BlackRock: AI Agents Could Drive Crypto's Next Demand Wave

In brief

• BlackRock's new "Machine-Native Economy" paper argues stablecoins are better suited than banks or card networks to handle the sub-cent, 24/7 payments AI agents will need to make on their own.
• The report floats a new asset class: tokenized claims on computing power.
• A separate study from blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs found AI agents currently account for as little as 0.6% to 7.5% of payment volume on Coinbase's x402 protocol

BlackRock thinks the robots are going to need a bank account.

The world's largest asset manager published a research paper this week arguing that artificial intelligence, not new regulation or fresh institutional buying, could become one of the biggest and most overlooked drivers of demand for crypto. Per the firm, AI agents are about to start paying for things themselves, and stablecoins are the instrument best built for that job.

“As agents become more capable and persistent, standardized claims on compute capacity could become a significant digital asset use case for financing and programmable settlement,” Blackrock says.

The paper, titled "The Machine-Native Economy," comes from BlackRock's Digital Assets Research team, led by Will Su and Robert Mitchnick, alongside the firm's U.S. equity ETF and iShares product leads.