The Machine-Native Economy

Three developments caught my attention this week …

All three are giving more oxygen to three connected trends we’ve been covering for years.

Those would be:

• The Proliferation of Stablecoins: With the passage of the GENIUS Act, stablecoins have the green light for growth in the U.S. These assets serve a dual purpose of providing onchain liquidity while also creating new demand for U.S. Treasurys, a good thing for a government with an insatiable appetite for debt.
• The Tokenization of Assets: The tokenization of real-world assets, including real estate, private funds, stocks, ETFs, and more, will likely be the most consequential evolution of finance since the invention of securitization. This is the goal of Project Crypto, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s initiative to bring finance onchain.
• The Permissionless, Agentic Economy: AI agents move assets freely, 24/7, across exchanges, lending venues, and credit markets in real time. Agents can be tasked to create a basket of stocks that rebalances daily, execute on entry and exit levels autonomously, engage in active trading strategies, and more. In essence, it’s unleashing the abilities of an AI agent on your personal investments with a simple prompt.

All three are significant. And all three are playing out in real time and converging in ways few predicted.

Let me show you …

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Development No. 1: Making Dollar Deals

The White House is weighing a program to actively spread U.S. dollar stablecoins around the world. That’s according to a Bloomberg report from Wednesday.

The mechanics under discussion are joint ventures between the government and private-sector stablecoin firms.

This looks to be a combination of multiple agencies such as the Treasury Department, the State Department, and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) – the agency that normally finances infrastructure projects abroad.

The general idea is that the DFC would help finance payment infrastructure in emerging markets. Meanwhile, the State Department smooths the diplomatic path, and private issuers provide the tokens.

The U.S. government effectively becomes a distribution partner for the dollar in digital form to areas where local banking is weak and dollar demand is already strong.

This is the first time we’re hearing about an aggressive, coordinated stance toward promoting stablecoins abroad.

Why would the federal government do this?

Two reasons …

First, a global proliferation of dollar-backed stablecoins would help solidify the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency.

The second reason is what we wrote about in Don’t Fight Bessent.

U.S. stablecoins are backed by short-term Treasurys. As a result, every stablecoin issued creates more demand for U.S. Treasurys. That’s good news for Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has plenty of debt to sell and is motivated to issue shorter-term debt to help tamp down on rates at the long end of the curve.

Put more simply, stablecoins seem to be going swimmingly at home. And now, the government wants to take the show on the road. It seems only a matter of time before dollar stablecoins have a market capitalization measured in the trillions of dollars.

Here’s why …

Development No. 2: The Assets Follow the Money

The issuers of investment funds got noticeably more active this week.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is partnering with Ondo Finance.

Ondo is a platform that lets users access tokenized stocks with a few clicks. Think of it as an on-ramp for stocks to move onchain seamlessly.

The two just launched three onchain portfolios built on BlackRock model strategies.

They are Ondo High Income, Ondo Diversified Growth, and Ondo High Growth. These are tokenized versions of the model portfolios BlackRock distributes through financial advisors.

They are now living onchain for eligible non-U.S. investors. Holders can mint, redeem, and transfer the tokens across wallets, exchanges, and DeFi protocols, with onchain visibility into holdings, allocations, and rebalancing activity.

What this means is that BlackRock’s investment strategies are now programmable assets that can move freely onchain.

Then there’s the news from ARK Invest. Cathie Wood’s firm partnered with a name we’ve covered before in the tokenization trend … Securitize, the one-stop shop for funds that wish to tokenize their shares.

The product moving onchain is the ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX). This is a unique vehicle in that the fund holds stakes in private companies most investors could never touch. These companies include the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, and Databricks.

The tokenized version is officially going live on Ethereum with a $500 minimum, funded in the USDC stablecoin. And each token is backed one-to-one by fund shares held in custody at BNY Mellon.

This will have several benefits …

First, the fund makes ownership easier than ever. Investors won’t need certain platforms to access the asset. It’ll be easily available onchain.

The second benefit is liquidity.

Today, ARKVX investors must wait for quarterly windows to sell shares back to ARK. There is also no guarantee those repurchase orders get filled in full.

Tokenized shares, on the other hand, allow secondary markets to form, giving holders the ability to sell when they choose or even pledge the token as collateral for a loan.

Tokenization means shares are able to flow in a more frictionless manner, which is what makes the last news item interesting …

Development No. 3: The Machine-Native Economy

BlackRock’s Digital Assets Research team published a white paper titled “The Machine-Native Economy” this week.

What does that mean?

The paper’s core framing is that AI is machine-native intelligence, and digital assets are machine-native money.

The two were built for each other.

Here’s how BlackRock described it:

At the core of this convergence, AI and digital assets both arise from a common foundation: AI represents machine-native intelligence, while digital assets represent machine-native money.

This alignment becomes particularly important with the rise of agentic AI, which refers to systems that can plan and execute multistep tasks toward a defined objective by interacting with external tools and infrastructure with limited human intervention, with blockchains providing the programmable infrastructure that connects intelligence with economic activity.

BlackRock even draws the parallel at the technical level, showing that a language model converts human language into machine-processable tokens, while a blockchain converts economic rights into machine-verifiable tokens.

The paper argues that AI agents transacting on their own will need payment rails that banks and card networks were never designed for. Some of the things agents will need include the ability to execute sub-cent transactions, run 24 hours a day, and settle without a human in the loop.

Stablecoins fit that job description precisely.

The report goes so far as to call AI adoption an underappreciated source of demand for blockchains, stablecoins, and tokenized instruments, and floats an entirely new asset class: tokenized claims on computing power (perhaps it needs to read our paid report on DIEM, an asset that does exactly this).

What does this mean for normal users like us?

It means the ability to whip up your own financial solutions is at your fingertips.

There’s no need to be locked into a single bank or brokerage. The user interface to blockchains, wallets, and onchain assets becomes a prompt.

A few minutes describing what you want, and an agent assembles it: a custom basket of stocks, an income or yield strategy, or simply a new savings account for that addition you want to put on your home.

Prompts and autonomous machine activity are how transaction activity grows 100x. It’s how trade volume goes parabolic. And it’s how protocols and networks reach record-high valuations.

Blockchains are infrastructure built for machines. And now the machines are here.

Individually, these three developments might be interesting. Taken together, they paint a picture of what’s to come.

The mass adoption of stablecoins, the rapid tokenization of assets, and the agentic economy providing a huge catalyst for public blockchains and associated assets – none of this is theoretical anymore.

It’s happening now.

Right now.

Stay tuned to what comes next.

Your Pulse on Crypto,

Ben Lilly

Editor, Chain of Thought