Author: Shenchao TechFlow
BlackRock proposes the "Machine-Native Economy": Which chains and tokens can benefit from Agent payments?
This week, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company, released a research report titled “The Machine-Native Economy: How Digital Assets Connect Intelligence, Commerce, and Computation,” proposing a simple yet bold equation: AI is “machine-native intelligence,” digital assets are “machine-native money,” and blockchain is the programmable infrastructure connecting the two.
This report was led by the BlackRock Digital Assets Research team, with Will Su and Robert Mitchnick as team leads; Robert Mitchnick is also the head of BlackRock’s iShares product line.
The core argument of the report is that as more software agents (AI Agent) begin autonomously purchasing data, calling APIs, and renting computing power, they require a payment infrastructure that does not rely on human confirmation clicks. Traditional banking accounts and credit card systems cannot serve software without identification, while stablecoins and blockchain are uniquely positioned to fill this gap.
In simple terms: robots need money, but banks won’t open accounts for robots, so robots use cryptocurrency.
This narrative is not new in the crypto industry, but the backing of an institution like BlackRock changes the game.
The key question is: How far is the journey from narrative to revenue? Which chains and tokens are truly on this path, and how many are merely bystanders along the way?
The report showed three pie charts.
BlackRock's approach consists of three layers: stablecoins as a "tool for spending," Bitcoin as a "tool for saving," and tokenized compute as a "new asset class."
Stablecoins: The only layer with real traffic. As of September 2026, the total market capitalization of stablecoins exceeds $300 billion, with adjusted annual trading volume surpassing $11 trillion in 2025—roughly equivalent to Visa’s volume during the same period. USDT leads with approximately $189.5 billion, followed by USDC at approximately $77.3 billion. This is existing infrastructure already in operation, not a dotted line on a roadmap.
Visa’s stablecoin settlement project processes $7 billion annually across nine blockchains. Mastercard has also integrated eight blockchains—including Solana, Arbitrum, Base, Ethereum, and Polygon—into its stablecoin settlement network. SoFi has just become the first U.S. national bank to launch on Mastercard’s stablecoin rail, with 70% of its SoFiUSD supply deployed on Solana.
Bitcoin: The narrative is compelling, but the evidence is shifting. BlackRock cited a study by the Bitcoin Policy Institute from earlier this year, which tested 36 AI models in simulated scenarios and found they selected Bitcoin as a store of value 79.1% of the time and stablecoins for payments 53.2% of the time. This data initially appeared highly favorable to Bitcoin, but the latest round of testing (early September, with nine updated models) shows a clear shift: the proportion selecting stablecoins for payments rose to 77%, while the share choosing Bitcoin for payments dropped from 36% to 20%. Only Grok 4.6 ranked Bitcoin as the preferred payment tool. BlackRock’s report does not mention Bitcoin’s Lightning Network or the L402 protocol; instead, it highlights Coinbase-led x402, Stripe’s MPP, Google’s AP2, and Visa’s TAP.
Looking at it another way: BlackRock has given Bitcoin the role of a "savings account," but in the actual payment processes of the agent economy, Bitcoin has been marginalized.
Tokenized compute: the most imaginative and farthest-reaching application. The most striking forward-looking judgment in the report is: "As agents become more persistent and powerful, standardized claims on compute capacity could become a significant use case for digital assets in financing and programmable settlement." BlackRock estimates that by 2030, the combined revenue of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud will reach approximately $1.1 trillion. If compute power becomes a tradable, standardized commodity like oil or wheat, the market potential for its financial derivatives would be significantly larger.
But this is still a theoretical possibility. No tokenized computing power market currently meets the standardization required for commodity futures.
$5,000: Real monthly transaction volume processed by Agent
BlackRock acknowledged in its report that agent payments are still in early stages, but how early is "early"? A study released by blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs on September 9 provided an extremely sobering answer.
Since its launch in May 2025, the x402 protocol led by Coinbase has recorded 205 million settlement transactions totaling approximately $52.7 million. At first glance, these figures appear impressive. However, TRM Labs applied three layers of filtering: removing self-payments where the payer and seller addresses were identical, eliminating anomalous traffic concentrated among a few payers, and excluding sellers with fewer than 10 buyers. After filtering, about half of the transaction volume disappeared, leaving approximately $25.62 million identifiable as legitimate buy-sell transactions.
