The Blockchain Standard for the Machine Economy

In 2019, Andreas Antonopoulos asked us to picture a strange future: a car with its own Bitcoin wallet. Not just self-driving, but self-owning. A machine that could pick up passengers, collect fares, pay for charging, schedule repairs, and sustain itself without human oversight.

Back then, it felt like science fiction. A few years later, Antonopoulos returned to the idea, calling it the collision of three forces:

“Let’s take three radically disruptive technologies and mash them together. Bitcoin. Uber. Self-driving cars. … What happens when you mash the three together? The self-owning car. A car that pays for its gas by giving people rides.”

We are not there yet, but the first steps are here. Tesla’s robotaxi program launched this summer. Other autonomous fleets are rolling out in cities. Drones carry parcels overhead, and humanoids are beginning to leave labs for shop floors. Machines are no longer only tools of production, they are edging toward roles as economic actors.

If these systems evolve into open, decentralized ecosystems, the implications are even larger. Machines will not only move through our cities, they will transact within them. And that raises urgent questions: how will they pay, how will they get paid, and how will they prove who they are?

This paper looks at five questions that frame the financial backbone of the machine economy:
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When does a robot truly need a wallet?
Why aren’t traditional banking rails enough?
What currency makes sense for machines?
Which blockchains can carry this new economy?
Who holds the keys, and how do we regulate trust?

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The Moment Machines Enter the Economy, Wallets Become Inevitable

Before asking how robots might use money, we should first ask whether they need it at all.

Picture the giant mechanical arms inside a car factory. They never leave their posts. Electricity flows steadily from the grid, spare parts arrive on schedule, and technicians keep them tuned and oiled. Every expense is made from the company’s balance sheet. For these machines, money is a concept that doesn’t exist. Even if they somehow became self-aware, their reality would be limited to energy and caretakers, not the act of paying or getting paid. Immobile, specialized robots live in a closed system where finance is invisible.

Now picture a self-driving taxi pulling out of a garage at dawn. Unlike the factory arm, it moves through a city thick with gates and meters, checkpoints and services. On the highway, a toll barrier blocks its lane: payment required. Later, with the battery running low, it pulls into a charging station: payment required. That night, it noses into a parking space downtown: payment required. For a mobile machine, money isn’t abstract, it’s everywhere.

And if that car were truly self-owned, its survival would depend on earning as well as spending. Fares from passengers would cover the essentials: charging, parking, maintenance, and the data streams it needs to navigate. With no driver to handle cash or swipe a card, the vehicle would have to collect and spend money directly, seamlessly, as part of its daily operations.

But ownership matters. In Tesla’s robotaxi fleet, the cars don’t need wallets. Riders pay Tesla in dollars through Apple Pay or a credit card, and Tesla settles the expenses from its accounts. In that closed ecosystem, the robotaxi is little different from the factory arm, financially invisible, operating entirely on its parent company’s balance sheet.

The picture changes in open ecosystems:

Independent ownership: A robotaxi owned by an individual or a small fleet needs its own way to earn and spend.
Machine-to-machine services: A car negotiating with a municipal toll gate, or a drone paying for a battery swap, requires direct settlement.
Offline operation: NFC or QR-based crypto transactions can allow low-cost, universal payments without relying on banks.

In short: not all robots need wallets, but the moment machines step outside corporate walls into open ecosystems, wallets become essential.

The Native Money of Machines

At first glance, fiat rails look good enough. Payments are faster than ever: FedNow in the US, SEPA Instant in Europe, Visa Direct worldwide. For corporate-owned fleets, these systems may be sufficient.

But they were never built for autonomous machines. Bank accounts require legal identities and paperwork. Cross-border payments are slow, permissioned. Micro-transactions are uneconomical. A robot paying one cent for data has no place in that system.

This is where crypto works. Payments can be coded directly into operations, triggered automatically by events. A toll gate could open the moment it detects a verified crypto transfer. A drone could pay another drone for a battery swap without a single human involved.

Crypto is neutral, programmable, and granular, the qualities machines need for seamless machine-to-machine payments. The caveat: governments will demand authorisation and authentication. Real-world deployment will require digital identity, verifiable credentials, and compliance.

Stablecoins as the Financial Standard for the Machine Economy

Bitcoin and Ethereum are the foundations of crypto: permissionless, global, always on. They embody the qualities machines need most: reliability, neutrality, permissionless access. But they come with a problem: volatility.

