BlackRock's new report reveals AI's potential to drive demand for digital assets and reshape financial infrastructure for machine payments.
BlackRock has published a report titled The Machine-Native Economy, emphasizing that the growing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) will be a crucial, yet often overlooked, driver for the demand in digital assets.
According to the report, the rise of autonomous AI agents will create a need for a new financial framework to facilitate machine-to-machine payments. Traditional banking systems are ill-suited for this purpose, as they require human interaction for processes like account setup and data verification, making low-cost transactions unfeasible due to high fees.
Instead, blockchain technology, stablecoins, and tokenized assets are identified as ideal solutions for enabling continuous automated transactions. Analysts predict that stablecoins will play a leading role in facilitating interactions between software agents.
In addition, BlackRock points to the burgeoning market for computational power. The demand for chips in neural network training is surging, with developers seeking price stability and suppliers looking for risk mitigation. Tokenizing rights to computational resources could allow for their sale, transfer, or use as collateral, enabling AI agents to independently acquire processing time without middlemen.
These observations resonate with sentiments from the cryptocurrency sector. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong previously noted that the emergence of neural networks would strengthen cryptocurrencies' position, as autonomous systems prefer programmable money over traditional banking solutions.
Developers are actively working on enabling such transactions. Protocols like x402 from Coinbase and the Machine Payments Protocol from Tempo are designed to allow AI agents to pay directly for server access and online services.
In March, analysts at Bernstein labeled digital assistants as the future of stablecoins, while Franklin Templeton later suggested that AI agents could significantly influence crypto payments. In August, Fidelity Digital Assets' senior analyst Max Wodington assessed the potential limitations of AI's role in the crypto market.
