Franklin Templeton Says AI Agents Will ‘Revolutionize’ Social Media, Sending Tokens Soaring

Artificial intelligence (AI) tokens have jumped dramatically in the wake of a Franklin Templeton report saying the excitement around AI agents has “merit.”

In the Jan. 14 report, Franklin Templeton said it can “envision a future where Al agents revolutionize content generation on social media and play an integral role across various industries and platforms.”

Comparing AIs to human influencers, it said, “ these agents could launch their own brands, products, music, movies, and more, driving significant economic value to their ecosystems. All of that while experimenting on how these agents will interact on blockchain rails is very exciting and has driven significant developer activity.”

AI agents are sophisticated software programs designed to perform tasks autonomously, ranging from automated trading in decentralized finance (DeFi) to entities capable of holding a conversation.

Virtuals demand

The report noted that Virtuals, the largest AI launchpad, is seeing “significant demand” for launching new agents. Dune Analytics data shows that just shy of 15,000 tokens have been created on the platform.

As a whole, AI agents’ market capitalization jumped 322% in the fourth quarter of 2024, rising to $15.5 billion from $4.8 billion, according to CoinGecko’s 2024 Annual Crypto Industry Report.

Top performer by market capitalization Virtuals Protocol’s VIRTUAL token is up 31% on the day, while No. 3 AI16Z is up 29%, according to CoinGecko. Fourth-ranked aixbt by Virtuals’ AIXBT is up fully 88% and No. 5 Freysa AI’s FAI is up 32%.

Artificial Superintelligence Alliance’s FET, which covers AI projects Fetch.ai, Ocean Protocol, and SingularityNET, was the outlier, up just 2.4% on Jan. 15.

Those jumps come just two days after the sector tanked, with the top five tokens dropping 5% to 17%.

Essential components

“Franklin Templeton’s vision aligns with the trajectory we’re seeing in the development of AI agents,” said Todd Ruoff CEO of Autonomys, which provides infrastructure needed to scale decentralized AI applications on-chain. “These entities are not just theoretical—they’re already demonstrating their ability to act autonomously or semi-autonomously in areas like content creation and brand building.”

Calling their potential to become a vital part of social and economic ecosystems “immense,” Ruoff said “by leveraging blockchain’s verifiable transparency and decentralized architecture, these agents could launch and manage brands, music, or even entire digital ecosystems in a way that ensures fairness, data privacy, and user ownership.”

That’s a “paradigm shift” in the generation and sharing of economic value, he added.

Looking beyond today’s price jumps, Ruoff said AI agent tokens surging value is “a signal of the growing recognition of their practical applications and transformative potential. AI agents are increasingly seen as essential components of decentralized systems, automating tasks like liquidity management in DeFi, personalized governance participation, and content generation.”

The convergence of AI and blockchain is the real driver of these tokens’ value, he said. That “enables these tokens to represent real technological capabilities. The excitement stems from the realization that these agents can operate autonomously, creating value in ways that are tangible and scalable.”

Not everyone is so bullish on AI. Earlier this month, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin called for a two-year “soft pause” on industrial scale AI computing to address the potential risks it brings.