Artificial intelligence could be one of the biggest drivers for digital asset adoption as autonomous agents begin buying services, moving money and sourcing computing power, according to a BlackRock paper.
The asset manager argues that AI provides “machine-native intelligence” while digital assets provide the payment and settlement infrastructure agents may need to act on their decisions. An agent carrying out a task could, for example, pay for a data request, book a service or purchase computing capacity without waiting for a person to to complete.
Stablecoins are likely to be the first major beneficiary. Their relatively stable value makes them useful for pricing services, while blockchain networks can support payments around the clock. BlackRock highlights Coinbase x402 protocol as one emerging way agents to pay for online resources, including API calls. It also acknowledges that existing payments networks are adapting to agentic commerce.
The paper points to compute as a longer-term opportunity. As demand for AI processing grows, standardized claims on computing capacity could eventually be traded, financed or used as collateral through digital asset infrastructure. BlackRock cites analyst estimates that revenue from the major cloud businesses of Amazon, Microsoft and Google could reach out about $1.1 trillion by 2030.
BlackRock says agent payments remain at an early stage, liquid markets for standardized compute contracts have yet to develop.