We are moving towards an economic system where software and devices can trade with each other without human involvement.
Instead of simply executing transactions, machines will be able to make decisions, coordinate with each other, and buy whatever they want in real time. Sensors and satellites will sell data streams by the second. The factory will price and purchase electricity in real time based on supply and demand. Supply chains can even become fully autonomous—reordering materials, booking shipping, paying customs fees, and rerouting shipments without any human involvement.
But such an economy cannot be built on large, infrequent payments. It needs to run billions of tiny sequential transactions, executed autonomously at machine speed. Just as electricity prices facilitate mass production, microtransactions and machine-to-machine (M2M) payments will make full automation economically viable.
If continuous M2M payments are the new electricity, then blockchain—the rails on which these microtransactions occur—must be considered the new power grid. They are a critical part of the infrastructure that can unlock new business models, new technologies, and ultimately a new machine economy.
How will these innovations develop? The electrical revolution has many lessons to teach.
a new revolution
Before electrification, electricity was local, manual, unreliable and expensive. Factories relied on steam engines or water wheels, which limited the location and scale of production. Power is something you build into every action you take.
Electricity changed that. Once electricity became standardized and always available, it ceased to be a feature and became the basis of modern industry.
Payments today still resemble the pre-electricity era. They are intermittent, often batch-based, and heavily mediated by humans and institutions. Even digital payments involve discrete events such as invoices, settlements, reconciliations or billing cycles.
But M2M payments (autonomous financial transactions between connected devices) combined with microtransactions (worth pennies on the dollar) can turn the exchange of value into things like environment and infrastructure. Instead of having to stop to pay, machines can simply run continuously, exchanging value as they consume resources or provide services.
Technology leaders have been talking about microtransactions since the early days of the internet, but it’s impossible to realize this vision in the current banking system. Blockchain technology can now send value around the world instantly and virtually for free. The infrastructure of the crypto industry is critical to the birth of sustainable M2M payments.
Just as electricity gave birth to computers and the Internet, M2M payments and microtransactions will allow a whole new economy to flourish.
How electricity changed the world
The continuous power provided by electricity enables automation. Mass production occurs not because factories employ more workers, but because machines can operate continuously and relatively independently.
Today’s machines are technically autonomous but economically constrained. An AI agent can make decisions, route traffic, or optimize logistics, but it can’t pay for immediate computation. Economic friction forces humans to intervene in otherwise independent systems. But M2M payments combined with microtransactions will provide continuous economic power, just like electricity provides continuous mechanical power.
In addition, electricity opened up industries that would never have existed before. M2M payments will have the same characteristics, providing economic infrastructure for industries that cannot function without fine-grained real-time payments.
What does that look like? We can have autonomous supply chains where machines constantly coordinate procurement and logistics. Or we could see the emergence of AI services with pricing models that reflect millisecond inference times. The global data market may depend on pay-per-byte access. The infrastructure itself – from roads to charging stations – can price access continuously and automatically.
Notably, the move to usage-based pricing also changes the business model for electricity. Paying by the kilowatt-hour allows businesses to scale up without having to renegotiate contracts or invest in fixed capacity. When you use it, you pay for what you use. M2M payments will provide the same flexibility for 21st century businesses.
Lessons from the Electrical Revolution
In the early days of electrification, the focus was mainly on the development of generators. However, this is not the most important technological innovation. What matters is the transmission. Only when electricity can be delivered cheaply and predictably around the world can it reshape industry and society.
The same lesson applies to M2M payments. The blockchain track on which the payment occurs is more important than the specific M2M payment application used (such as Coinbase’s x402 protocol). Therefore, the first priority should be to build the best blockchain possible—one with near-zero fees, extremely low latency, and predictable performance. In other words, M2M payments encounter the same friction as regular stablecoin payments: they require state-of-the-art underlying infrastructure if they want to function properly.
Additionally, blockchain for machine payments needs to be viewed as neutral infrastructure. They must be able to interoperate across vendors, jurisdictions and machines. After all, machines can no more negotiate custom payment systems than appliances can negotiate voltage standards. This means that decentralization may play an important role in the growth of the machine economy. In this case, public blockchains may have advantages over private blockchains.
If M2M payment rails achieved this neutrality, they would become the coordination layer for autonomous systems, just as electricity is the coordination layer for physical power sources. At that point, innovation can safely move toward building entirely new machine-driven industries.
The machine economy will arrive when machines gain continuous, autonomous, and invisible transaction capabilities through the power of blockchain. M2M payments are not just a feature of the future. They are its electricity.