Bitcoin Losing AI Payments Battle per Blackrock, but Not the War

The latest paper from Blackrock on “The Machine-Native Economy” essentially omits bitcoin, assigning it only the role of a savings technology. The report, co-authored by the company’s exchange-traded fund (ETF) product executives among others, argues that artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is an underappreciated source of demand for digital assets. Stablecoins are considered the most likely to lead transactional use in the agentic economy, while some digital assets might also benefit. Ethereum is mentioned as an example.

Meanwhile, bitcoin is mentioned only in one paragraph, citing research by the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) from earlier this year. The research showed that AI models favored stablecoins for everyday payments and bitcoin for long-term value preservation. Blackrock doesn’t mention the Bitcoin Lightning Network or L402, its protocol for agentic payments.

Instead, Blackrock names protocols such as x402, MPP, ACP, AP2 and TAP. Coinbase, Stripe, OpenAI, Google and Visa back these protocols, while bitcoin payment adoption mostly relies on decentralized efforts by multiple, smaller Bitcoin industry players. The closest Bitcoin ally in the fintech industry is Jack Dorsey’s Block. In May, its Bitcoin-supporting initiative Spiral argued that $BTC is the “best money for agents,” while still accepting that most agents may choose stablecoins.