Of the $25.62 million, only 0.6% to 7.5% of transactions appeared to originate from genuine AI agents, translating to an absolute amount of $154,000 to $1.92 million. Equating to a monthly run rate for 2026, genuine agent commercial payments are approximately between $5,000 and $11,000 per month.
$5,000 per month. This is the real agent trading volume generated by a protocol with 100,000 registered agents, running on three chains, and fully backed by Coinbase.
TRM Labs' primary signal for identifying AI activity is transaction amount: transactions averaging under $1 are more likely to originate from agent micropayments. However, the researchers themselves note that "specialized agents" designed for single tasks may not follow this pattern, so actual agent activity may be underestimated. Even so, the gap between thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars is so large that it raises doubts about whether the entire market exists.
USDC accounts for 99.6% of the settlement value on x402. This validates BlackRock’s assertion that stablecoins are the preferred payment tool for Agents, but also means that x402 currently functions more like a USDC pipeline than a diverse Agent economy.
Who is really making money: The truth about revenue from the settlement layer, hashing layer, and data layer
BlackRock’s report outlines a layered system: the underlying settlement networks (L1/L2) earn gas fees from each transaction; the intermediate layer of compute and data markets earns commissions from supply-demand matching; and the top layer of stablecoin issuers profits from interest on reserve assets. This framework is correct, but the revenue scales across each layer vary dramatically.
Settlement layer: Base captured the largest early红利. 67% of x402’s trading volume runs on Coinbase’s L2 network, Base, with the remainder distributed across Solana and Polygon. However, gas revenue generated by Agent payments is negligible for these chains. With an average transaction cost of $0.30 and gas fees around $0.001, the total $52.7 million in volume generates only tens of thousands of dollars in on-chain fees. A meaningful signal for L1/L2 networks will only emerge when transaction volumes reach billions per month. Currently, these chains earn far more from routine stablecoin transfers and DeFi activity than from Agent payments.
Solana is the most active chain in the stablecoin settlement space. In April 2026, it captured 32.6% of weekly adjusted stablecoin transfer volume, surpassing Ethereum’s 27.8%. In February alone, stablecoin transaction volume on Solana reached $650 billion. However, this volume primarily stems from DeFi and cross-border payments, not the Agent economy. Directly attributing Solana’s stablecoin processing volume to Agent payment benefits is a logical leap.
Hashpower Layer: Revenue is growing, but attribution remains unclear. The decentralized hashpower market is the most direct manifestation of BlackRock’s “tokenized hashpower” narrative. Here are the actual revenue figures for leading projects:
Aethir is currently the highest-revenue DePIN compute project, generating $127.8 million in revenue for the full year of 2025, with an annualized recurring revenue of $166 million in Q3, serving 94 countries and over 440K GPU containers. These revenues stem from AI training, inference, and cloud gaming demands of more than 150 enterprise customers.
Akash’s data tells a more complex story. Akash’s official report shows that total compute spending for Q1 2026 surpassed $5 million for the first time; however, Messari’s independent tracking reveals that on-chain rental revenue for the same quarter was only $253,000, a 45% decline quarter-over-quarter, annualizing to approximately $1 million. The two figures differ by about fivefold, likely due to differing accounting treatments for AkashML’s inference revenue. AkashML’s inference throughput did grow from around 5 billion tokens per day in May to over 10 billion tokens per day in July, but the AKT token (approximately $0.51, down about 94% from its 2021 high) has not captured this growth.
io.net reports approximately $20 million in annualized on-chain revenue, with over 10,000 active nodes and 56 enterprise customers, offering roughly 72% lower costs than AWS.
Render Network has accumulated over 77.5 million frames rendered and 5,600 nodes, with token burn volume growing by 279% year-over-year, but protocol-level revenue data has not been publicly disclosed.
Overall, the DePIN compute sector tracked by DeFiLlama generated an annualized revenue of approximately $180 million to $220 million in Q1 2026, with Aethir accounting for the majority. However, the entire DePIN ecosystem, with a circulating market cap of about $10 billion, generated only $72 million in on-chain revenue during fiscal year 2025. This is not an undervalued sector—it is a sector with a significant gap between revenue and valuation.
