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Points of Focus
- BlackRock sees AI agents using blockchain rails for micropayments, data purchases, and autonomous commerce.
- Fidelity said public blockchains face competition from banks, fintechs, and technology platforms building agent-ready payment infrastructure.
- Fidelity expects a “multi-fi” future in which agents move between financial rails according to cost, reliability, and acceptance.
AI agents may soon have money to spend. BlackRock thinks blockchains are well-placed to help them spend it. Fidelity expects the resulting market to be much messier.
In its Aug. 24 thematic mid-year update, BlackRock sketched a simple example: An AI travel agent researches a trip, buys third-party data through micropayments, and settles the purchase on blockchain rails.
The example captures the broader thesis. As software becomes capable of researching, deciding, and transacting with less supervision, it needs infrastructure built for machines as much as for people. Digital assets can be held and transferred programmatically, while blockchains keep settlement available around the clock.
That could make agents unusually natural customers for crypto infrastructure. A piece of software buying data, compute, or access to a service has little use for a checkout page. It needs a way to pay that can be called directly by code.
Research from Fidelity Digital Assets, published five days earlier, points toward a less orderly outcome. Public blockchains bring open standards, programmable assets, and global, 24/7 settlement. Banks, fintechs, and large technology platforms already have distribution, merchant relationships, credit, fraud controls, and regulatory infrastructure.
The agent economy may end up using all of them.
AI agents may shop across financial rails
Fidelity calls this prospective mix “multi-fi.” An agent could send one payment over a blockchain, another through a bank, and a third through a proprietary network, selecting whichever route offers the best combination of price, reliability, and counterparty acceptance.
Micropayments are one area where crypto has a clear opening. Fixed fees make tiny card payments awkward. A low-cost blockchain can support payments for an API call, a data set, or a few seconds of compute at values far below the usual economics of card networks.
Some of that infrastructure already exists. X402 allows software to pay for online resources with stablecoins inside an HTTP request. For an autonomous agent, payment can become part of the request itself.
Banks and payment companies are moving in the same direction. Fidelity expects them to adapt existing systems for agent-initiated transactions, bringing the advantages of scale, distribution, and established commercial relationships with them.
Transaction volume is only part of the prize
The economics become less straightforward once those payments reach scale.
A future filled with machine payments could generate enormous transaction counts without producing equally large revenues for the blockchains carrying them. Fidelity found that over the past 180 days, trading generated 49 times more Ethereum base-layer revenue per dollar of volume than payments.
That makes financial activity a potentially richer market for crypto. Agents that trade, lend, manage portfolios, or provide liquidity can generate more fees and make heavier use of programmable assets. Routine machine payments may leave more of the economics with stablecoin issuers, payment providers, and the applications sitting closest to the user.
BlackRock’s travel agent gives blockchains a plausible place in the machine economy: Software needs programmable money and settlement that never closes.
Fidelity’s “multi-fi” model makes the competition harder to ignore. An agent buying a fraction of a cent of data, paying for a service, or moving capital through an onchain market may choose a different rail each time. The winners will be the systems that make those transactions cheap, reliable, and widely accepted — and easy for software to execute.
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