BlackRock just published a paper saying AI is the most underappreciated demand driver for crypto (holy shit) This quote was killer: "AI represents machine-native intelligence, digital assets represent machine-native money" These two themes have been treated as separate trades With the famous tweet: "If you're in crypto, pivot to AI" But I've long said that a bet on crypto is a bet on AI and that's starting to play out Blackrock notes 2 specific areas where these technologies converge: 1. Agentic Commerce requires machine-native payment rails As AI agents start actually DOING things (buying data, booking travel, renting compute), they need a way to pay. And that's where it gets interesting An AI agent can't easily walk into a bank and open an account. Card rails need human onboarding, charge merchant fees that make a sub-penny API call pointless, and take days to fully settle and clear disputes A stablecoin wallet runs 24/7, settles in seconds, and doesn't care if the owner is a person or a piece of software 2. Compute is emerging as a new and potentially large market for digital assets As compute becomes one of the largest in-demand products in the world, BlackRock thinks standardized, tokenized claims on compute become a real digital asset market, with agents shopping for GPUs and paying per job. There are already early signs of Compute markets and digital assets converging with @USDai_Official, who uses stablecoins to provide financing for GPUs and uses the interest to give yield to USDAI stablecoin holders As the compute market expands, this market should have significant growth across the digital assets ecosystem Crypto has long been judged/valued based on human use cases, but I think it needs to be looked at as financial technology for AI, rather than humans (though it will work for both) Companies like Coinbase and Circle are already going all in on becoming the payment structure for AI and so to are many DeFi protocols. If you want to see what assets I hold in my portfolio to capture the agentic financial upside, you can check out my portfolio here: Don't forget to give me a follow @kylereidhead for more insights on AI, crypto and markets