AI Agents Set to Revolutionize Crypto Economy

The 'Machine Economy' is emerging as a new paradigm in the crypto space, where artificial intelligence (AI) agents could become economic participants. This shift is driven by the convergence of AI, stablecoins, and blockchain infrastructure.

Crypto analyst Ran Neuner, known as Cryptoman Ran, has been advocating for this thesis, which gained institutional relevance after BlackRock published 'The Machine-Native Economy' in September 2026. The report suggests that AI adoption could become an underappreciated source of demand for digital assets, particularly stablecoins, programmable blockchains, and tokenized computing markets.

According to IDC, 1.2 billion AI agents are projected to be operational by 2029, carrying out approximately 217 billion actions per day. A study by the Bitcoin Policy Institute found that in long-term store-of-value scenarios, Bitcoin was selected in 79.1% of responses, while stablecoins were chosen in 53.2% of everyday payment scenarios.

BlackRock argues that financial systems designed primarily around human users may not be optimized for agents that need to make small, frequent, and programmable payments. Its research suggests that stablecoins could become important instruments for machine-to-machine payments, while computing capacity could increasingly become a tokenized asset.