BlackRock predicts stablecoins will become the payment rails for autonomous AI

BlackRock’s Digital Assets Research team published a paper titled “The Machine-Native Economy: How digital assets connect intelligence, commerce, and compute” during the week of September 22, 2026. The core argument is straightforward: autonomous AI systems need to pay for things, existing financial plumbing cannot handle that job, and stablecoins can. Why legacy payment rails struggle with machine-to-machine transactions BlackRock’s paper identifies traditional systems, including ACH and credit card networks, as fundamentally mismatched for the low-cost, high-frequency, machine-to-machine payments that autonomous AI systems will generate. The settlement times, fees, and intermediary requirements that are tolerable for human-initiated commerce become structural bottlenecks when the counterparty is an algorithm buying GPU time or data access in real time. The report also floats the possibility that an entirely new digital asset class could emerge, specifically assets tied to tokenized computing capacity. Regulations and market standards for that segment are still taking shape. The numbers behind the thesis Stablecoin circulating supply crossed $300 billion by September 2026. Adjuste...