BlackRock Sees AI-Powered Demand Boom for Digital Assets

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has released a research paper that highlights the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to drive demand for digital assets. The report, titled 'The Machine-Native Economy,' suggests that broad AI adoption could lead to an increase in demand for blockchains and other programmable payment infrastructure.

The authors argue that existing payment rails can support some degree of automation, but they require human involvement for tasks such as account setup, credentialing, and authorization. This can make low-value transactions uneconomic and settlement and finality times vary across providers.

BlackRock believes that stablecoins, native cryptocurrencies, and tokenized real-world assets are well-suited to high-frequency, sub-cent machine-to-machine transactions that take place around the clock. Stablecoins are likely to lead transactional use, according to the authors.

The report also explores the potential for digital assets in the growing market for compute, the processing power needed to train and run AI systems. The authors argue that AI agents could use markets to automatically purchase resources as needed, broadening institutional investor participation and establishing compute as a new opportunity for the broader digital asset ecosystem.