe Price is wading into is not new, but its size lends it weight that smaller crypto-native funds lack. A $1.9 trillion manager choosing to hold Dogecoin, even at a modest 1.26% weighting, is a different signal than a niche fund doing the same, and it arrives as the SEC works through a queue of single-asset memecoin ETF filings that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Whether that queue clears smoothly or stalls will likely shape how many other traditional managers follow T. Rowe Price's lead into memecoin exposure over the next year.
