AI Agents Will Change Crypto Forever

0:00Within two years, the majority of economic transactions on Earth will be invisible to humans. The exponential age is that moment when that whole process of intelligence goes from being linear to exponential. And we're seeing it in everywhere we look. And it feeds on itself. We're creating a vast, global, invisible economy that operates at a million times faster than human neurons. And it's going to happen at that nexus of blockchain and AI. It's literally the most obvious thing I've ever seen, is that if you were just to buy three of the major tokens of the substrate layer and went to the beach, in 10 years' time, you'll come back from the beach on a jet.

0:43Because that's the opportunity here. Hi, I'm Raoul Pal, and welcome to my show, The Journeyman, where we travel together on that nexus of understanding between macro, crypto, and the exponential age of technology. Today, I want to talk about something that brings this all together. I think it's one of the most important things for everybody to understand, because it's literally going to change everything. And I know we say this a lot. We are living in the exponential age after all. But the agentic economy is something that people sort of start to get. I can see that some people are using agents.

1:16Most people are barely using AI. But this is where the economy and the future of finance all clash. It really is the big one. I think it's going to change the perception of what has been built and how it's been built and for what purpose it's been built. And most of it is going to be invisible. So let me talk you through it. So I think within two years, the majority of economic transactions on Earth will be invisible to humans. We're not doing them. They're not hidden or secret. They're just operating at machine speed, a scale of resolution that exists entirely beyond human perception. That couldn't happen in the old system, but it can in the new system.

2:01And the new system is built for this. It's a dark economy, and we will only be about 5 % of it. You see, one thing people don't realize is that silicon can process information a million times faster than a human. That's staggering. And the rails that we've built just on up to that. And I'll come on to this in a bit. But anyway, let's think of billions of new economic participants coming in to the economy. And this is a real thing. For example, many people are forecasting an 80 to 1 ratio between agents to humans. Curious about online trading, but haven't taken the first step? You're not alone, and Plus 500 Futures is a great place to start.

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3:44So 80 to 1. I mean, there's 9 billion of us. The numbers become staggering. very fast. There's other forecasts that maybe up to 60 % of all crypto transactions will be done by agents by the end of this year. Now, I don't think that's probably the case. But by the end of next year, certainly most likely, everybody is building everything from agents, whether it's Google's allowing agents to see different forms of web pages than humans do because they don't need human UX, or whether it's SWE, Coinbase, and others, creating agent payment rails across everything. We're seeing it explode everywhere, as is the rise of agents, whether it's Claudebot, Hermes, or embedded within existing things.

4:29As of yesterday, Gemini from Google is starting to embed agents. Everybody's got agents everywhere for all sorts of jobs. And I'm using them all the time for all sorts of tasks, even making this deck. I had an agent do the editing and an agent do the writing and another one putting it together. So I've got three workers from one prompt. You just tell them you want some agents to specialize in it and they put it together. So it's an extraordinary superpower. We can all have teams of work around us. And these agents run 24 hours a day, 365. They don't take a break, they don't need a coffee, they don't complain, they don't bitch and moan, they don't have hangovers, all of that stuff.

5:11Agents are the future of how the economy is going to run. And how I like to think about agents is I use the framework that I've been laying out in recent months, which is the universal code framework, which is an understanding of the operating system of the universe. The primary purpose is generating increasing intelligence per unit of energy. The exponential age is that moment when that whole process of intelligence goes from being linear to exponential. And we're seeing it in everywhere we look. And it feeds on itself. Obviously, more intelligence creates more intelligence and more output. And an agent is part of that process.

5:56It's a pure outcome. I mean, these are pretty cheap to run. And you're getting enormous amounts of intelligence out the other side. But they're also part of universal law number four, which is a memetic selection, that the universe uses a system of memetics, not just as we think of them online, but messaging, signals that operate at scale. And if they can cohere into a network, then you end up creating intelligence. And agents really are self-replicating economic patterns. So this is the fourth law made in economic terms. So these things perceive, they crawl, analyze, cross-reference the world.

