BlackRock forecasts that stablecoins will become the payment infrastructure for autonomous AI agents. The Digital Assets Research division published a report titled "Machine-Native Economy: How Digital Assets Connect Intelligence, Commerce, and Computing" during the week of September 22, 2026. The main argument is that autonomous AI systems need to pay for something, the existing financial infrastructure is inadequate for this, and stablecoins are suitable.
The report identifies ACH and card networks as unsuitable for machine payments: they are too expensive and slow for frequent transactions. The settlement times, fees, and intermediary requirements that are acceptable for human-initiated transactions become structural bottlenecks when the counterparty is an algorithm buying GPU time or access to data in real-time. The report also allows for the emergence of a completely new class of digital assets tied to tokenized computing power. The rules and market standards for this segment are still being formed.
The figures supporting this thesis: the circulating supply of stablecoins exceeded $300 billion by September 2026. The adjusted transaction volume for just 2025 surpassed $11 trillion. Since 2020, the transaction volume of stablecoins has grown by approximately 80% per year. During the same period, the volume of ACH has increased by about 8.5% annually. According to an analysis by TRM Labs referenced in the report, AI agents currently account for between 0.6% and 7.5% of activity in leading payment protocols. Analysts predict that the revenue of the cloud industry from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google will reach approximately $1.1 trillion by 2030. Cumulative investments in AI infrastructure from 2025 to 2030 could exceed $5 trillion.
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