Artificial intelligence development is becoming increasingly tied to the growth of cryptocurrency demand, according to a new report titled "Machine-Native Economy" released by BlackRock (NYSE: BLK). The report introduces the concepts of "machine-native intelligence" and "machine-native currency," suggesting that autonomous AI agents will use blockchain, stablecoins, and tokenized assets to transform the payment landscape. Traditional financial infrastructure, built around human users, accounts, and authorization processes, struggles to accommodate the high-frequency, small-value transactions that occur between machines.

Stablecoins, by contrast, offer programmability and continuous settlement advantages, making them well-suited for digital service payments such as API access, data set acquisition, and computing power rental. BlackRock (NYSE: BLK) pointed out that the x402 standard introduced by Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) is emerging as key infrastructure connecting autonomous software with digital services, having already processed over $54 million in total transaction volume across more than 230 million transactions. Additionally, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Bedrock AgentCore Payments now supports autonomous stablecoin payments through the x402 standard and Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) infrastructure.

While the application scale remains in its early stages, the technology has begun to take shape. An analysis of the $52.7 million in x402 settlement transactions suggests that transactions genuinely driven by AI agents account for only 0.6% to 7.5% of the total, indicating a significant gap between current real-world usage and the potential market. BlackRock (NYSE: BLK) further projects that computing power usage rights could be converted into standardized digital assets, which could then be traded, used for financing, or pledged as collateral. This would enable AI agents to bypass traditional cloud service contract negotiations, instead comparing prices and acquiring computing resources directly through programmable transactions, greatly improving efficiency.

From a macroeconomic perspective, cryptocurrency is gradually evolving into the core financial infrastructure underlying automated economic activity. Stablecoins handle payments, blockchain fulfills the settlement function, and tokenization connects digital systems with financial and physical resources. This architecture not only solves the trust and efficiency challenges of machine-to-machine transactions but also lays a solid foundation for a future fully automated economic system.