BlackRock Sees AI Boosting Crypto Demand Through Stablecoin Adoption

Financial giant BlackRock believes that artificial intelligence (AI) may have an unexpected effect on the cryptocurrency market. According to a recent paper, AI could drive up demand for digital assets.

The firm notes that AI and crypto are converging, with autonomous software interacting with financial systems. This can include planning and executing tasks, interacting with external services, and even performing transactions.

BlackRock views digital assets as 'machine-native money' and sees potential in the use of stablecoins, which can be transferred at any time. The firm cites Coinbase's x402 as a promising example, along with other novel systems such as Stripe and OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol.

The asset manager also predicts that AI compute could become tokenized, leading to the creation of new markets for standardized claims on future computing capacity. These contracts may be represented on-chain like established commodity markets.