The world's largest asset manager believes the coming generation of AI agents will need somewhere to keep their money—and a way to spend it. BlackRock published a research paper this week arguing that artificial intelligence, rather than new regulation or fresh institutional buying, could become one of the biggest and most overlooked drivers of demand for crypto. In the firm's view, AI agents are about to start paying for things themselves, and stablecoins are the instrument best built for that job. Coming from a firm that steers trillions of dollars in client assets, the argument treats digital assets less as a speculative trade than as infrastructure for a coming class of customer that transacts around the clock.

The paper, "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. It argues that stablecoins are better suited than banks or card networks to handle the sub-cent, 24/7 payments autonomous agents will need to make on their own, and it floats a potential new asset class: tokenized claims on computing power.

“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.

At the core of the paper is a tidy piece of wordplay. “AI represents machine-native intelligence, while digital assets represent machine-native money,” the firm, arguing the two technologies were always headed toward each other.

Agents, not humans, doing the shopping

The thesis rests on “agentic AI”—systems that can plan and carry out multi-step tasks on their own, calling on outside tools and services with limited human hand-holding. These are programs that don't just recommend a flight, but book it, pay for it, and hand you the receipt.

That kind of autonomy runs into a problem fast: someone, or something, has to pay the bill. Traditional payment rails were never designed for it. Nearly every automated payment in today's economy—from subscription renewals to programmatic ad buying—still settles through an account opened by a person, and opening a bank account or a credit card requires a human with an ID. Card-network fees that make sense on a $40 purchase don't work for a fraction-of-a-cent API call.

BlackRock's answer is stablecoins—cryptocurrencies pegged to a stable asset such as the U.S. dollar, built to hold a steady price rather than swing like Bitcoin. They can move around the clock, settle almost instantly, and don't need a bank teller.

The scale is already substantial. Adjusted stablecoin transaction volume topped $11 trillion in 2025, according to the report, landing in the same range as Visa and Mastercard's annual payment volumes. That remains dwarfed by the $93 trillion that moved through the traditional ACH bank-transfer system that year, but stablecoin volume has grown roughly 80% a year since 2020, compared with about 8.5% for ACH.

“The rise of agentic AI and machine-to-machine payments will likely increase demand for blockchains and other programmable payment infrastructure; stablecoins, native cryptoassets, and other on-chain assets can serve as machine-native instruments for payment and settlement across these rails,” the paper reads.

The plumbing already exists

Some of this machinery is live today. x402, a protocol built by Coinbase around the old, mostly unused “HTTP 402: Payment Required” web code, lets a piece of software pay for a data feed or an API call in the same request that asks for it—no account, no human sign-off required.

Amazon has already wired stablecoin payments into its AI cloud tools together with Coinbase and Stripe, letting agents automatically pay for APIs, data feeds, and bookings mid-task. Google has built its own agent-payments layer with backing from Coinbase and the Ethereum Foundation, extending its Agent2Agent framework to handle cards, stablecoins, and real-time bank transfers. The involvement of platform-scale companies matters because it embeds agent payments into cloud and consumer infrastructure that already operates at internet scale, rather than leaving them confined to crypto-native pilots.

Real-world usage, however, is still thin. Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs examined $52.7 million in x402 settlements this year and found that AI agents likely accounted for somewhere between 0.6% and 7.5% of that value—most of the traffic looked more like ordinary automated scripts than genuine autonomous agents. How that agent share shifts in future settlement data is one of the clearest measurable tests of whether the thesis is moving from design document to reality.

BlackRock is not claiming this shift happens at scale anytime soon. Its bet, instead, is that the plumbing is being built ahead of the moment it will be needed.

Tokenized compute as a new asset class

Running AI is expensive, and demand for cloud computing capacity keeps climbing. BlackRock cites analyst estimates putting combined 2030 revenue for the cloud divisions of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google at roughly $1.1 trillion. Cloud capacity today is bought mainly through negotiated enterprise contracts—precisely the friction tokenization would aim to strip out.

The paper envisions “compute” packaged into standardized contracts, similar to how oil or wheat futures work today, that could be bought, sold, used as collateral, or settled automatically on a blockchain. In that scenario, an AI agent could shop around for the cheapest available server capacity and pay for it directly, job by job, without a person negotiating a cloud contract.

BlackRock's own figures put the circulating market cap of stablecoins above $300 billion as of September 2026, with more than $11 trillion in adjusted transaction volume moved in 2025 alone. The markers to watch are concrete rather than price-based: whether stablecoin float keeps compounding from that $300 billion base, whether x402 settlement volumes grow past the $52.7 million measured this year, and whether future on-chain analytics attribute a larger share of traffic to genuine agents rather than scripts. The firm's wager is that AI agents, not human spenders, drive the next leg of that growth as autonomous systems begin paying their own bills.