- BlackRock believes that the proliferation of AI agents could create new structural demand for digital assets and blockchain infrastructure.
- Stablecoins could become the primary payment instrument for autonomous systems.
- The company also points to compute power needed to run AI as a separate tokenization market.
Investment firm BlackRock has published a report titled The Machine-Native Economy, focused on the convergence of artificial intelligence and digital assets. The authors argue that the widespread adoption of AI could become an underappreciated source of demand and new use cases for crypto assets.
At the center of this trend are autonomous AI agents — systems capable of planning and executing multi-step tasks with limited human intervention. As these solutions evolve, they will be able to independently buy data, pay for APIs, reserve compute power, and carry out other financial operations.
According to BlackRock, the emergence of a large number of such systems could turn AI into a structural catalyst for the adoption of digital assets. In this context, blockchains could serve as the infrastructure that connects decision-making machines with economic activity.
AI Agents Will Need Their Own Payment Infrastructure
BlackRock expects that as autonomous systems develop, the need for machine-to-machine payments will grow. This includes a large volume of 24/7 microtransactions to pay for APIs, data, and compute resources.
Existing financial infrastructure already supports significant automation, but it is not always suitable for these kinds of operations. Among the constraints, the researchers highlighted the need to open accounts and complete authorization, fees, settlement mechanics, and potential scaling issues if the number of machine transactions spikes sharply.
The authors believe blockchain networks are better suited for high-frequency, low-value machine-to-machine payments. Stablecoins, native crypto assets, and tokenized real-world assets enable 24/7 settlement and the use of programmable transaction conditions.
One example of such infrastructure is the x402 protocol. It allows software to initiate a payment over HTTP on its own and, in particular, use stablecoins to pay for digital services.
BlackRock also mentions Stripe and Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol, as well as the Agentic Commerce Protocol created by Stripe and OpenAI.
The company expects stablecoins to take a leading role in AI agent transactions, thanks to their stable value and the ability to use them for programmable settlement.
According to the study, the market capitalization of this segment exceeded $300 billion in September 2026. Adjusted stablecoin transaction volume in 2025 totaled more than $11 trillion, and its compound annual growth rate from 2020 to 2025 reached roughly 80%.
The growth of these payments could also affect demand for other crypto assets. For settlement on public networks, higher activity means additional demand for blockspace, fees, and validator services. As a result, part of the economic impact could accrue to networks’ native assets, although the scale will depend on fee mechanisms, staking, and gas payment models.
Compute Power Could Become a New Class of Digital Assets
Another potential direction BlackRock highlights is the compute market. AI systems require ever more GPUs, energy, and cloud resources, and autonomous agents could eventually be able to find suitable capacity on their own and pay for its use.
According to estimates cited in the report, total capital expenditures on AI infrastructure from 2025 to 2030 could exceed $5 trillion. Consensus forecasts for the major cloud divisions of AWS, Microsoft, and Google imply combined revenue of about $1.1 trillion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of around 29% versus 2025 levels.
BlackRock allows for the emergence of standardized compute contracts. Rights to such resources could be represented as digital assets, transferred between market participants, used as collateral, and settled through programmable infrastructure. This could create another demand channel for tokenization and blockchain systems.
The company also emphasized that the market is still at an early stage of development. AI agent activity in payments remains limited, and compute markets still need to address standardization, liquidity, and contract structure.
Still, BlackRock believes that as autonomous systems become more widespread, digital assets could become an increasingly important part of AI’s economic infrastructure. This includes stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and native tokens that power blockchain networks.