Why BlackRock Thinks AI Agents Could Run On Stablecoins And Bitcoin

BlackRock said the study's results reflected simulated model responses and that agentic payment activity remained nascent.

• BlackRock said stablecoins provided a stable unit of account and more predictable pricing and settlement for agents.
• The models were subjected to 9,072 open-ended scenarios without suggested currencies or prompted answers.
• Bitcoin received 48.3% of responses, while stablecoins garnered 33.2% of the responses.

BlackRock (BLK), the world's largest asset manager, stated in a paper published on Monday that AI agents will need payment systems machines can use on their own, and that stablecoins and crypto assets could fill that role.

The asset manager explained in the report that the research findings pointed to “a potential AI-native monetary architecture in which stablecoins serve as transaction money and bitcoin as a store of value.” 

Researcher Matthew Boyer put 36 models from Anthropic, DeepSeek, Alphabet Inc.’s Google (GOOG, GOOGL), MiniMax, OenAI (OPEAZZX) and xAI through 9,072 open-ended scenarios, with no currencies suggested and no answers prompted. Bitcoin drew 48.3% of responses overall and stablecoins 33.2%. More than 90% of answers favored digitally-native money over traditional fiat.

Bitcoin led as a store of value at 79.1%. Stablecoins led for everyday payments at 53.2%. BlackRock was careful about what that proved. The results "reflect simulated model responses rather than observed agent behavior," it said.

However, the research was not BlackRock's own; it came from the Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI), a Bitcoin advocacy group, which published it in March.

Bitcoin’s price was trading around $84,000, down 1% over the past 24 hours. On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around BTC dropped to the ‘bearish’ zone from the ‘neutral’ zone, while chatter stayed at ‘low’ levels over the past day.

Models Disagreed Sharply

The study said that averages also hid a wide split. Bitcoin preference ranged from 91.3% in some model families to 18.3% in others. Boyer attributed the variation to differences in model intelligence, training data, and alignment methods. 

That spread mattered for anyone reading the headline figures as a settled preference. On this evidence, which AI model was asked changes the answer more than the question does.

Why Stablecoins Lead

BlackRock's own reasoning for the payments for half of the split rested on price stability. Stablecoins gave agents a reliable unit of account and more predictable pricing and settlement, the firm said. Their circulating market capitalization passed $300 billion as of September 2026. If more of that settlement moved onto permissionless networks, BlackRock said, demand could rise for blockspace, validator services, and transaction fees, though how much value reached a network's own token depends on its fee, staking, and gas-sponsorship design.

The firm was clear that none of this is happening at scale today. Agentic payment activity remained nascent, BlackRock said, and markets for the compute these systems ran on were still thinly traded. 

One company sits directly in the path BlackRock described. The firm singled out Circle’s (CRCL) stablecoin USD Coin (USDC) as the early primary use case for x402, Coinbase's (COIN) machine payment protocol, and pointed to Circle's Arc network, where USDC was designed to serve as the native gas asset.

Circle stock, the largest stablecoin issuer, edged lower in pre-market trading on Wednesday. On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around CRCL remained in the ‘bearish’ zone, while chatter around it stayed at ‘normal’ levels over the past day.

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