The Machine-Native Economy Emerges
A new report from investment giant BlackRock, titled "The Machine-Native Economy," forecasts a significant convergence between artificial intelligence and digital assets. The firm suggests that the rapid advancement of AI agents will lead to the creation of a novel economic framework, fundamentally altering how transactions and resource allocation occur.
BlackRock posits that AI will provide the "machine-native intelligence" necessary for these systems, while blockchain technology will offer the corresponding "machine-native money." This evolving landscape is driven by agentic AI—systems capable of planning and executing complex, multi-step tasks with minimal human oversight, interacting seamlessly with external tools and infrastructure.
As these sophisticated AI agents increasingly initiate purchases, access data, and execute transactions autonomously, they will necessitate a robust payment infrastructure specifically designed for machine-to-machine commerce. This shift is expected to generate a fresh wave of demand for various digital assets.
Stablecoins and Blockchain: The New Payment Rails
According to BlackRock, crypto-native blockchain rails are particularly well-suited to handle the high-frequency, low-value transactions characteristic of an AI-driven economy, such as API calls, on-demand data access, and consumption-based computing. The report highlights stablecoins, native cryptoassets, and tokenized real-world assets as critical programmable instruments for facilitating these payments and digital ownership.
Stablecoins, designed to maintain a stable value against reference currencies like the US dollar, are already demonstrating significant scale. BlackRock's findings indicate a circulating market capitalization exceeding $300 billion as of September 2026. Furthermore, adjusted stablecoin transaction volume surpassed $11 trillion in 2025, experiencing an impressive 80% compound annual growth rate between 2020 and 2025.
The report also notes that growing regulatory clarity in key markets, including the US, EU, Hong Kong, and Singapore, is expected to further support the adoption and integration of these digital assets into mainstream financial systems.
Compute as a Tokenized Asset
Beyond digital currencies, BlackRock identifies computing capacity as another substantial economic resource poised for transformation within this machine-native economy. Citing estimates, the report suggests that combined revenues from major cloud providers—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud, and Google Cloud—could reach approximately $1.1 trillion by 2030, marking a 29% compound annual growth rate from 2025 levels.
As the demand for AI training and inference continues to expand, BlackRock envisions a future where standardized claims on compute capacity could be tokenized, allowing them to be transferred, pledged as collateral, and settled efficiently through programmable infrastructure. This evolution could even lead to the development of standardized compute products, such as exchange-traded compute futures, which would aid in price discovery and hedging strategies.
In this advanced model, AI agents could autonomously procure computing resources, evaluating factors like price, performance, latency, location, and hardware specialization. They would then provision these resources and settle payments automatically, leveraging specialized protocols to facilitate data access, agent coordination, and machine-to-machine payments.
A Nascent but Transformative Ecosystem
While BlackRock emphasizes that the ecosystem for agentic payments and compute-market liquidity remains nascent, the overarching thesis of their report is clear: as AI adoption continues to broaden, digital assets will become an increasingly indispensable infrastructure layer. This infrastructure will underpin an economy where machines can independently transact, allocate resources, and pay for services with limited human intervention, ushering in a truly machine-native economic era.