AI agents will become the main driver of crypto payments — analysts at Franklin Templeton
Artificial intelligence in the form of autonomous agents has the potential to radically transform the landscape of consumer payments, and blockchain will serve as the ideal infrastructure for this. This conclusion was reached by experts at Franklin Templeton after analyzing current trends in the digital asset space.
The traditional payment system, despite its maturity, faces a number of fundamental limitations: high fees, lengthy settlement periods, and the mandatory involvement of humans. For scenarios where AI agents will independently conduct microtransactions—paying for data access, computing power, or API calls—these shortcomings become critical.
Why Blockchain Is Key Infrastructure for the Agent Economy
Unlike simple chatbots, agentic AI can perform sequential actions without user intervention. This paves the way for fully automated commerce. According to Bain & Company forecasts, by 2030, AI agents will account for 15% to 25% of all e-commerce sales in the United States. McKinsey offers even more ambitious estimates—agentic commerce will "orchestrate" between $3 and $5 trillion in global consumer transactions by the same date.
Such volumes will require infrastructure capable of processing operations with minimal fees, high throughput, and instant settlement. Blockchain, unlike Visa or Mastercard, can simultaneously record and finalize transactions without an intermediary bank. For comparison: the Bitcoin network processes about 7 TPS, Ethereum approximately 75 TPS, while Aptos demonstrates up to 12,933 TPS and Solana up to 6,284 TPS. Visa typically processes 1,700–10,000 TPS, but final settlement for its transactions takes 1–3 business days.
Which Assets Will Benefit from the Growth of Agent Payments
It is logical to assume that the explosive growth in the number of transactions initiated by AI agents will lead to increased demand for the native assets of the networks where these operations are conducted. Franklin Templeton explicitly points to SOL and ETH as the main beneficiaries of this trend.
Infrastructure Is Already Taking Shape
Notably, major market players have already begun building the necessary infrastructure. In July 2025, the Linux Foundation announced the launch of the x402 Foundation, which includes 40 participants, such as AWS, Google, Mastercard, Visa, Coinbase, Stripe, Circle, Shopify, the Solana Foundation, and the Stellar Development Foundation. The x402 protocol, originally developed by Coinbase, allows services to accept programmable payments from humans and AI agents without requiring account creation or manual payment.
Google has also not stood aside, unveiling the open Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) in September 2025. For Web3 scenarios, the company, together with Coinbase, the Ethereum Foundation, and MetaMask, developed the A2A x402 extension.
My professional opinion: We are on the brink of a fundamental shift. AI agents are not just another use case for blockchain, but potentially the most mass-market one. If McKinsey's forecasts hold true, by 2030 we will see trillions of dollars flowing through decentralized networks. Investors should closely monitor projects that are already building the infrastructure for this future—they will become the new "blue chips" of the crypto market.