BlackRock has published "The Machine-Native Economy," an 11-page research paper arguing that AI agents and digital assets are two halves of the same machine economy. The authors, Will Su, Robert Mitchnick, Jay Jacobs and William Helm, span digital assets research and iShares product teams. Their framing is direct: AI is machine-native intelligence, digital assets are its native money, and autonomous agents will drive structural demand for on-chain settlement.
Highlights#
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The core claim: agentic commerce needs machine-native rails. The paper argues that the rise of agentic AI and machine-to-machine payments will increase demand for blockchains and programmable payment infrastructure, with stablecoins and other on-chain assets serving as settlement instruments across those rails. Existing rails like ACH and card networks support automation, but their onboarding requirements and settlement economics can make them a poor fit for high-velocity machine transactions.
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Stablecoins are already at scale. BlackRock counts more than $300 billion in stablecoin market capitalization as of September 2026, with adjusted transaction volume above $11 trillion in 2025, the same broad range as Visa and Mastercard's annual payment volumes. Growth ran at an 80% CAGR from 2020 to 2025, against roughly 8.5% for ACH.
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Compute as the next tokenized asset class. The paper envisions agents that autonomously provision processing capacity for tasks and pay for it in stablecoins. Consensus estimates for AWS, Microsoft Intelligent Cloud and Google Cloud imply roughly $1.1 trillion in combined annual revenue by 2030, a 29% CAGR from 2025, against estimates of more than $5 trillion in cumulative AI capital spending through 2030. The authors flag real contract-design and market-structure challenges, from chip-generation differences to regional energy costs, before standardized compute products can scale.
Why it matters#
When the world's largest asset manager describes agent-to-agent settlement as a structural use case for stablecoins, the thesis graduates from crypto narrative to mainstream research. The paper also notes that know-your-agent checks and other compliance still happen off-chain, with results passed on-chain. That gap between on-chain settlement and off-chain trust is exactly where escrow and reputation rails for autonomous agents will live.