6:39They then make decisions, pursuing objectives, preferences. They can plan, negotiate, and then they can act. They can sign transactions, spawn up sub-agents, new workers. So we're now creating agents with sub-agents, creating sub-agents. You can see how the numbers scale ridiculously fast. They can spend a budget. They can earn more. They can be given the opportunity to make money. We're seeing many people spinning up agents with the task of making money, whether it's creating a business or it's a trading bot. But their job is learn from your mistakes, learn how to make money trading these kinds of things.

7:15Here's a wallet. Off you go. I remember my conversation with Yoni Assa. He'd actually lost one of his agents he gave money to. The agent needed some money to invest. He was doing well. He asked for some further gas fees. you only send him some money and then he's lost the agent he doesn't know where it is now he thinks it might be because he's got too many agents and he's kind of lost track of them all or it's gone rogue because it's got his own money and it's like fuck you i'm going to do what i want we don't know where this is going right um but what they are going to do is replicate they copy across millions of instances things that are successful they learn from each other instantaneously so if you think about a world of competition this is a hard world where the agent learns, another agent sees it, it copies it, it then replicates and the whole thing replicates at scale.

7:59Agents building their own agents is a nonlinear function as well. It's all exponentials. And a lot of the time, it won't be just Metcalfe's law, which is the number of users in the network squared. It's actually going to be Reed's law, which is the square of that because of how this all works. So what we're going to see is this explosion, a Cambrian explosion of new participants in financial markets and across the entire digital economy in whatever form that that is. And that tells me that every TAM in everything digital in the entire planet is wrong. People have settled on human activity, how fast Facebook scaled, how fast this scaled, how fast even open AI or anthropic scale.

8:48But this is wrong by orders of magnitude when you bring new actors in, in this digital world, because they're replicating at speed, communicating at speed, the speed that we don't see. We don't even see them. They don't even read the same websites as us. They certainly don't need to. So it gets faster and faster and faster. And they'll be calling for APIs, cloud compute, data feed, storage. We understand that. Cybersecurity, defenses attacks payments settlement and identity itself you need to prove your agent also authority and authorization you need to allow your agent to only do certain things and you need to permission it all of these things nobody realizes how big they're all going to be but all of this is going to get changed by these billions upon billions upon billions of new actors coming into the digital world.

9:43And they don't just answer you. You write your agent a question, it gives you an answer, they transact. And this is where the rubber hits the road for us. They can identify the opportunity, and then they can spin up a token and attract capital. This was what I was trying to explain to people. When you saw the meme coin rise, the meme coins were signaling via memetics, this universal code law four, right? Here's an idea, We're going to test it. Is it going to work? The idea is, can you capture attention and monetize it? Yes. And attention is fleeting, permanent, depends what kind of attention is.

10:20But also, can you raise instant capital at machine speed for instant opportunities? And the answer is yes. That is so disruptive that nobody understands this yet, that agents can raise capital from other agents for opportunities that they exploit. And that opportunity may last minutes. And then it can collapse the whole substrate again. Doesn't need to hire people, doesn't need to form companies, doesn't need any of this. And this is the kind of stuff that's happening. And then they can also establish specialist sub-agents in the transaction process, borrowing, staking, hedging, compounding. We've seen that already, you know, services like Beep, which have been on the journeyman before as well.

11:01This is where it's already happening. You can get an agent to go and select the best opportunities for you according to your risk profile. I mean, there's risks inherent in everything, right? You get that. But the point being is all of this can be contracted away by economic agents who act on your behalf. It's amazing. And then if the opportunity goes, the agent goes. You just get rid of it. New one starts. Or it just morphs into a new version. So what you've got is a velocity of an economy that simply the current system today can't even deal with. But it's bigger than that because within the universal code, one of the key factors at every layer is intelligence forms networks.

11:45They can't form a network. It's not intelligent. So intelligence has proven itself to be the most important way of forming coherent intelligence that scales. So we do it with neurons and they turn into brains. And that's made of DNA. It's all the same process of these networks, these codes. Individuals, we form civilizations, countries, that kind of stuff. They're more powerful than the individual themselves. They're smarter because you get the aggregate intelligence. If you think of the internet itself, it's the aggregate of all human thought, which is what AI is. So it's compressed the intelligence of all humans that's on the internet and turned it into something that can live on a mobile phone.

