Franklin Templeton just told investors to stop staring at NVIDIA and start paying attention to blockchain. Sandy Kaul, the firm’s head of digital assets and innovation, published a thesis arguing that agentic AI — not generative AI — will be the driving force behind the next wave of crypto adoption. Here’s what that argument actually looks like, and where we think it holds up.

What Is Agentic AI, and Why Does It Need Blockchain?

Most people know AI as the thing that writes emails and generates images. That’s generative AI — it responds to prompts. Agentic AI is different. It acts on its own. An AI agent can compare flight prices, buy cloud computing power, negotiate a data subscription, or hire another AI agent to complete a…