Why machine-to-machine payments are the new electricity for the digital age

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Why machine-to-machine payments are the new electricity for the digital age

If continuous M2M payments are the new electricity, then blockchains must be seen as the new power grid, Huang contends.

By Annabelle Huang|Edited by Betsy Farber

Feb 7, 2026, 6:30 p.m.

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We are moving toward an economic system in which software and devices transact with one another without human involvement.

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Instead of simply executing transactions, machines will be able to make decisions, coordinate with each other and purchase whatever they need in real time. Sensors and satellites will sell data streams by the second. Factories will price power purchases in real-time based on supply and demand. Supply chains could even become completely autonomous — reordering materials, booking transport, 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 on billions of tiny, continuous transactions, executed autonomously at machine speed. Just as electricity pricing enabled mass production, micro-transactions and machine-to-machine (M2M) payments will make full automation economically viable.

And if continuous M2M payments are the new electricity, then blockchains — the rails upon which these microtransactions will occur — must be seen as the new power grid. They’re a critical piece of infrastructure that unlocks new business models, new technologies and ultimately, this new machine economy.

How will these innovations develop? The electrical revolution has plenty of lessons to teach.

A new revolution

Before electrification, power was local, manual, inconsistent and expensive. Factories relied on steam engines or water wheels, which constrained where production could happen and how it could scale. Power was something you built into each operation.

Electricity changed that. Once power became standardized and always available, it stopped being a feature and became the substrate of modern industry.

Payments today still resemble the pre-electric era of power. They are episodic, usually processed in batches, 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), when combined with micro-transactions (worth a few cents), turn value exchange into something ambient and infrastructure-like. Instead of stopping to pay, machines can simply operate continuously, exchanging value as they consume resources or provide services.

Tech leaders have discussed microtransactions since the early days of the Internet, but it was impossible to realize that vision with the current banking system. Now, blockchain technology enables sending value across the world instantly and at almost no cost. The crypto sector’s infrastructure is fundamental for the birth of continuous M2M payments.

And just as electricity enabled the creation of computers and the Internet, M2M payments and micro-transactions will allow a completely new economy to flourish.

How electricity changed the world

The continuous power provided by electricity enabled automation. Mass production did not happen because factories hired more workers, but because machines could run constantly 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 cannot pay for compute on the fly. Economic friction forces human intervention in systems that are otherwise independent. But M2M payments, combined with micro-transactions, will provide continuous economic power in the same way electricity provides continuous mechanical power.

Also, electricity unlocked industries that simply could not exist before it. M2M payments will have the same property, 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, in which machines coordinate purchases and logistics continuously. Or we could see the emergence of AI services with pricing models that reflect milliseconds of inference time. Global data markets could depend on pay-per-byte access. Infrastructure itself — from roads to charging stations — could continuously and automatically price access.

It’s worth noting that shifting to usage-based pricing also transformed electricity's business models. Paying per kilowatt-hour allowed firms to scale 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 electrical revolution

At the beginning of electrification, the focus was mostly on developing generators. However, that wasn’t the most important technological innovation. What mattered was transmission. Only once electricity could be delivered everywhere, cheaply and predictably, did it reshape industry and society.

The same lesson applies to M2M payments. The blockchain rails on which the payments will occur matter way more than the specific M2M payment application (like Coinbase’s x402 protocol) being used. The priority should therefore be to build the best blockchains possible — chains with near-zero fees, very low latency, and predictable performance. In other words, M2M payments hit the same frictions as ordinary stablecoin payments: they need the underlying infrastructure to be tip-top if they want to function properly.

Moreover, the blockchains used for machine payments need to be perceived as neutral infrastructure. They must be interoperable across vendors, jurisdictions and machines. After all, machines cannot negotiate bespoke payment systems any more than appliances can negotiate voltage standards. That means decentralization may play an important role in the growth of the machine economy. In that case, public blockchains could have the advantage over private alternatives.

If M2M payment rails achieve this neutrality, they become the coordination layer of autonomous systems, just as electricity is the coordination layer of physical power. At that point, innovation can safely shift to building entirely new machine-driven industries.

The machine economy will arrive when machines gain the ability to transact continuously, autonomously, and invisibly thanks to the power of blockchain. M2M payments are not just a feature of that future. They are its electricity.

Blockchains

Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc. or its owners and affiliates.