BlackRock: AI Adoption Could Fuel Huge Demand for Digital Assets

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has published a research paper that makes an unusual argument for crypto adoption. According to the paper, artificial intelligence (AI) could become one of the biggest forces pushing money into crypto.

The report, titled 'The Machine-Native Economy', argues that AI adoption is an underappreciated source of demand for digital assets. The researchers point out that as AI-driven and machine-to-machine transactions grow, demand could rise substantially for blockchains and other programmable payment systems, including stablecoins and other on-chain assets.

BlackRock sees an emerging market where computing capacity gets tokenized, traded, and used as collateral. Stablecoins are expected to lead transactional use in high-frequency, machine-native payments. The firm also suggests that AI agents could eventually use markets to automatically purchase the resources they need.