Autor Cointelegraph By Felix Ng

The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, says broad AI adoption could represent an underappreciated source of demand for digital assets. In its latest research paper, “The Machine-Native Economy,” BlackRock said the rise of AI and machine-to-machine payments could increase demand for blockchains and other programmable payment infrastructure, including stablecoins and other on-chain assets. It also sees a potential opportunity for digital assets to support the compute market, allowing claims on computing capacity to be tokenized, traded and used as collateral. “Together, these developments position AI as a structural catalyst for digital asset adoption and digital assets as a potential facilitator of the AI economy,” BlackRock’s Will Su, Robert Mitchnick, Jay Jacobs and William Helm wrote. “This relationship remains underappreciated and could expand the role of digital assets as core infrastructure for an increasingly autonomous digital economy.”The crypto industry has long argued the potential link between AI and digital assets, but BlackRock’s research could bring that thesis to its broader audience of institutional investors. AI could drive need for machine-native payment railsOne of BlackRock’s arguments is that the rise of agentic AI could increase the demand for machine-native payment instruments. While existing payment rails can support some degree of automation, account setup, credentialing, and authorization could require human involvement. Meanwhile, merchant fees can make low-value transactions uneconomic and settlement and finality times could vary across providers.BlackRock said stablecoins, native cryptocurrencies and tokenized real-world assets are well suited to high-frequency, sub-cent, machine-to-machine transactions that take place around the clock.“Several types of digital assets may support agentic commerce, but stablecoins are likely to lead transactional use,” the authors said. Compute could open a new market for crypto The authors said there is an opportunity for digital assets in the growing market for compute — the processing power needed to train and run AI systems. With AI demand surging, AI companies could seek to lock in costs and providers to manage risk. Claims on that capacity could then be represented as tokens to be transferred, pledged as collateral or traded. “This could in turn broaden institutional investor participation and establish compute as a new opportunity for the broader digital asset ecosystem,” the authors said. They also argued that AI agents could use these markets to automatically purchase resources as needed. Related: Australian 40-year economic outlook recognizes ‘AI revolution,’ omits cryptoBlackRock’s thesis echoes arguments from crypto executives. In July, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong pushed back against calls for crypto to pivot to AI, arguing that AI agents could stoke demand for crypto-based financial services. “AI being a megatrend takes nothing away from crypto,” Armstrong wrote, because AI agents will need programmable money rather than traditional banking rails. “If anything, it makes crypto more important,” he added. Crypto companies are already building tools to support that activity. Coinbase’s x402 protocol and Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol have both been designed to let AI agents automatically pay for online services. In May, Circle introduced agent wallets and USDC payment tools, while OKX’s Agent Payments Protocol is designed to support recurring payments and arrangements in which funds are held in escrow and released after a task’s completion.Magazine: Big Questions: Does Satoshi actually own 1.1 million Bitcoin?

The US commodities regulator has warned that prediction market contracts tied to what a person says or does carry a heightened risk of manipulation, putting exchanges on notice as the industry faces increasing scrutiny over market integrity. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Division of Market Oversight on Tuesday said it issued an advisory to some of its regulated entities, advising that there are only “limited circumstances” in which “mention markets” — event contracts based on whether an individual will say certain words, attend or appear at an event or interact with another person — can be listed consistently with the Commodity Exchange Act. “These contract types present a heightened risk of manipulation because their settlement turns on the discrete conduct of a person that may be neither independently generated nor externally verifiable,” the regulator said. The warning follows several cases involving traders accused of exploiting privileged information on prediction markets, including a former White House teleprompter operator who was ordered last month to return $107,539 in profits and pay a $65,000 civil penalty for trading contracts tied to US President Donald Trump’s speeches. Related: Kalshi US visits soar 1,500% as regulatory pressure mountsAccording to CNBC, the CFTC letter said exchanges listing mention markets should consider four factors: whether there are adequate oversight measures in place to detect manipulation, whether the words or actions used for settlement are independently verifiable, external pressure that could influence the subject’s conduct, and what outside obligations the subject of the mention market may have. CFTC Chair Mike Selig welcomed the guidance in an X post on Tuesday, saying that “regulatory clarity drives sound markets.” “Pleased to see staff provide guidance on the potential risks and unique considerations associated with the listing of mention markets on CFTC-regulated exchanges and remind DCMs of their obligation to list only contracts not readily susceptible to manipulation.”Cointelegraph reached out to the CFTC for comment. The CFTC had reportedly already begun examining mention markets before Tuesday’s advisory. CNBC and NPR reported in August that the regulator had opened a review into the contracts over manipulation concerns, with Kalshi removing mention markets tied to sporting events “until further notice” as the regulator conducted its inquiry.Prediction market Kalshi faces fresh scrutiny Separately, unusual trading activity on Kalshi has drawn fresh scrutiny over potential market manipulation.In August, nearly one million trades worth more than $5 billion were made in a single market tied to the price of Ether, with more than a third occurring in nearly identical amounts of around $5,500, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. The activity has caught the attention of federal regulators and traders, according to the Journal, though Kalshi has rejected suggestions that the transactions amounted to wash trading. Magazine: How to fix suspected insider trading on Polymarket and Kalshi

