BlackRock has released a report titled "The Machine-Native Economy" arguing that artificial intelligence agents could become a major driver of cryptocurrency demand as they conduct autonomous economic activity.
According to the research, AI agents performing tasks such as booking travel, purchasing data, and renting computing power will require payment infrastructure capable of operating continuously and handling transactions worth fractions of a cent. BlackRock noted that traditional card networks and automated clearing houses involve human-driven onboarding, fees that make micropayments uneconomic, and slower settlement times.
The report stated: "As AI agents become more capable and as their real-world applications expand, they increasingly demand payment and asset infrastructure designed natively for machine-speed commerce." It added that "crypto-native blockchain rails are particularly well suited to high-frequency, sub-cent, machine-to-machine transactions that take place around-the-clock, including API calls, on-demand data, and consumption based compute."
BlackRock's research, which included controlled simulations by the Bitcoin Policy Institute, found that stablecoins were generally favored for everyday payments while bitcoin was favored for long-term value preservation in machine-native scenarios.
The $15 trillion asset manager suggested that as AI adoption expands, digital assets could become increasingly integral to AI's economic infrastructure, potentially increasing utility across stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and native cryptoassets that support blockchain settlement.
BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust, approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2024, has attracted the most investment and trading volume among U.S. bitcoin ETFs and currently manages over $67 billion in assets.
