Franklin Templeton Says Agentic AI Is Crypto’s ‘Killer Use Case’

Sandy Kaul, Head of Digital Property and Innovation at Franklin Templeton, has a message for anybody who thinks shopping for Nvidia inventory covers their AI publicity: It does not.

Kaul printed a paper Tuesday arguing that agentic AI—software program that acts, pays, and decides in your behalf with out checking with you at each step—will run on crypto rails, not Wall Avenue ones. Franklin Templeton manages almost $1.8 trillion in belongings.



“Blockchain can be pivotal in permitting agentic AI to appreciate its potential for shopper transactions, and the expansion of agentic AI is more likely to turn out to be the ‘killer’ use case that drives blockchain adoption,” the asset supervisor mentioned in its put up.

The case activates what AI brokers really do, Franking Templeton argues. AI brokers transcend what a easy chatbot can do—brokers can store, guide, and pay for issues autonomously, as soon as given permissions by the consumer. A report by the AI advisory agency Capgemini cited within the paper describes the shift as shifting AI “from a reactive, conversational chatbot to an autonomous system that may understand its setting, devise a plan, and execute multi-step duties to realize high-level targets with out fixed human supervision.”

That’s what agentic AI does. Execute issues autonomously as an alternative of simply spitting out data.

Per a Bain & Firm forecast, additionally cited by Kaul, “AI brokers are anticipated to account for 15% to 25% of all U.S. e-commerce gross sales by 2030.”

Conventional fee networks—constructed for human-scale, human-speed commerce—cannot deal with the mathematics required to energy a world through which agentic AI turns into a social phenomenon. There can be too many transactions for banks to course of on time.

Blockchain networks, being distributed ledgers that file and settle transactions concurrently with out a financial institution within the center, can.

“Whereas bitcoin solely processes ~7 transactions per second and Ethereum ~75 transactions, newer high-speed chains are recording most speeds starting from 12,933 transactions per second (TPS) on the Aptos chain, 6,284 TPS on Solana and three,252 TPS on BNB Chain,” the put up reads. “These transaction speeds are on par with the Visa community that processes 1,700 to 10,000 transactions per second in regular operations.”

“But, even this comparability is deceptive. Blockchains each file and settle their transactions in that TPS window whereas the Visa community solely information a transaction. Settlement on the Visa community takes 1-3 enterprise days.”



That velocity hole issues when your software program is making hundreds of micropayments per hour. Coinbase already launched instruments that allow AI brokers commerce and pay autonomously. Google unveiled a fee protocol for brokers in 2025, backed by the Ethereum Basis.

The x402 Basis—40 organizations together with Visa, Mastercard, and AWS constructing open fee rails for AI—launched formally on July 14. The protocol revives a forgotten HTTP standing code from 1991, initially reserved for internet funds that by no means materialized, and places it to work letting software program pay software program instantly over the web.

If every agent buys information, compute, and API entry utilizing a blockchain’s native token (the cryptocurrency that powers transactions on that particular community), demand for cash like Solana and Ethereum may observe quantity.

Kaul’s conclusion is direct: “I imagine what’s going to turn out to be more and more clear in coming years is that so as to seize the worth of decentralized networks and companies, traders might want to purchase the cryptocurrencies and alt cash being issued by these entities.”

Agentic commerce—AI methods transacting autonomously on behalf of people, from shopping for cloud compute to reserving flights—is projected at $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030, in line with a report by McKinsey & Firm.