Franklin Templeton says proxy AI is the ‘killer use case’ for cryptocurrencies

Sandy Cowell, head of digital assets and innovation at Franklin Templeton, has a message for anyone who thinks buying Nvidia stock covers their exposure to artificial intelligence: It doesn’t.

Cowell published a paper on Tuesday arguing that agentic AI — software that acts, pays and decides on your behalf without checking in with you at every step — will run on the tracks of cryptocurrencies, not the tracks of Wall Street. Franklin Templeton manages approximately $1.8 trillion in assets.

“Blockchain will be pivotal in allowing agentic AI to realize its potential in consumer transactions, and the growth of agentic AI is likely to become the ‘killer’ use case that drives blockchain adoption,” Asset Manager He said in his post.

Franking Templeton argues that the issue is about what AI agents actually do. AI agents go beyond what a simple chatbot can do, as agents can shop, book and pay for things autonomously, once they are granted permissions by the user. Report issued by artificial intelligence consulting firm Capgemini The aforementioned paper describes the transition as moving AI “from an interactive chatbot to an autonomous system that can perceive its environment, plan, and execute multi-step tasks to achieve high-level goals without constant human supervision.”

This is what agent AI does. Do things independently rather than just disseminating information.

According to a Bain & Company forecast, also cited by Cowell, “AI agents are expected to account for 15% to 25% of total U.S. e-commerce sales by 2030.”

Traditional payment networks—designed for commerce at a human scale and at a human speed—cannot handle the mathematics required to power a world in which agentic AI becomes a social phenomenon. There will be a lot of transactions that banks will have to process on time.

Blockchain networks, distributed ledgers that record and settle transactions simultaneously without a bank in the middle, can do this.

“While Bitcoin only processes 7 transactions per second and Ethereum 75, the newer high-speed chains are recording peak speeds ranging from 12,933 transactions per second (TPS) on the Aptos chain, 6,284 TPS on Solana, and 3,252 TPS on the BNB chain,” the post said. “These transaction speeds are on par with the Visa network, which processes 1,700 to 10,000 transactions per second in normal operations.”

“However, even this comparison is misleading. Blockchain networks record and settle their transactions in that TPS window, while the Visa network only records the transaction. Settlement on the Visa network takes one to three business days.”

This speed gap is important when your software is making thousands of small payments per hour. Coinbase Tools that have already been launched Which allows AI agents to trade and pay autonomously. Google Payment protocol unveiled For proxies in 2025, supported by the Ethereum Foundation.

The x402 Foundation, 40 organizations including Visa, Mastercard and AWS, working to create open payment paths for AI, officially launched on July 14. The protocol revives a forgotten HTTP status code from 1991, originally intended for web payments that never materialized, and makes it work to allow programs to push programs directly over the Internet.

If each agent purchased data, compute, and API access using the blockchain’s native token (the cryptocurrency that supports transactions on that specific network), the demand for coins like Solana and Ethereum could skyrocket.

Cowell’s conclusion is straightforward: “I think what will become increasingly clear in the coming years is that in order to capture the value of decentralized networks and businesses, investors will need to buy the cryptocurrencies and altcoins issued by those entities.”

Proxy commerce — artificial intelligence systems that transact autonomously on behalf of humans, from cloud computing purchases to flight bookings — is expected to be worth between $3 trillion and $5 trillion by 2030, according to a recent report. a report By McKinsey & Company.