AI agents will become the main catalyst for crypto payments: Franklin Templeton analysis
Artificial intelligence in the form of autonomous agents could become the "killer use case" for blockchain in consumer payments. Franklin Templeton's Head of Digital Assets and Innovation, Sandy Kaul, presented a compelling argument as to why traditional financial infrastructure is not ready for the era of agent-based transactions.
The key difference between AI agents and regular chatbots is their ability not just to respond to queries, but to independently execute chains of actions: paying for API calls, purchasing data, or launching computations. This is precisely where blockchain demonstrates its fundamental advantage. Traditional systems suffer from high fees, settlement delays, and mandatory human involvement. Blockchain, on the other hand, allows for simultaneous recording and settlement of transactions without intermediaries — banks or payment gateways.
Scale of the Future Market
The forecasts are impressive. According to Bain & Company, by 2030, AI agents could account for 15% to 25% of all e-commerce sales in the United States. McKinsey & Company goes even further, estimating the volume of global consumer transactions "orchestrated" by agents at $3–5 trillion. Such a flow will require infrastructure with low fees, high throughput, and instant settlements.
Which Blockchains Are Ready?
Franklin Templeton conducted a comparative analysis of network performance. Bitcoin demonstrates a modest 7 TPS, Ethereum around 75 TPS. However, the leaders in throughput — Aptos (up to 12,933 TPS) and Solana (up to 6,284 TPS) — are already capable of competing with Visa, which typically processes 1,700–10,000 transactions per second. An important difference: Visa records a transaction quickly, but final settlement takes 1–3 business days. Blockchain does this instantly.
According to Kaul, the growth of agent-based payments will directly increase demand for the native assets of the networks where these operations will be conducted. She cites SOL and ETH as examples — tokens that are already becoming the "fuel" for the new economy.
Infrastructure Is Already Being Built
Significantly, the largest players are not waiting for 2030. Coinbase has created the x402 protocol for automatic payments over HTTP, allowing services to accept programmable payments from humans and AI agents without accounts or manual payment. In July, the Linux Foundation announced the launch of the x402 Foundation with 40 participants, including AWS, Google, Mastercard, Visa, Coinbase, Stripe, Circle, and the Solana Foundation. In September, Google introduced the open AP2 protocol, and for Web3 scenarios, added the A2A x402 extension in collaboration with Coinbase, the Ethereum Foundation, and MetaMask.
My expertise: We are witnessing not just a technological trend, but the formation of a new payment paradigm. When Google, Visa, and Coinbase jointly develop standards for AI agent payments, it is a signal that blockchain is ceasing to be a niche tool and is becoming the foundational infrastructure for the economy of autonomous agents. Investors should closely monitor high-throughput networks — they will be the beneficiaries of this transition.