TL;DR:
- BlackRock published its research report titled The Machine-Native Economy on September 22, 2026, focusing on the convergence between artificial intelligence agents and digital asset infrastructure.
- The document cites an adjusted transactional volume exceeding $11 trillion in stablecoins recorded during the 2025 annual fiscal year.
- The firm reports cloud sector projections placing the revenue of top companies in the field at approximately $1.1 trillion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 29%.
BlackRock has just presented a new line of technical research. The asset manager examines how viable it is to use stablecoins and tokenization to make automated payments between autonomous artificial intelligence agents.
Our latest research paper explores the growing connection between AI and digital assets and explains why broad AI adoption may drive new demand, utility and applications across the digital asset economy. https://t.co/z5T88Orble pic.twitter.com/GMxQqTVmUN
— BlackRock (@BlackRock) September 22, 2026
This research, conducted by the BlackRock Digital Assets Research division, proposes operational scenarios where autonomous software systems interact directly with decentralized financial rails.
Interaction of software agents with blockchain infrastructure
The report from the management company indicates that the advancement of autonomous models will generate demands for computational consumption, purchase of application programming interfaces (APIs), and acquisition of datasets. To resolve these recurring, low-cost transfers, protocols under development are planned, such as x402, the Machine Payments Protocol driven by Stripe and Tempo, along with the Agentic Commerce Protocol conceived by Stripe and OpenAI.
The BlackRock report indicates that these technical specifications seek to allow agents to execute machine-to-machine transfers without requiring individual human authorizations for each transaction.
In this scheme, dollar-pegged stablecoins are presented as a functional settlement mechanism for the autonomous economy. The manager recorded more than $11 trillion in adjusted stablecoin volume throughout 2025.
Firm data suggests that the adoption of these currencies will depend on the consolidation of regulatory frameworks such as the GENIUS Act in the United States, the MiCA regulation in the European Union, and specific regulations implemented in Hong Kong and Singapur.
Regarding the tokenization of traditional funds and securities, these would facilitate the programming of direct contractual rules for algorithmic agents. The official documentation of the study emphasizes that tokenized assets do not exempt compliance with eligibility rules, Know Your Customer (KYC), and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) standards, which will operate on verification layers independent of the blockchain accounting record.
Furthermore, the report addresses the computing capacity required for inference and training tasks. According to estimations gathered in the publication, the aggregate revenue of the largest cloud computing providers could rise to $1.1 trillion by the year 2030, starting from records observed in 2025.
Under this market model, rights to graphics processing units (GPUs) could be represented through transferable digital contracts, used as collateral guarantee, or traded in real-time through protocols such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A).
The deployment of this infrastructure coincides with the expansion of the company’s institutional investment products, following the launch of the IBQT ETF in Canada during August 2026.
The final part of the report from asset manager BlackRock points out that the practical materialization of these use cases will require technical standardization of hardware metrics and the resolution of digital identity schemes for autonomous agents before reaching a large-scale commercial implementation phase.
