BlackRock: The potential of AI-driven crypto demand is still underestimated

September 23: BlackRock stated in its latest research report "The Machine-Native Economy" that the widespread adoption of AI could become an underappreciated driver of demand for digital assets. With the rise of AI agents and machine-to-machine payments, demand for stablecoins, native crypto assets, and other on-chain assets may grow further.

BlackRock believes that AI agents need to be able to conduct high-frequency, low-value, and even sub-1-cent machine-to-machine transactions around the clock, while the traditional payment system has limitations in account setup, authorization, fees, and settlement efficiency. Stablecoins are especially well suited to handle such transactions and may become the primary transactional digital asset in AI agent commercial activity.

In addition, the AI compute market may also open up new use cases for crypto assets. As AI companies' demand for compute continues to grow, compute providers could in the future tokenize the rights corresponding to computing power, making them transferable, tradable, or usable as collateral, and AI agents could also automatically purchase the compute resources they need through related markets.

BlackRock believes that AI is poised to become a structural catalyst for digital asset adoption, while digital assets may also become important infrastructure for the AI economy. At present, this potential connection is still underestimated.