About $28 billion is already tokenized under the ERC-3643 standard on chain, a sliver of a potential multitrillion-dollar machine-to-machine economy. The Casper Manifest, published May 12, 2026, lays out a multi-year technical roadmap designed to let robots and agentic AIs authenticate, contract and pay without human intervention. Market commentary since Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's CES 2025 remarks has framed agentic and physical AI as a multitrillion-dollar opportunity, with fast growth sketched in both software agents and robotics. If the roadmap succeeds, households, firms and markets will face new payment rails, identity rules and sharply higher demand for chips and rare-earth inputs.

Households, enterprises and capital markets will face different risks and opportunities as machines start to contract and pay without human intervention, because the Casper Manifest aims to make blockchain the infrastructure layer for regulated assets and autonomous machine payments.

What the Casper Manifest sets out

The Casper Manifest was presented by Casper Association President and CTO Michael Steuer at the Digital Finance Forum in Bermuda and published on May 12, 2026. It lays out a coordinated set of protocol initiatives designed to marry Casper's WebAssembly foundation with the developer and wallet ecosystem that already exists around the Ethereum Virtual Machine. That compatibility is meant to let developers port existing contracts and wallets to Casper's stack rather than rebuild from scratch.

Among the infrastructure priorities the Manifest names are a native token registry to reduce fragmentation between execution environments, gasless transactions and batch operations to simplify machine-driven flows, and smart accounts that support biometric authentication so a device or agent can transact without routing every approval to a human. The document also puts compliant security tokens and on-chain identity verification front and centre, aligning jurisdictional controls with the ERC-3643 standard. The Manifest notes that ERC-3643 already governs about $28 billion in tokenized assets on chain.

Privacy features, support for micropayments between AI agents, a native token design and quantum-safe cryptography are also listed as priorities. The Association frames these items as a package: the parts must fit together for machines to behave as economic actors that meet regulatory and commercial requirements.

Mastheads

Forbes first framed agentic and physical AI as a multitrillion-dollar opportunity in January 2025 after comments from Nvidia’s Jensen Huang at CES 2025. Subsequent commentary and market posts from late 2025 and into 2026 have sketched a range of growth scenarios. One projection put agentic AI software at about $45 billion by 2035, while an alternate projection reached roughly $199 billion by 2034.

Those software forecasts start from a small base, roughly $6 billion in 2025 in the cited estimates, and depend heavily on hardware scaling and systems integration.

Robotics forecasts cited in November 2025 estimate the overall robotics market reaching about $111 billion by 2030, with industrial robotics near $60.6 billion that year and humanoid applications contributing tens of billions by the mid-2030s. A LinkedIn analysis singled out Nvidia's Blackwell-class GPUs and factory tooling for AI as enabling hardware for more autonomous robots and agents.

Those upside scenarios encounter hard physical constraints. A market commentary published March 17, 2026 emphasised the centrality of rare-earth magnet systems to electric vehicles, consumer electronics, industrial robotics and hyperscale AI data-centres. That piece placed the addressable downstream markets in the hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars, while noting global production of key magnet rare earths sits at roughly 70,000 to 80,000 metric tons per year. Heavy rare earths, which are critical in some magnet chemistries, are available in much smaller volumes, and metallization plus downstream alloying remain chokepoints for scaling industrial magnet production.

Those supply limits matter because the machine economy isn't just software. Businesses that build or buy fleets of robots and AI agents will need programmable payments, machine identity and on-chain compliance to let those systems contract, pay and prove jurisdictional permissions without human involvement, the Casper Association argues. Meanwhile manufacturers, data-centre operators and the semiconductor and rare-earth supply chain all face increased demand if the vision in the roadmap and the market projections play out.

Technically, the Manifest pursues developer convenience and regulatory alignment in parallel. Adding full EVM compatibility to a WebAssembly base, and offering native token registries and gasless UX, aims to lower the friction for firms that want to embed tokenized assets and automated payment logic into devices. The regulatory angle is explicit: the Manifest prioritises compliant token standards and on-chain identity that can enforce jurisdictional controls and custody rules for real-world assets.

Taken together, the roadmap is an attempt to move blockchains beyond novelty use-cases and toward the plumbing that regulated markets and corporate procurement processes recognise. But the path depends on several moving parts: developer adoption, hardware availability, and the industrial bottlenecks in rare-earths and manufacturing capacity that the market commentary flagged.

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Watch these follow-up signals: rising ERC-3643 tokenization volumes, any jurisdictional guidance on on-chain identity and compliant tokens, OEM and wallet adoption of machine-friendly accounts, and chip and rare-earth supply updates that could throttle hardware scaling.

This article was created with AI assistance.