BlackRock frames stablecoins and tokenised compute as the rails of agentic commerce
Key points
- BlackRock's paper 'The Machine-Native Economy' positions stablecoins as the primary settlement instrument for AI agent-to-agent commerce.
- The paper proposes tokenised compute capacity as a new digital asset class, envisioning agents that autonomously provision and pay for processing power using stablecoins.
- BlackRock quotes a forward-looking thesis that 'standardised claims on compute capacity could become a significant digital asset use case for financing and programmable settlement.'
- Bloomberg-compiled sell-side estimates project $1.1 trillion in combined 2030 revenues from AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Intelligent Cloud, with over $5 trillion in cumulative AI capital expenditure between 2025 and 2030.
- The paper does not address tokenised deposits, which competing multi-bank solutions have already trialled for agentic payments, leaving an open question about which settlement format reaches scale first.
BlackRock has published a paper titled ‘The Machine-Native Economy’ arguing that artificial intelligence agents require payment infrastructure designed for machine-to-machine settlement, and that stablecoins are the natural instrument to fill that role. The paper extends the thesis to compute capacity, proposing that standardised claims on processing power could emerge as a meaningful tokenised asset class, with agents autonomously provisioning and paying for compute using stablecoins.
The compute framing carries weight given BlackRock’s position as the world’s largest asset manager. Sell-side analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg project combined revenues of $1.1 trillion from AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Intelligent Cloud by 2030, with cumulative AI capital expenditure across those hyperscalers estimated at over $5 trillion between 2025 and 2030. If compute capacity becomes a financeable, programmable asset, those revenue pools represent the addressable market for tokenised claims.
One notable gap in the paper is its silence on tokenised deposits, which several multi-bank consortia have already trialled for agentic payment use cases. The likelier read is that BlackRock’s framing favours stablecoins because they are available today at scale on public chains, whereas most multi-bank tokenised deposit solutions have not yet launched at production scale. That timing distinction is the operative variable: being ready to scale when the adoption wave arrives tends to matter more than being first to conceive the use case.