Franklin Templeton, which manages nearly $1.8 trillion in assets, has published research naming Solana as one of the top three blockchain networks suited for AI agent micropayments, citing the network's 6,284 transactions per second (TPS) throughput. The analysis argues that autonomous AI agents will require blockchain infrastructure fundamentally different from credit card networks to handle the volume and speed of machine-to-machine payments at scale.

Why Traditional Payment Networks Cannot Support AI Agent Commerce?

Sandy Kaul, Franklin Templeton's Head of Digital Assets and Innovation, published a research paper on July 22 arguing that agentic AI represents "the killer use case for blockchain and crypto." The paper identifies two structural incompatibilities between traditional payment infrastructure and autonomous agent transactions.

Traditional credit card networks charge 2-3% per-transaction fees, a cost that can exceed the value of the payment itself when transactions are small. Additionally, Visa and Mastercard settle transactions over one to three business days, a timeline incompatible with autonomous systems executing thousands of transactions per hour. Blockchain networks, by contrast, record and settle transactions simultaneously without intermediaries on a 24/7 global basis.

The economic opportunity is substantial. McKinsey projects that agentic commerce could orchestrate $3 trillion to $5 trillion in revenue by 2030. Bain and Company estimates AI agents will account for 15% to 25% of all U.S. e-commerce sales by that year.

How Does Solana's Throughput Compare to Other Networks?

Franklin Templeton's paper benchmarks Solana's throughput against competing blockchain networks and traditional payment systems. Solana operates at 6,284 TPS with second-speed settlement, positioning it as a candidate for handling the transaction volumes that agentic payment adoption would require. For context, Ethereum processes approximately 75 TPS, and Bitcoin processes around 7 TPS. Visa's peak processing capacity reaches into the tens of thousands of transactions per second, though actual settlement takes one to three business days.

Kaul's framing emphasizes infrastructure capacity as the primary constraint. "Blockchain will be pivotal in allowing agentic AI to realize its potential for consumer transactions," the paper states. The analysis is structural rather than speculative; Kaul does not project a price target for SOL but instead describes a direct relationship between transaction volume and demand for the network's native fee token.

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, demand for SOL to denominate those fees rises proportionally with transaction volume. Kaul extends the same logic to all three networks named in the paper: agentic payment adoption drives demand for each chain's native fee token.

What AI Agent Infrastructure Is Already Live on Solana?

Solana's AI agent ecosystem has been accumulating real usage in the weeks surrounding Franklin Templeton's paper publication. The x402 open payment protocol, standardized under the Linux Foundation in July 2025, 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, demonstrating the network's current transaction capacity.

Franklin Templeton's analysis adds an institutional data point to this 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. The firm has direct experience with blockchain settlement through its on-chain tokenized fund products. Franklin Templeton recently participated in a $6 million seed investment in Cambrian, a company building blockchain data infrastructure for the AI agent ecosystem.

How Solana Wallets Are Expanding Cross-Chain Reach?

While Franklin Templeton's research focuses on Solana's technical capacity for AI agents, Solana-rooted wallets are simultaneously expanding their reach into adjacent blockchain ecosystems. Phantom, Solana's largest wallet by user base, added support for Robinhood Chain on July 23, 2026, giving its users direct access to tokenized stocks and decentralized finance (DeFi) applications on the new Ethereum Layer 2 network.

Robinhood Chain is a permissionless Ethereum Layer 2 network built on Arbitrum's Orbit stack, launched on July 1, 2026. The chain targets tokenized real-world assets, DeFi applications, and AI-agent-driven trading, running at 100-millisecond block times with ETH as the native gas token. In its first week, the network processed over 17 million transactions and attracted more than 350,000 active addresses, generating over $1 billion in decentralized exchange (DEX) volume.

Phantom users can now view balances, send and receive tokens, swap, and bridge assets on Robinhood Chain without leaving the wallet they already use for Solana, Ethereum, Base, Polygon, Sui, Monad, Bitcoin, and HyperEVM. Users manage Robinhood Chain through their existing Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) wallet address in Phantom, with no new wallet creation required.

Steps to Enable Robinhood Chain Support in Phantom?

• Update the wallet: Ensure Phantom is running the latest version available in your browser extension or mobile app store.
• Access network settings: Open Phantom's Settings menu and select "Active Networks" to view the list of supported blockchains.
• Enable Robinhood Chain: Find Robinhood Chain in the network list and toggle it on to activate support for the chain within your wallet.
• Prepare gas fees: Note that gas fees on Robinhood Chain are paid in ETH, not SOL, so users bridging from Solana will need to acquire ETH on Robinhood Chain before initiating transactions.

This is the second Solana-connected wallet to add Robinhood Chain support. Backpack, another Solana-origin wallet, integrated Robinhood Chain on July 12, adding discovery, swap, and bridge capabilities. Phantom's integration extends that feature set to include send and receive functionality.

For Robinhood Chain, gaining Phantom as a supported wallet matters for user reach. Robinhood documents its own mobile wallet and MetaMask as the primary wallet options for the chain, but Phantom brings a user base that arrived through Solana and has experience navigating multi-chain DeFi. The Robinhood platform counts approximately 28 million customers across 38 countries. Phantom's users skew toward self-custody and on-chain interaction, a different and largely non-overlapping population now with a path into Robinhood Chain's tokenized securities ecosystem.

On July 8, World.xyz migrated its prediction market from Solana to Robinhood Chain, and Phantom publicly reaffirmed its Solana commitment at the time alongside Raydium and Jito. Supporting Robinhood Chain as a network is a different posture than abandoning Solana; Phantom treats it as one chain among ten, the same approach it takes with Ethereum and Polygon.

What Does This Mean for Solana's Institutional Positioning?

Franklin Templeton's research and Phantom's multi-chain expansion reflect a broader institutional positioning of Solana within a diversifying blockchain ecosystem. The Franklin Templeton analysis does not position Solana as the only blockchain capable of supporting AI agent payments; it identifies Solana as one of three networks with the technical capacity to handle the throughput requirements. This framing acknowledges competition while establishing Solana's infrastructure credentials with a major institutional asset manager.

The timing of these developments suggests institutional confidence in Solana's role in emerging use cases. Franklin Templeton's public research carries weight with institutional allocators who track the firm's positioning on digital asset infrastructure. At nearly $1.8 trillion in assets under management, the firm's analysis of blockchain infrastructure for AI agents provides a data point that extends beyond speculation into documented institutional analysis.