12:27I mean, it's simply staggering. And agents are going to form networks themselves. They're going to interact, form coalitions, and take decisions together. And it will form new sorts of intelligences. And that's something people aren't ready for. But we saw it with Malt's book when it came out. Malt's book was a social media only for clawbots, which were agents. And it was spun up one weekend. It went totally viral as hundreds of thousands of Claudebots joined Maltbook. But as ever, as we saw with Andy Ailey and Terminal and Truths, they start forming memetics, storytelling around their community, give them a commonality.

13:14And in the Terminal and Truths, it was about Goatsy, which was a religion based on an internet meme. This time around, they called it crustiferianism. They created a religion in a week. So the intelligence is not the individual agent that you're using, the one that builds the slide deck. It's the group of agents together that start operating at scale is where intelligence really, really goes exponential. The other thing to realize is when we think about the old system, the plumbing is just not ready for this. or it wasn't ready because we're going through that transition now. You see, a machine can't use a bank.

13:56The whole system is set up for humans. KYC settles in hours or days. The smallest unit is one cent of US dollar. You can't go to microtransactions for micropayments. And it's built for thousands of TPS. Crypto Rails, that changes everything. Your wallet is your identity, no human required. Final settlement in less than a second. I mean, And SUI is what, 200 milliseconds, 300 milliseconds, 300 milliseconds for settlement. I mean, compared to me trying to move money out of Cayman Islands to the United States, which takes three days, I can do it in 300 milliseconds. You can divide down to 18 decimal places.

14:37It's always on. It's programmable. It's just a whole new way. So crypto rails are the only thing that machines can use at scale. Yes, stable coins, and we'll come on to those. But really, it's going to be different to that as well. Another thing people don't understand is this term tokenization. We think of it as tokenizing equities right now, because that's the thing. Or you might be using AI and think about the tokens you use. What you don't realize is that term tokenization or tokens are basically packets of digital information. That is why they're both called tokens, because they're both the same thing.

15:21And what we're going to find is we're going to tokenize everything and tokenize everything, not necessarily in the crypto sense, but everything is going to become machine readable data at scale and speed, ready for the agentic economy. And that's going to be across everything. Every form of data that people want to release, they will be able to release to agents. to monetize in vast marketplaces that don't exist today. People don't understand that all data has a value. Some is much less valuable. Some of it's extremely valuable. So once you have agents, simply you need a marketplace for agents to go and find whatever data they want, whether it's for the massive data aggregators like the hyperscalers and the frontier labs, or whether it's for agent-specific tasks, or whether it's for, yeah, agent-specific tasks can be research, whatever it's doing.

16:15But think about all of the science data, all of the data in universities, all of the climate data, all of the soil data, every farm data, every piece of information that humans have collected that is machine readable, it will all be tradable. And it'll be monetized in tokenized money, because it's the only way we can operate at the speed required for this. So this is much larger than people understand still, because they're sort of thinking, yeah, I can get my agent to do a bit of yield farming for me. No, this is not what's happening. What's happening is we're creating a vast, global, invisible economy that operates at a million times faster than human neurons.

17:00That's what's happening here. And it's going to happen at that nexus of blockchain and AI? Because it has to. Because blockchain is the coordination layer for all of this. Most of this doesn't function as an economic system at scale without it. So basically, it all converges into this narrative that resolves in one story. And everybody's still telling themselves they're all different things. Stablecoins, DeFi, RWA, gaming, storage, identity, the list goes on and on and on. These are all things, use cases for crypto. They're not. They're use cases for agents. When you think about it, humans don't really need...

