BlackRock: AI agents will become the main driver of demand for crypto

The BlackRock Digital Assets team has released an 11-page report titled "The Machine-Native Economy," which explains why the widespread adoption of AI could become an underappreciated source of demand for digital assets.

Main takeaway: AI is machine intelligence, and digital assets are machine money. As AI agents begin to carry out real economic actions, they’ll need a payment infrastructure that can keep pace with their speed. Blockchains and stablecoins are better suited for this than traditional rails.

Key points:

• Tokens in AI and on blockchains serve a similar function: They convert real-world entities into a format that machines can process natively. LLMs break down text into tokens for computation, while blockchains represent value and rights as digital tokens for verifiable settlements.
• Existing payment rails are ill-suited for agent-based commerce. ACH and card networks require human intervention for setup, charge fees that make microtransactions unprofitable, and don’t operate 24/7. New protocols like x402 from Coinbase, ACP from Stripe and OpenAI, MPP from Stripe, and Tempo are built on top of blockchains and enable agents to pay autonomously for API calls, data, and computations.
• Stablecoins will likely lead the transactional side. Their market capitalization has surpassed $300 billion, and adjusted transaction volumes in 2025 could exceed $11 trillion—comparable to Visa and Mastercard. From 2020 to 2025, growth was 80% per year, compared to 8.5% for ACH.
• Computing power is becoming a new class of asset. The combined revenue of AWS, Microsoft Cloud, and Google Cloud could reach $1.1 trillion by 2030. As this market grows, standardized contracts for computing—including futures—that can be tokenized, used as collateral, and settled via blockchain will emerge. Stripe’s acquisition of OpenRouter is an early signal that model routing and compute optimization are becoming part of AI’s financial infrastructure.

The ecosystem is still in its infancy, but the structural alignment between autonomous agents and machine payments makes digital assets potentially a key infrastructure for an autonomous digital economy.