A robot cannot plan around assets that swing 20 to 30 percent in weeks. Trading Bitcoin may suit speculators, but it does not work for a machine running on thin margins.

Stablecoins preserve crypto’s strengths, programmability, borderless settlement, 24/7 availability, while anchoring value to currencies like the dollar. In practice, they offer the stability machines require.

For robots, stablecoins are a natural fit:

Predictable pricing for reliable cost planning.
Global liquidity, with USD-pegged stablecoins already dominating settlement.
Machine-native infrastructure, working seamlessly with contracts and automation.

Examples are easy to picture:

A drone swarm paying per kilometer in USDC.
A humanoid robot covering a monthly software subscription.
A robotaxi charging passengers directly in digital dollars.

Not every jurisdiction will rely on dollars; local stablecoins will emerge. Even dollar-backed coins face scrutiny over reserves and regulation. Machines may need fallback options or multi-currency support.

Yet despite uncertainties, stablecoins stand out as the most practical choice. They combine crypto’s openness with fiat’s stability, giving machines both freedom and predictability. If decentralized physical AI is the engine of the future, stablecoins are the oil that keeps it running.

Which Blockchains Can Power the Machine Economy?

The challenge is not money, it is scale. Millions of machines transacting constantly would overwhelm most networks today.

The right infrastructure must check five boxes:

Throughput and latency: real-time processing for millions of micro-payments.
Cost: transactions cheap enough to make fractions of a cent viable.
Paymaster capability: machines should not need native gas tokens; they should transact directly in what they earn and spend.
Identity frameworks: DIDs, attestations, credentials so machines can prove who they are and what they can do.
Interoperability: seamless operation across chains and jurisdictions.

Current contenders are strong but general-purpose. zkSync, Base, and Solana offer speed and developer ecosystems, but were designed for human finance, not machines.

peaq flips the logic. From day one it was built for machines, offering projects a wide variety of tools, integrations, and frameworks for building the Machine Economy. Its stellar fundamentals already put it at 10,000 TPS, and a recent testnet trial proved the network’s ability to hit some 49,000 transactions per second without compromising its decentralization and security. This scalability offers machines a perfect settlement layer for rapid microtransactions, from micro-rewards for collecting and sharing data to payments for charging sessions, parking sessions, battery swaps, and more.

peaq’s full-on focus on machines and robotics has prompted it to launch the Machine Economy Free Zone in the United Arab Emirates — the world’s first free zone of the kind, working as a testing ground for autonomous robotics and DePIN projects. The idea behind the MEFZ is to give the blockchain-powered real-world innovation a regulatory sandbox where projects can easily connect with investors, decision-makers, and businesses, tailor their offering and business models to their real-world needs, test and deploy fast. The MEFZ is a hotbed of innovation and another reason why peaq stands out as the blockchain to build anything real-world on.

Besides that, building on peaq is easy. peaq just released the dedicated Robotics SDK, which enables builders to make any robots Machine Economy-ready in just a few lines of code. The SDK unlocks peaq’s Universal Machine Functions, its pre-made modular functionalities for real-world apps, for robotics projects, enabling them to:

Universal Machine ID: Outfit the robots with self-sovereign machine IDs, which enable them to interact with other robots as well as humans onchain
Universal Machine Access: Enable the robots to use decentralized data storage, saving up the local memory
Universal Machine Storage: Set up role-based access rules, determining who can interact with the robot — and on what terms

Future updates will unlock the full kit of peaq’s Universal Machine Functions, adding the following capabilities to the mix:

Universal Machine Payment: Peer-to-peer payments for machines and robots enabling robots to pay and get paid in the Machine Economy
Universal Machine Verification: Three-tiered data verification framework enabling machines to monetize and consume trusted data
Universal Machine Time: Nanosecond-precise clock synchronization for robots and machines, enabling ultra-precise timestamping and coordination

With its recent announcement of the world’s first tokenized robo-farm launching on its network, peaq is already making strides in bringing robotics onchain. Enabled by its unwavering focus on real-world applications, this early lead sets peaq up as the leader in the nascent Robotics segment of the wider Web3, driving its further growth and development.

Yes, peaq’s ecosystem is younger and smaller. But that is also its edge: unencumbered, focused, designed for one goal, becoming the economic layer of decentralized physical AI. If Solana is a trading floor, and Ethereum a global settlement layer, peaq is the operating system of machine capital.

