Franklin Templeton: Agentic AI’s $3-5T Market by 2030 Points to ETH, Not AI Stocks

Franklin Templeton’s digital assets chief Sandy Kaul says agentic artificial intelligence could become crypto’s “killer use case,” pointing to estimates that agentic commerce could reach $3 to $5 trillion by 2030. Her argument, published in a lengthy post on X, is that capturing that growth will require holding cryptocurrencies and altcoins directly rather than shares of AI companies — a distinction with real implications for how investors position around the AI trade.

Kaul, Head of Digital Assets and Innovation at Franklin Templeton, an asset manager overseeing close to $2 trillion, argues that autonomous AI agents will need to independently initiate, track and settle transactions at scale. Legacy payment rails, she says, are too slow and too costly for the kind of high-frequency micropayments that machine-to-machine commerce would generate.

Why AI Agents Can’t Use a Bank Account

A core piece of Kaul’s thesis is structural: AI agents cannot open bank accounts or clear the KYC requirements attached to traditional financial services. That leaves decentralized blockchains as the practical settlement layer for autonomous commerce, according to her post.

Ethereum and its layer-2 networks are singled out as the current default choice, given what Kaul describes as the largest developer base and the deepest institutional support among smart-contract platforms — factors that matter when agentic payment systems need reliability and existing tooling rather than experimental infrastructure.

A Different Playbook Than the AI Stock Rally

Kaul contrasts this with how investors have played the broader AI boom so far: buying shares of AI-aligned companies, a strategy that has ridden the S&P 500’s roughly 20% climb over the past year to an all-time high in early June, largely driven by tech and AI names. She argues that approach will not work for agentic AI specifically.

“I believe what will become increasingly clear in coming years is that in order to capture the value of decentralized networks and businesses, investors will need to buy the cryptocurrencies and altcoins being issued by those entities,” Kaul wrote. She added that “such investments are likely to become key holdings in portfolios, especially for those looking to capture the emerging agentic AI opportunity.”

Reading Between the Lines on ETH

The post drew attention from former BlackRock vice president and Milk Road Daily host John Gillen, who framed Kaul’s remarks bluntly: “The Head of Digital Assets and Innovation for a ~$2T Asset Manager just said to buy ETH.” The comment reflects how directly Kaul’s framing of Ethereum’s infrastructure role is being read as an endorsement of holding the asset itself, not just exposure to the sector.

For holders and traders, the significance lies less in a price call and more in the institutional framing: a manager with trillions in assets under management is publicly arguing that blockchain-native tokens, rather than equities, are the correct instrument for exposure to an emerging multi-trillion-dollar machine economy. Whether that thesis translates into flows remains to be tested, but it adds a fresh institutional voice to the debate over how AI and crypto narratives intersect.

Read more: Ethereum Tests $1,869 as Bulls Eye $1,938 EMA, Hayes Adds to ETH Stack

Sources

• cryptopotato.com
• beincrypto.com