AI Agents May Drive Next Wave of Stablecoin Demand: BlackRock

BlackRock's recent whitepaper suggests that artificial intelligence (AI) agents could become the next major source of demand for stablecoins and blockchains. The paper, titled 'The Machine-Native Economy,' argues that AI systems are converging with digital assets to form two halves of a system: machine-native intelligence and machine-native money.

The authors, including BlackRock's Head of Digital Assets Research Will Su and Robert Mitchnick, point out that traditional payment infrastructure is poorly suited for the needs of autonomous, high-frequency transactions. They claim that AI agents will need a way to pay for things natively, which could be achieved through stablecoins and blockchains.

BlackRock predicts that AI agents will become major users of stablecoins, signaling institutional endorsement of machine-native finance. The firm's analysis is based on several data points, including the $300 billion stablecoin market capitalization and $11 trillion in adjusted stablecoin transaction volume in 2025. This figure sits in the same broad range as Visa and Mastercard's annual payment volumes.

The paper also frames compute itself as 'a distinct, large, and increasingly investable economic resource.' It cites projections that hyperscaler cloud revenues could exceed $1 trillion annually by 2030, with combined revenue from AWS, Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud, and Google Cloud estimated near $1.1 trillion by then.

BlackRock notes that while the machine-native economy has not yet arrived, there is a growing cluster of emerging protocols built for this purpose, including x402, ACP (the Agentic Commerce Protocol), MPP (a Machine Payments Protocol), and others.