BlackRock paper sees compute futures and stablecoins powering AI agent payments

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In its new research paper, BlackRock expects standardized compute products, like exchange-traded compute futures, to emerge as AI adoption expands.

“The Machine-Native Economy” also touts stablecoins as the payment rail for autonomous AI agents.

Hyperscaler cloud revenue could reach $1.1 trillion by 2030

The paper casts compute, the processing power that trains and runs AI, as a resource that might follow the trajectory of large commodity markets. Those markets built trading infrastructure to improve liquidity and risk management, BlackRock wrote.

“We expect standardized products, including exchange-traded compute futures, to support more transparent price discovery and more effective hedging for both providers and consumers of compute capacity,” BlackRock’s paper says.

The business said that claims on compute capacity could be shown, moved, pledged as collateral, and settled on the blockchain. They also said this might bring more institutional investors into the market.

The productivity of different generations of chips varies, the cost of energy varies by region, and there aren’t workable standards yet for cash settlement or for delivering the contracted capacity.

These are what BlackRock calls “important but ultimately resolvable design considerations.”

Sell-side analysts think that AWS, Microsoft’s Intelligent Cloud, and Google Cloud will bring in about $1.1 trillion in combined revenue by 2030. In the years after 2025, that means a 29% rise each year.

The paper suggests that AI agents could use marketplace APIs to look at capacity and compare it based on price, latency, location, and hardware. After that, rails like x402 would be used to pay for it.

Passage from page 8 of BlackRock’s The Machine-Native Economy paper.

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The paper’s authors include Will Su, the head of digital assets research, and Robert Mitchnick, the head of digital assets. It was co-written by Jay Jacobs, U.S. head of equity ETFs, and William Helm, head of U.S. iShares product innovation.

“AI represents machine-native intelligence, while digital assets represent machine-native money,” the paper says.

BlackRock said card networks and ACH have onboarding requirements and settlement economics that don’t lend themselves to always-on, very low-value payments.

The circulating market cap of stablecoins topped $300 billion in September 2026.

Stablecoin volume adjusted surpassed $11 trillion in 2025, on par with Visa and Mastercard. It grew at an 80% annual rate from 2020 through 2025, versus about 8.5% for ACH.

Since May 2025, AI agents probably accounted for 0.6% to 7.5% of $25.62 million in screened x402 payments, according to research from TRM Labs.

BlackRock is one of the founding validators of the Arc blockchain from Circle, which launched its mainnet this month and was partly built for AI agents transacting on their own.

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