- Wall Street is struggling to fit crypto into its traditional investment playbook.
- The S&P 500’s top 10 stocks make up almost 40% of the index’s total value today.
- AI agents could boost demand for blockchain networks through low-cost payments.
Crypto is giving Wall Street “indigestion,” according to Franklin Templeton’s Head of Digital Assets and Innovation, Sandy Kaul. She argues that traditional finance is struggling to fit digital assets into its existing investment playbook, even as blockchain infrastructure becomes increasingly relevant to the next phase of AI development.
Wall Street’s AI Investment Boom
Her argument centers on where AI investment concentration already sits. On July 14, 2026, IBM shares plunged 25.2% after the company warned that corporate technology spending was shifting toward AI infrastructure, pulling money away from conventional software and IT projects.
That single warning shows a shift already visible in the market. The S&P 500 is now more concentrated than at any point since the late 1990s tech bubble, with its 10 largest stocks, all AI-aligned, making up almost 40% of the index’s total value, compared to 25% during the dotcom era and just 15% in 1980.
From Chatbots to Autonomous Agents
Generative AI turned machines into co-creators capable of answering questions and drafting content. Agentic AI goes further, letting software perceive its environment, form a plan, and execute multi-step tasks without constant human oversight. By 2028, an estimated 38% of organizations expect AI agents to work alongside human employees as functional team members.
That shift brings a wave of machine-to-machine transactions. Agentic commerce could reach $3 trillion to $5 trillion by 2030, and AI agents are projected to account for 15% to 25% of all US e-commerce sales in that same window. ChatGPT alone already processes 2.5 billion prompts daily, including 53 million shopping queries, with OpenAI now enabling checkout directly inside third-party apps like Target, DoorDash, and Instacart.
Why Legacy Payment Rails Fall Short
A lot of that volume will happen in micropayments, tiny charges for compute time, API calls, or a single data query. A standard credit card transaction costs 2% to 3% plus a flat fee near 30 cents. An AI agent payment can cost roughly a tenth of a cent. Traditional banking infrastructure wasn’t built for transactions that small or that fast.
Blockchains, Kaul argues, were. They can issue single-use tokens carrying built-in spending rules, verify an AI agent’s cryptographic identity before a transaction clears, and record and settle transactions within the same window, something the Visa network still cannot do, since card settlement takes one to three business days even though authorization happens instantly.
On raw throughput, newer chains are already competitive, with Aptos posting peak speeds of 12,933 transactions per second, ahead of Solana’s 6,284 and BNB Chain’s 3,252, compared to Bitcoin’s roughly 7 and Ethereum’s 75.
Protocols built for this exact handoff are already emerging. Coinbase developed the x402 payment standard, built around a decades-old but unused web response code labeled “payment required,” and later handed the IP to the Linux Foundation to make it an open standard. Stripe, Visa, Shopify, Google, Amazon Web Services, and a growing list of Web3 providers have since adopted it, enabling what Kaul describes simply as software paying software.
Twist Behind the Indigestion
That’s the tension buried in Kaul’s line. Wall Street knows how to buy a company’s stock to capture its growth. It hasn’t yet figured out how to buy a stake in a decentralized network, where value lives in the token itself rather than a corporate balance sheet.
Kaul’s bet is that investors will eventually need to hold the cryptocurrencies and alt coins tied to these networks the same way they hold equities today, not as a speculative side bet, but as the entry point into the next major platform shift.
Related: AI Agents Growing Dominance Across Emerging Tech Ecosystems
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