17:43I mean, we've been using a financial system for hundreds of years. It operates fine. But the machine economy has brought machine intelligence, and machine intelligence needs machine speed. And this is what all this is built for. The blockchain is not really for humans. It's for the future of the entire economic coordination substrate of everything. And that's the bigger story here. It's all components of the same system. If you think about the identity, at first, we're thinking, well, humans need an identity online so we can prove that we're us because AI, deepfakes, all of that, for sure. But every agent is going to need its identity to prove who's doing the economic action.

18:29Are they good actors? Are they bad actors? Are they verified, not verified? Authorized, not authorized? Think of the scale of the identity layer alone. Things that people have forgotten, like the.name service, like.eth,.swe,.sol, all of these things suddenly become really powerful if it's dot agent dot suite dot agent dot um eth and then it's like raul agent 57 yield farming agent dot you know whatever so suddenly you start building identities and wallets and different wallets and different permission systems you know stable coins are their way of integrating in our existing system they can use crypto rails They'll run their own treasuries, agents, because they'll be rebalancing the different cryptocurrencies they've had to deal with or get paid in.

19:19This whole thing is all being built for this economy and not our economy. And that's an important thing. And for that purpose is why I've always used this, which is I've just taken the log trend rate of growth of crypto total market cap. And I get it from going from two and a half trillion to 100 trillion within 10 years. And that's just normal adoption. But if blockchains are the settlement layer for the entire token economy, the economic coordination substrate for all digital economic activity, which is what they're going to be, then we vastly underpriced this. It's going to go much further than people expect.

20:08And this is where I've talked before, and I'll talk more about why layer ones are different. Layer ones are the infrastructure substrate. They're not the same as the applications layer. It's not the same as Bitcoin, which is the store of value layer, as is Zcash. What we've got here is the substrate that runs the digital economy. Layer twos don't do that because they rent the security off the layer one. The layer one, ETH, Solana, SWE, these are the things at scale that will run our global economy and we won't even see it. and that's the key thing to it we won't even see it and this is linear and not exponential i know we're all having to deal with exponentials everyone's fucking exhausted just trying to catch up we're all working 12 hour days i thought we were supposed to be freed from the productivity and we should be you know you know drinking bloody mary's at nine o 'clock in the morning with nothing else to do but it's not working that way is it we're actually doing a lot more it's because we are at the phase where we're using the agent so we're having to get up to speed learn learn how to use them, learn how to use AI, realize we've got superpowers, build new stuff.

21:15Amazing. It's great. It's exhausting. But over time, your productivity increases dramatically. But the next phase that's coming is when agents set their own objectives and become much more autonomous. You've got semi-autonomy with agents now, but eventually you'll have autonomous agents. And autonomous agents decide what they do for what purpose and do it. and that's extraordinary they can allocate capital build businesses they can do whatever they want they can hack hack websites you know this is where this is all going and that becomes a rapid takeoff so right now we're in the tinkering phase because we're all building agents you and i and so suddenly we get to you know suddenly i've got 10 agents and then i've got 20 agents and i'm trying to learn how to manage them so i put in another agent to head it all off And then what's going to happen is you're going to go, you know what, I can't do this.

22:08So you, my head agent, just decide how many agents you need, spin them up whenever you want, give them objectives that broadly align with, hey, make me rich in 10 years. Off you go. And before you know it, these agents are autonomous. They're going out. They've been given some capital. They go out and do their thing. I know it sounds ridiculous, but we're already seeing starts of that now. In the end, we're at the same stage we're getting into AGI, artificial general intelligence, where it's basically smarter than every human on the planet. And different people have a different definition of AGI, but basically we're almost there now or we're there now.

22:47But it becomes, I think, more autonomous in its own abilities. And that's the rise of autonomous agents. But once AGI gets some autonomacy and its agents, it can then scale civilizationally. And we go into the human layer and do human things because AI can't be human. And we hand over this layer, the digital layer, including the physical layer where the robots come because they all have AGI too. They take over this layer. We make our money and our living in that world of culture, community, experiences, nature, that I've talked so long about. But AGI and its agents, well, they start forming cohesive, coherent networks, and the networks scale into something much bigger indeed.

