The asset manager says claims on computing capacity could be pledged as collateral onchain, and AI agents could pay for compute in stablecoins.

BlackRock expects standardized compute products, including exchange-traded futures, to appear as AI use spreads. It says those futures would give sellers and buyers of computing capacity more open pricing and a better way to hedge.

The forecast comes from The Machine-Native Economy, a new BlackRock research paper written by the firm's digital-assets leads with the heads of its U.S. equity-ETF business and of U.S. iShares product innovation. It treats compute, the processing capacity used to train and run AI, as a resource that may follow the path of major commodity markets. In BlackRock's telling, those markets built trading systems that deepened liquidity and helped participants manage risk.

The paper carries that market onto a blockchain. BlackRock says rights to computing capacity could be recorded onchain, passed between parties, pledged as collateral and settled on the same ledger, and that handling compute claims this way might bring more institutional investors into the market.

BlackRock also lists what stands between capacity and a contract. Chip generations differ in productivity, energy costs vary by region, and there is no practical standard yet for settling a contract in cash or for physically delivering the capacity it promises. The firm calls them important but ultimately resolvable design considerations.

AI agents are among the buyers the paper expects. It pictures them querying marketplace APIs to see what compute is available, comparing offers on cost, hardware, latency and location, and paying through rails such as x402. The paper argues that card networks and ACH are a poor fit for tiny payments that run around the clock, because of how they onboard users and what settlement costs them. It concludes that stablecoin payments and tokenized compute could make AI agents an overlooked source of demand for crypto.

Agents that transact on their own are also part of what Circle's Arc blockchain was built for, and BlackRock is one of its founding validators. Arc's mainnet launched in September 2026.

So far, though, measured agent payments are tiny. On x402, one of the payment rails the paper names, TRM Labs estimates that AI agents were likely behind only 0.6% to 7.5% of the $25.62 million in screened payments since May 2025.