Australia’s new 40-year economic outlook has identified artificial intelligence as one of five major transitions expected to have a profound effect on the economy, while leaving out any mention of crypto. The latest Intergenerational Report, published on Monday by the Australian Treasury, described agentic AI systems as having become “significantly” more capable, autonomous and widely used — surpassing human-level performance on some benchmarks. The other major transitions are geopolitical conflicts, an aging population, a shift to clean energy and Australia’s industrial transformation toward services.“The Intergenerational Report makes it clear that Australia’s prosperity over the next 40 years will depend heavily on our ability to adopt new technology and lift productivity,” Coinbase Australia country director John O’Loghlen said in emailed comments. “And while the report focuses heavily on artificial intelligence, it completely misses the financial infrastructure those agents will need.”Previous Intergenerational Reports also have not addressed digital assets. The latest omission came despite the Reserve Bank of Australia increasing its focus on tokenized finance and financial infrastructure upgrades earlier this year, while the Digital Finance Cooperative Research Centre estimated digital finance innovations could generate 24 billion Australian dollars ($17.1 billion) in annual economic gains. Despite the omission, Treasury’s separate report called the “Financial Innovation Strategy,’ released on Sept. 3, does address the link between AI and financial infrastructure. Related: Australia draft payments vision eyes stablecoin interoperabilityThe report said agentic systems could increase automated and machine-to-machine transactions, creating greater demand for real-time, interoperable and programmable payment systems. “We’ve made good progress in recent years, including through the Digital Asset Platform framework, which has provided necessary regulatory clarity,” O’Loghlen added.“The opportunity now is to bring the same focus to the tokenized stored-value facility framework for stablecoins, and clear rules for tokenized markets. Those are the rails digital finance — agentic finance included — will run on and getting them right is how Australia turns this opportunity into reality.”Magazine: Kyle Samani predicts SOL flippening, claims ‘no one’ uses ETH

Prediction market platform Trueo plans to migrate from Base to Ethereum, citing broader integration opportunities and plans to build the next iteration of its oracle system. The project, which launched on Base in March 2025, said its priority after the migration will be attracting liquidity and launching the next generation of its oracle, the system used to verify real-world outcomes that are used to resolve prediction markets. Trueo said it chose to move from Base to Ethereum because it offered higher integration potential and product upside, while on Base, integrations are limited to the immediate ecosystem. “Ethereum is the best chain for the most credibly neutral and truthful oracle system and prediction markets,” Trueo co-founder known as “Lumberg” said on X.Source: Vitalik Buterin“As a new app and experiment, an L2 like Base was the right choice for many reasons. At the time, Mainnet gas costs were still elevated and some features of our app were experimental,” Trueo said on X. “The final form of Trueo is to be a platform that is widely adopted, broadly integrated, fully permissionless, mostly immutable, and highly credible. Ethereum is the best fit for this combination of properties.”Trueo is ranked as the 14th-largest onchain prediction market with a total value locked of $795,687, according to DefiLlama.Related: World Cup generated $20B in blockchain prediciton market volume: ChainalysisCointelegraph is committed to independent, transparent journalism. This news article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and aims to provide accurate and timely information. Readers are encouraged to verify information independently.

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