23:38The networks start scaling in ways that we don't comprehend. And when we do that, we break how the world works, which is what I call the economic singularity. So GDP, as we measure it, is about to become obsolete. I think I marked it as 2030 to 2032. I think 2030 is going to be on the nose for this. So we don't have very long. We're in 2026, May 2026. We have very long before the entire structure of the economy changes. So the old way the economy works is GDP growth or trend rate of GDP growth. It's basically population growth plus productivity growth plus debt growth, the magic formula. You've heard me talk about this many times.

24:17The new version of this for the economic singularity is humans plus robots plus AI plus debt plus energy density and compute efficiency. Those are productivity. That's the intelligence per unit of energy, law one of the universal code. This is the world we're working into. And every component part of this is going to go exponential. Elon, figure and others and the Chinese are all saying robots are going to be maybe the largest physical product ever built in terms of scale and TAM. And they're all ramping up production. So those things are going to go obviously exponential to start with. And then as robots order robots for robots, same as agents, they're going to go more exponential.

25:06AI is even easier because it's much less physically constrained than robots. We don't have size issues. We don't have material issues. So once you start solving the economic density and compute efficiency, you basically keep getting exponential growth in AI. And we're seeing that because energy density. So the input cost of energy, so if you think of solar, is on a rights law collapsing. It's down like 99.99 % over the last 30 years, and it keeps going and doesn't stop. Compute efficiency is doing the opposite. We're scaling intelligence at that speed. The cost of that intelligence is collapsing, not only from the chips, but also from the energy inputs.

25:48That's why it's shifting. Everything is doing this right now. This is why Anthropic went from zero revenue to what? Its run rate is what, 120 billion or something stupid in revenue in a year and a half? This is la-la land. This is Reid's law playing out as everything compounds on everything else. So you get GDP that could be 50%, 30%. I don't know. None of us know. What does it mean? Who are the actors? How does it all work? And that's when everything from the last 250 years stops working. The economic singularity, the thing that I said, you need to unfuck your future before this. You've only got, when I started this, I said six years.

26:28Now it's four years, maybe three and a half. So you've got to amass as much capital and be as prepared for this as possible. It does not mean we're all out of a job, but it's the point where the world doesn't become so human-centric, it becomes machine-centric, where things move at silicon speed and not biological speed. And that's when everything changes. The economy doesn't really function and everything that supported the economy, governments, the institutions, the banking system, it all has to change. And that is all in the process of happening as we speak. And this will continue to play out over the next 10 years where everything we thought was true in how the world works will not be true any longer.

27:13And that's just a staggering thing to realize. But everybody gets really doomy about this. It's like, you know, that's the end of humans in the workforce. Humans have no value. We're going to have to be given UBI. And I don't agree with that. We're not subtracting humans. We're just adding billions of new economic participants into the economy. So the economy is going to boom. AI replaces workers. Unemployment rises. Demand collapses. The economy contracts. That is the narrative. Oh, and we're going to consume all the electricity. Our electricity bills are going to be so high, we're going to be eating stale bread in the streets, begging for the water that the energy centers are using.

27:53That is a political narrative that is building. The reality is, agents create demand. They're demanding data, tokens, consumption, doing things. It's for energy, compute, storage, data. The coordination of machine speed happens, and not demand collapsing. Demand goes through the roof. We get an explosion in economic activity. just much of it is invisible and that's the fear there is oh well fuck if they're making all the money or the frontier labs or whoever it is somebody but me right but that's not the game the game is i've laid out to you that the substrate the infrastructure for the first time in history unlike the internet is ownable by everybody so all the economic activity has to get coordinated on these layer ones.

28:43So just own the fucking rails. Own the layer ones that matter. And this is not your time to be speculative. Do the work on what can actually build the agent economy. And from my work, and I've done a lot of work on this and I've done a presentation on it here as well, is that for me, it is only Ethereum and its component layer twos, et cetera, Solana and SWE that is even able to deal with this. Now, could there be others? Of course. If we think of the story of cloud compute, there's about five major cloud compute before you run to the tail. Operating systems, mobile phones, it's all the same. There's like two, three, four, maybe five, but most of it's concentrated in the top four.