BlackRock: AI Agents Are an Underappreciated Demand Driver for Crypto

BlackRock has weighed in on the long-running debate over AI and crypto, arguing that the rise of autonomous agents could become a major, underappreciated source of demand for digital assets. In a research paper titled “The Machine-Native Economy,” the asset manager said machine-driven commerce could push more transactions onto blockchains and programmable payment systems, while tokenized computing power could open a new market for on-chain assets.

The paper was authored by BlackRock executives Will Su, Robert Mitchnick, Jay Jacobs and William Helm. They wrote that AI and digital assets could feed off each other in two main ways: AI agents need payment infrastructure that operates without human oversight, and the booming market for compute—the processing power required to train and run AI systems—could be made more liquid through tokenization.

“Together, these developments position AI as a structural catalyst for digital asset adoption and digital assets as a potential facilitator of the AI economy,” the authors wrote. “This relationship remains underappreciated and could expand the role of digital assets as core infrastructure for an increasingly autonomous digital economy.”

BlackRock’s analysis focuses first on payments. While existing financial rails can handle some automation, they still often require humans to set up accounts, provide credentials and authorize transactions. Merchant fees can also make very small payments impractical, and settlement times vary from one provider to another, according to the paper.

The authors argue that stablecoins, native cryptocurrencies and tokenized real-world assets are built for the high-frequency, low-value payments that AI agents are expected to make around the clock. “Several types of digital assets may support agentic commerce, but stablecoins are likely to lead transactional use,” they said.

The second opportunity is in the compute market. As AI demand surges, companies may want to lock in costs and manage supply risk by trading claims on future computing capacity. Those claims could be represented as tokens, which could then be transferred, used as collateral or traded. That, the authors said, could “broaden institutional investor participation and establish compute as a new opportunity for the broader digital asset ecosystem.” AI agents themselves could also use these markets to automatically buy the compute they need.

BlackRock’s thesis echoes comments from industry leaders. In July, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong pushed back against calls for crypto to pivot toward AI, saying the two trends are complementary. He contended that AI agents would need programmable money, not traditional bank rails. “If anything, it makes crypto more important,” he wrote on social media.

Several firms are already building for this future. Coinbase has developed the x402 protocol, and Tempo offers a Machine Payments Protocol, both designed to allow AI agents to pay for online services automatically. Circle introduced agent wallets and USDC payment tools in May, and OKX launched an Agent Payments Protocol for recurring payments and escrow-based releases after task completion.

BlackRock’s research could carry weight beyond the crypto community. As the largest asset manager in the world, it has a broad audience of institutional investors, and its endorsement of the AI-crypto link may push more traditional players to consider digital assets as core infrastructure for an autonomous economy.