No blockchain is fully ready for the tidal wave ahead. Scaling, interoperability, regulation, all remain open battles. But if the future belongs to networks shaped for the machine economy, peaq is setting the standard.

Custody and Control: Who Holds the Keys?

If wallets are the lifeblood of the machine economy, the hardest question is: who holds the keys?

Imagine a robotaxi with its own wallet. If it controls the keys, it has autonomy, but also becomes a target. A hack could drain funds, immobilize it, or weaponize its spending power. If the operator holds the keys, autonomy collapses; the machine is back to being just another corporate tool.

The answer lies in between. Options include:

Hardware-secure enclaves to protect wallets at the silicon level.
Multi-party custody with keys split between machine, owner, and regulator or insurer.
Programmable limits or circuit breakers to stop runaway transactions.
Insurance and bonding to cover compromised machines.

But technology alone will not solve it. Regulation will demand wallets be tied to legal entities, with clear rules for identity, liability, and compliance.

History offers parallels. Corporate banking once wrestled with custody: who could sign checks, who could authorize payments, how to prevent fraud. Online payments went through the same cycle: clunky, insecure, until identity and regulation caught up.

Machine wallets will follow the same arc. Early versions will be crude and tightly controlled. Over time, they will gain more autonomy as infrastructure matures and laws adapt. Too much control and autonomy is meaningless. Too little and machines are a nightmare. The likely outcome is hybrid: machines with agency inside guardrails set by owners, insurers, and regulators.

Custody and compliance are not afterthoughts; they are gatekeepers of the machine economy. peaq is already working here, building frameworks in the UAE’s Machine Economy Free Zone (MEFZ) with policymakers and institutions to test regulatory models for autonomous and tokenized machines.

The Rise of Machine Capital

Once custody and compliance are solved, something larger takes shape.

Soon we will see fleets of humanoids in warehouses, drones in the skies, taxis on the streets. Each with income, expenses, and wallets. Over time, machines do not just act alone, they begin pooling resources, insuring one another, sharing risk.

This is the birth of machine capital: financial structures where robots contribute, benefit, and in some cases, decide. Instead of acting in isolation, they become collective economic entities.

The possibilities extend further:

Insurance and risk-sharing through shared liquidity pools.
Collective investment, pooling surplus into DAOs for upgrades or bulk energy.
Community alignment, with owners and locals receiving revenue shares.

Speculative? Yes. But history shows a pattern: when financial infrastructure matures, networks self-organize. Corporations in the industrial age. Platforms in the internet era. Machines may be next.

The machine economy will not only be about survival. Fleets and swarms will build resilience together. Machines will stop being only tools, and start acting like economic actors in their own right, sharing value with owners like companies share profits with shareholders.

Beyond the Machine Economy

The machine economy is no longer theory. Cars, drones, and humanoids are moving from labs to streets and workplaces. As they become more independent, how they transact becomes unavoidable.

Once machines step beyond closed corporate systems, they will need wallets, just as companies need balance sheets. And those balance sheets will not exist alone. They will tie into ownership, accountability, and ultimately into the humans and communities behind them.

This is the foundation of machine capital. Robots will not just work, they will earn. Not just cover costs, but share profits. Fleets and swarms will coordinate, pooling resources to strengthen and scale.

We are at the beginning. Wallets are the interface. Stablecoins are the currency. Blockchains like peaq are emerging as the operating systems. Together, they form the financial backbone of decentralized physical AI.

Machines will stop being just tools of production. They will become economic actors: earning, spending, and sharing value. The machine economy is taking shape now, and blockchain is the standard that will define it.

Bullish on Robotics? So Are We.

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Co-Authored by peaq

peaq is the Machine Economy computer and operating system leading a global infrastructure revolution, empowering people to own and earn from the devices, robots, vehicles, and infrastructure they use. peaq is designed to be the go-to backbone for the human-centric Machine Economy, and is already home to 60+ applications in 20+ industries and to the millions of devices and machines that run on them. peaq serves as permissionless, borderless digital infrastructure for increasingly intelligent machines to serve all of humanity in the era of AI and automation. peaq’s mission is to usher in the Age of Abundance for everyone, everywhere.

For more information, visit peaq or follow peaq on Twitter/X for updates.

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