The more critical issue is that revenue growth in the compute market is currently driven by the natural spillover of enterprise AI demand (cloud providers facing capacity constraints, leading customers to turn to decentralized alternatives), and has little to do with Agent payments. The scenario described by BlackRock—where Agents autonomously procure compute power and settle payments in stablecoins—has not yet scaled on these platforms.
Data layer: The most vacant link. BlackRock’s report lists "data purchasing" as one of the core activities of the Agent economy, yet in the on-chain data market space, there are almost no noteworthy revenue cases to discuss. CoinGecko’s paid API was one of the early deployments of x402, but the scale of such services is too small to support an independent asset class narrative.
The competitive landscape of agent payment protocols: Cryptocurrency is not the only player
The five Agent payment protocols listed in BlackRock's report reveal a fact selectively ignored by the crypto industry: the competition among Agent payment protocols is far more complex than "on-chain vs. off-chain."
x402 is a stablecoin payment protocol built by Coinbase around the HTTP 402 status code, where the Agent initiates a request, the server responds with price and address, and the Agent settles on-chain using USDC without requiring an account. This is a crypto-native approach.
MPP (Machine Payments Protocol), developed jointly by Stripe and Tempo, launches in March 2026 and supports simultaneous settlement in both stablecoins and fiat currencies. Anthropic, OpenAI, Shopify, Etsy, Visa, and Mastercard are all signatories. Stripe’s strategy is clear: leverage its distribution advantage to lock in the standard before x402 establishes itself as the benchmark.
ACP (Agentic Commerce Protocol), developed jointly by OpenAI and Stripe, standardizes the checkout process within AI interfaces. AP2 is Google’s authorization layer protocol, addressing the question of "who approved this transaction." TAP is Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol, resolving the identity verification question of "whether this Agent is a legitimate buyer."
These protocols are composable with one another, forming a layered stack: an Agent purchase may simultaneously use AP2 for authorization, ACP for checkout, and x402 or MPP for settlement. Cryptocurrency payments (x402) constitute only a portion of the settlement layer in this stack. If Stripe’s MPP allows the Agent to complete the same micropayment using fiat currency, then the exclusivity of on-chain settlement no longer exists.
For chains and tokens, competitors are not just other chains, but also the agentization upgrade of the entire traditional payment system.
Where is the real Alpha?
Going back to the original question: Which chains and tokens can Agent payments generate revenue for?
If "generating income" is defined as "having already generated verifiable income from Agent activity today," the answer is sobering: almost none. Monthly Agent payment volumes of $5,000 to $11,000, spread across Base, Solana, and Polygon, have no meaningful impact on the revenue statement of any single chain.
If we extend the timeframe to "potential beneficiaries over the next 3-5 years," the order of beneficiaries is roughly:
Stablecoin issuers (Circle, Tether) are the most certain winners. Regardless of which chain an Agent trades on or which protocol they use, USDC and USDT are the default payment mediums. However, USDC and USDT themselves are not investable tokens; Circle’s revenue comes from reserve interest, not on-chain fees.
Low-fee settlement chains (Solana, Base) hold a structural advantage in competition. Typical Agent transaction amounts are under $1, making a gas fee of $0.001 a barrier to entry. Ethereum mainnet is naturally excluded from micropayment scenarios. However, Agent payment revenues on Solana and Base are currently rounded to zero.
Decentralized compute networks (Aethir, Akash, Render, io.net) generate real revenue, but this income stems from enterprise AI demand, not autonomous Agent procurement. The "compute tokenization" scenario described by BlackRock—where Agents buy and sell standardized compute like futures contracts—does not currently exist on any platform. The AKT token price has dropped 94% from its peak, and the market has not assigned a valuation premium to Akash’s usage growth.
The value capture mechanisms for protocol-specific tokens are generally weak. Most DePIN project tokens lack direct revenue-sharing rights, token burn volumes are negligible compared to market capitalization, and token inflation far exceeds demand consumption. Render’s token burn volume increased by 279% year-over-year, but the cumulative burn volume as of the end of 2025 accounted for only about 0.2% of its market capitalization.
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