We are moving towards an economic system in which software and devices interact without human intervention.
Instead of simply making transactions, machines will be able to make decisions, coordinate with each other, and buy what they need in real time. Sensors and satellites will sell streams of data per second. Factories will price energy purchases in real time based on supply and demand. Supply chains could even become completely autonomous: reordering materials, booking transportation, paying customs fees and rerouting shipments without any human intervention.
But such an economy cannot be built on large irregular payments. It must run on billions of small, continuous transactions, executed autonomously and at machine speed. Just as the price of electricity made mass production possible, microtransactions and machine-to-machine (M2M) payments will make full automation economically feasible.
And if continuous M2M payments are the new electricity, then blockchains – the rails on which these microtransactions will take place – should be seen as the new electricity grid. They are a crucial part of the infrastructure that unlocks new business models, new technologies and ultimately this new machine economy.
How will these innovations develop? The electric revolution offers many lessons to learn.
A new revolution
Before electrification, power was local, manual, inconsistent and expensive. Factories relied on steam engines or water wheels, which limited where production could take place and how it could be scaled up. Power was something you built into every operation.
Electricity changed that. Once power became standardized and always available, it ceased to be a feature and became the substrate of modern industry.
Payments today still resemble the pre-electric age of energy. They are episodic, usually processed in batches, and highly mediated by people 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), when combined with microtransactions (worth a few cents), transform value exchange into something environmental and infrastructure-like. Instead of stopping to pay, machines can simply continue to work continuously and exchange value while consuming resources or providing services.
Technology leaders have been talking about microtransactions since the early days of the Internet, but it has been impossible to realize that vision with the current banking system. Now, blockchain technology makes it possible to send value across the world instantly and at virtually no cost. The infrastructure of the crypto sector is fundamental to the birth of continuous M2M payments.
And just as electricity enabled the creation of computers and the Internet, M2M payments and microtransactions will allow an entirely new economy to flourish.
How electricity changed the world
The continuous power provided by electricity made automation possible. Mass production came about not because factories hired more workers, but because machines could run constantly and relatively independently.
Today’s machines are technically autonomous, but economically limited. An AI agent can make decisions, route traffic or optimize logistics, but cannot pay for computing power on the fly. Economic friction forces human intervention into systems that are otherwise independent. But M2M payments, combined with microtransactions, will provide continuous economic power, just as electricity provides continuous mechanical power.
Furthermore, electricity has opened up industries that simply could not exist before. M2M payments will have the same feature, providing economic infrastructure for industries that cannot function without fine-grained, real-time payments.
What does that look like? We could have autonomous supply chains, where machines continuously coordinate purchasing and logistics. Or we could see the rise of AI services with pricing models that reflect milliseconds of inference time. Global data markets could depend on pay-per-byte access. The infrastructure itself – from roads to charging stations – could continuously and automatically price access.
It is worth noting that the shift to usage-based pricing has also transformed electricity business models. By paying per kilowatt hour, companies could scale up without renegotiating contracts or investing in fixed capacity. You paid for what you used when you used it. M2M payments will provide the same flexibility to 21st century businesses.
Lessons from the electric revolution
At the beginning of electrification, the focus was mainly on the development of generators. However, that was not the most important technological innovation. What mattered was the transfer. Only when electricity could be supplied cheaply and predictably everywhere did it change industry and society.
The same lesson applies to M2M payments. The blockchain rails on which the payments will take place are much more important than the specific M2M payment application (such as Coinbase’s x402 protocol) being used. The priority should therefore be to build the best possible blockchains: chains with almost zero costs, very low latency and predictable performance. In other words, M2M payments face the same problems as regular stablecoin payments: they require the underlying infrastructure to function optimally.
Furthermore, the blockchains used for machine payments should be seen as a neutral infrastructure. They must be interoperable across suppliers, jurisdictions and machines. After all, machines can no more negotiate customized payment systems than devices can negotiate voltage standards. This means that decentralization can play an important role in the growth of the machine economy. In that case, public blockchains could have the advantage over private alternatives.
When M2M payment rails achieve this neutrality, they become the coordination layer of autonomous systems, just as electricity is the coordination layer of physical energy. At that point, innovation can safely shift to building entirely new, machine-driven industries.
The machine economy will emerge when, thanks to the power of blockchain, machines gain the ability to conduct transactions continuously, autonomously and invisibly. M2M payments are not just a feature of that future. They are his electricity.