According to reports from Franklin Templeton, the $1.5 trillion asset manager is suggesting that investors chasing artificial intelligence growth should look beyond traditional AI stocks. The firm's head of digital assets, Sandy Kaul, contends that cryptocurrencies and altcoins may be key to capturing the potential of agentic AI. As reported by Franklin Templeton, Kaul argues that agentic AI could become the 'killer' use case that drives blockchain adoption, fundamentally changing how investors approach AI-related investments. The institutional backing from a major asset manager provides significant credibility to the agentic AI thesis, with Franklin Templeton projecting agentic commerce at $3 to $5 trillion by 2030, with agents driving 15 to 25% of US e-commerce. This strategic shift comes as the broader cryptocurrency market shows signs of recovery, with Bitcoin hitting an all-time high of $126,198 in October 2025 before settling near $66,000 currently, indicating that the building blocks for a recovery are already falling into place.
As reported by Franklin Templeton, Kaul's thesis centers on how AI agents will conduct transactions. Autonomous software will make constant micropayments for compute, data, and services, but standard card networks charge roughly 2% to 3% plus a flat fee per payment. These costs make tiny machine payments impractical. Blockchains can settle sub-cent transactions in seconds and automatically record them, making them ideally suited for AI agent activities. According to Kaul, agentic AI will likely need to rely on crypto technologies and blockchains as these rails are ideally suited for these use cases. The report emphasizes that auditability alone is not enough, as by the time a bad transaction is recorded, the money has already moved, making verification before execution a crucial component for secure blockchain transactions.
The agentic AI market is already showing significant development, with major platforms implementing autonomous trading capabilities. Robinhood launched AI-powered investing tools in May that allow agents to trade stocks and make purchases for users, with CEO Vlad Tenev stating that AI agents will eventually rival human traders. OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to build increasingly autonomous systems that can navigate software and complete complex tasks independently. Unlike generative AI, which creates content in response to prompts, agentic AI is built to complete tasks with little human input, including booking travel, comparing prices, purchasing computing power, retrieving data, or managing software workflows on behalf of users. This shift represents a fundamental change in how AI systems operate, moving from human-guided to autonomous decision-making capabilities.
The agentic AI and blockchain convergence thesis has gained additional credibility through alignment with industry leaders. Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire has argued that AI agents and blockchain represent a single technological shift rather than two separate developments. In a recent paper, Allaire stated that AI is driving the cost of knowledge work toward zero while blockchain and programmable digital money are doing the same for payments, settlement and coordination. He envisions that as businesses rely more heavily on specialized AI agents, those agents will become economic actors that buy services, hire other agents, and exchange value autonomously. AI-native companies could increasingly operate on-chain, with tokens representing ownership and governance, while software pricing shifts from monthly subscriptions to pay-per-task models as AI agents become both buyers and sellers of digital services.
The investment opportunity remains largely forward-looking, as reported by Franklin Templeton. McKinsey estimates agentic commerce could orchestrate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in revenue by 2030. If a meaningful share of those transactions runs on blockchain networks, demand for the cryptocurrencies powering those ecosystems could rise, potentially strengthening the investment case for digital assets beyond traditional AI stocks. However, the report acknowledges significant liquidity risks, noting that Wood Protocol has no trading history before this week and TVL sits at just $421,100 compared to its $27 million market cap. The analysis warns that a handful of large sells could move this price a lot faster than the chart's recent smoothness suggests, making thin liquidity a key risk factor for altcoin investments in this space. For investors, Kaul argues that AI portfolios have largely focused on public technology companies building models and infrastructure, but if autonomous AI agents become a meaningful part of the economy, blockchain networks and the cryptocurrencies that power them could emerge as another way to gain exposure to AI's next stage of growth.
