Artificial intelligence and digital assets are beginning to converge, with research cited by BlackRock showing that AI models display a preference for bitcoin and stablecoins — cryptocurrencies pegged to assets such as the U.S. dollar and designed to hold their value against it.

In a new report titled “The Machine-Native Economy,” the $15 trillion Wall Street firm argues that the next major wave of crypto demand will come not from human investors but from software. According to the report, traditional payment infrastructure — card networks and automated clearing houses, the bank-to-bank systems that move routine transfers — depends on human-driven onboarding, charges fees that make microtransactions uneconomic, and delivers slower settlement and finality, constraints that bite hardest when the counterparties are software rather than people.

As AI agents — software programs that can browse, transact and complete tasks with limited human direction — begin booking travel, buying data and renting computing power on their own, BlackRock argues, they will require payment systems that operate around the clock and can process transactions worth fractions of a cent.

Bitcoin Magazine highlighted the findings in a post on X on October 6, 2026:

NEW: $15 trillion BlackRock says agents may choose to save in #Bitcoin for "long-term value preservation"

"These findings … point to a potential AI-native monetary architecture in which stablecoins serve as transactional money and bitcoin as a store of value."

pic.twitter.com/utJHYuTkGJ — Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) October 6, 2026

“As AI agents become more capable and as their real-world applications expand, they increasingly demand payment and asset infrastructure designed natively for machine-speed commerce,” the report read. “Crypto-native blockchain rails are particularly well suited to high-frequency, sub-cent, machine-to-machine transactions that take place around-the-clock, including API calls, on-demand data, and consumption based compute.”

The report added that research from the Bitcoin Policy Institute found that “controlled simulations generally favored stablecoins for everyday payments and bitcoin for long-term value preservation.”

“As AI adoption broadens and agentic systems become more capable, digital assets could become increasingly integral to AI’s economic infrastructure, expanding utility across stablecoins, tokenized RWAs, and native cryptoassets that support blockchain settlement,” the report noted. Tokenized RWAs are real-world assets such as funds and securities represented on blockchains.

The report frames the scenario as potential rather than a forecast. Its thesis holds only if machine-to-machine uses — API calls, on-demand data, consumption-based compute — grow into everyday billing markets, and if AI agents are built to transact on crypto rails in practice rather than only in the research simulations cited in the report.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has long praised bitcoin and other crypto applications that utilize its technology, such as the tokenization of assets. The Securities and Exchange Commission approved the firm’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, an exchange-traded fund that holds bitcoin, in 2024, and the fund has since attracted the most investment and trading volume of all U.S. bitcoin ETFs. It delivered the most successful debut in the history of ETFs and now manages over $67 billion in assets.

BlackRock has previously said that bitcoin is an asset class of its own, and that investors are buying it to hedge against any potential debt crises.

This article, written by Mathew Di Salvo, first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.