BlackRock: AI agents may use stablecoins to pay for data and computing power

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, is framing AI agents not just as a technology story but as a payments story. The paper argues that as autonomous agents begin buying services, moving money and sourcing computing power, they will need payment and settlement infrastructure that digital assets can provide. Stablecoins are singled out because their relatively stable value makes them useful for pricing services, and blockchain networks can support payments around the clock.

The firm points to Coinbase x402 protocol as one emerging way agents pay for online resources, and acknowledges that existing payments networks are adapting to agentic commerce. For compute, BlackRock sees a longer-term opportunity: as demand for AI processing grows, standardized claims on computing capacity could eventually be traded, financed or used as collateral. But it notes that standardized contracts and liquid markets for such claims have yet to develop.

BlackRock's argument hinges on whether agent payments move beyond early experiments into real volume, and on whether compute contracts can be standardized enough to trade. If they do, stablecoin issuers and blockchain networks stand to gain; if not, the opportunity remains theoretical. The paper's citation of analyst estimates that major cloud revenue from Amazon, Microsoft and Google could reach about $1.1 trillion by 2030 shows the scale BlackRock is watching, even as it acknowledges the infrastructure is not yet in place.