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 lar...