Franklin Templeton Names Solana Among Top Blockchains for AI Agent Micropayments

Sandy Kaul, Franklin TempletonFranklin Templeton's Head of Digital Assets and Innovation, published a research paper on July 22 arguing that agentic AI is "the killer use case for blockchain and crypto," naming Solana as one of three blockchain networks best-suited for the machine-to-machine payment volume autonomous agents will generate. The firm manages nearly $1.8 trillion in assets and has been active in digital asset products for several years.

The paper makes a specific technical and economic case: traditional payment networks are structurally incompatible with AI agent micropayments, and the fee tokens on the blockchain networks that do support them will see demand grow proportionally with agent activity.

Why AI Agents Cannot Use Legacy Payment Rails

Kaul's paper identifies two hard constraints on credit card infrastructure for agentic payments. Traditional networks charge 2-3% per-transaction fees, a cost that can exceed the value of the payment itself for micro-scale transactions. Visa and Mastercard settle over one to three business days, a timeline incompatible with autonomous systems executing thousands of transactions per hour.

Blockchain networks record and settle simultaneously, without intermediaries, on a 24/7 global basis. McKinsey projects that agentic commerce could orchestrate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in revenue by 2030. Bain & Company estimates AI agents will account for 15% to 25% of all U.S. e-commerce sales by that year.

Solana at 6,284 TPS in Franklin Templeton's Comparison

The paper includes a throughput comparison across the networks it identifies as candidates for the agentic payment layer, benchmarked against Visa:

Visa's range reflects peak processing capacity, with actual settlement taking one to three business days. Ethereum (~75 TPS) and Bitcoin (~7 TPS) appear in the paper's data but are not positioned as primary candidates for agentic payment rails. Kaul's framing is infrastructure capacity first: at 6,284 TPS with second-speed settlement, Solana clears the throughput bar that agentic payment volumes require.

"Blockchain will be pivotal in allowing agentic AI to realize its potential for consumer transactions," the paper states.

SOL as an AI Economy Fee Token

The paper connects network throughput directly to token economics. Submitting a transaction on Solana requires SOL as the fee. As AI agents conduct micropayments at machine speed, scaled across an economy of autonomous agents, the demand for SOL to denominate those fees rises with the volume. Kaul extends the same logic to all three named networks: agentic payment adoption drives demand for each chain's native fee token.

The argument is structural rather than speculative. Kaul is not projecting a price target; she is describing a relationship between transaction volume and fee token demand that follows from the network's architecture.

Franklin Templeton's Digital Asset Track Record

Franklin Templeton has been operating in digital assets for several years, with on-chain tokenized fund products giving the firm direct experience with blockchain settlement. The firm recently participated in a $6 million seed investment in Cambrian, a company building blockchain data infrastructure for the AI agent ecosystem, according to Crypto Briefing.

Kaul's position as Head of Digital Assets and Innovation places this paper within the firm's institutional analysis function. At nearly $1.8 trillion in AUM, Franklin Templeton's public research carries weight with institutional allocators who track the firm's positioning on digital asset infrastructure.

Solana AI Agent Activity as Franklin Templeton's Paper Arrives

Solana's AI agent infrastructure has been accumulating real usage in the weeks surrounding the paper's publication. The x402 open payment protocol, standardized under the Linux Foundation in July, has been routing Solana-native AI agent payments since its May 2025 launch. The Solana Foundation and Google Cloud are running an AI agentic commerce hackathon in Korea as part of developer expansion efforts. Solana processed 129 million transactions on July 23, per Solana Compass analytics.

Franklin Templeton's analysis adds an institutional data point to that context: a specific, documented throughput comparison from a firm managing nearly $1.8 trillion in assets, identifying Solana by name and TPS figure as infrastructure the agentic AI economy can use.