BlackRock Sees AI-Driven Demand for Digital Assets in Payments

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has published a research paper arguing that artificial intelligence could become an overlooked source of demand for digital assets. The paper, titled The Machine-Native Economy, comes from the firm's digital assets team, including Robert Mitchnick and Will Su.

The idea is that autonomous AI agents will need to buy data, pay for services, and rent computing power, and stablecoins and other on-chain assets suit these small, round-the-clock payments. BlackRock names stablecoins, native cryptocurrencies, and tokenized real-world assets as possible instruments, and floats tokenized computing capacity as a further idea.

The mechanism here is payments, not price speculation, and coverage of the paper notes that it does not argue Bitcoin becomes the default currency for machine transactions. Critics add two cautions: that on-chain data markets show almost no notable revenue for the data-buying activity highlighted in the paper, and that agent payment protocols compete with each other.

The next observable test is whether measured agent activity grows beyond the 0.6% to 7.5% estimate on x402 and similar protocols. Evidence of agent-driven volume rising in absolute terms would strengthen the thesis, while if agent share stays in the low single digits, the paper remains a forecast rather than a demand story.