BlackRock says AI agents need “machine-native money,” and stablecoins are its leading candidate. A new research paper from the world’s largest asset manager argues that card networks and bank transfers were never built for software that pays software.
The paper sketches a two-tier money system for machines. Stablecoins handle the spending, and Bitcoin, according to a study BlackRock cites, handles the saving.
Software that buys data, compute, and services on its own cannot wait a business day for a bank transfer. BlackRock’s answer is money that settles at machine speed, and it names stablecoins first.
Why BlackRock Says Cards and ACH Fall Short for AI Agents
BlackRock’s argument starts with a practical problem. An autonomous agent cannot open a bank account or a card without a human. Merchant fees make sub-dollar payments pointless, and Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfers still take up to a business day to settle.
Blockchains, in contrast, settle around the clock in near real time. The paper concludes that this makes on-chain assets a natural fit for machine transactions.
“stablecoins, native cryptoassets, and other on-chain assets can serve as machine-native instruments” BlackRock said
The firm points to Coinbase’s x402, a protocol that revives the dormant HTTP 402 “Payment Required” code so agents can pay for data on the spot. BeInCrypto has covered the x402 payment standard and the token frenzy that followed it.
However, BlackRock does not frame this as a crypto-only future. The paper lists rival rails from Stripe, OpenAI, Google, and Visa, some of which settle in ordinary bank money. It also concedes that live agent payment volume remains small.
The scale of stablecoins gives the thesis weight. BlackRock puts the circulating supply above $300 billion. Adjusted volume passed $11 trillion in 2025, roughly level with Visa’s $11.2 trillion, but still behind Visa’s $16.7 trillion.
Stablecoins moved another $8.5 trillion in the first half of 2026.
The asset manager already sits inside this market. It launched a money market fund built for stablecoin issuers to park their reserves earlier this year.
AI Models Pick Bitcoin to Save and Stablecoins to Spend
The paper’s most shareable claim is borrowed. BlackRock cites a February 2026 study by the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI), a pro-bitcoin research and advocacy group, as “preliminary support” for a split monetary role.
The BPI team ran 36 frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, and DeepSeek, collecting 9,072 answers. Asked where to store value, the models chose Bitcoin 79.1% of the time. Asked what to spend, they chose stablecoins 53.2% of the time. Bank money drew under 9% overall.
BeInCrypto reported on the AI Bitcoin preference study when it first appeared. Two caveats stand. The results varied sharply by vendor, with Anthropic models favoring Bitcoin far more often than OpenAI’s.
Bitcoin (BTC) traded near $86,400 at press time, up about 0.6% over 24 hours, according to BeInCrypto Markets.
Readers should note that every forward-looking line in the report uses “could” or “can,” and a disclaimer states it is not a forecast. Hence, this should not be taken as financial advice.
Source: BeInCrypto
