The Universal Code: Crypto’s Next Big Move with Raoul Pal | Sui Live Miami 2026

0:00Join me, Raoul Pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto and exponential age landscapes. In The Journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together.

0:24So welcome, everybody. Good to be here. Good to see you all. I'm going to do something a little bit different today. It's a whole different framework that none of you have seen before that I've been developing over the last, well, 35 years of my journey through markets, but also in the last two years with my journey through AI. It's an operating system for the universe, bizarrely. It's kind of understandable. It's provable. It's how all systems thrive and survive throughout every observable part of the universe itself, whether it's biology, whether it's ecology, whether it's cities, whether it's blockchains.

1:01It applies to everything. Technology, the human body. It's called the Everything Code, the Universal Code. The Universal Code is a much bigger body of work, but I'm going to show how, for the first time ever, it applies to blockchains. And I think it's going to be very different and hopefully interesting. There's a lot to get through. It's more dense than my usual few slides and a banana, but I think you'll enjoy it. So let's start with the universal code. What we have is we have this observable phenomena, which is that every network that exists ever maximizes intelligence per unit of energy. It's a fundamental law that I've found to be true everywhere.

1:45Whether that's the boss system of the solar system, that top left is actually a picture of the solar system. It's unbelievable. It's a neural network. Next to it is the mycelial network, which is the largest network that we know of on planet Earth, and that's the fungi that runs under pretty much all land and connects all trees, all life forms. Then we've got a neuron, which forms into neural networks and all of that. And then we've got blockchain. That's Bitcoin. So they're all networks, and they're there specifically to maximize output of intelligence per unit of energy. And it's the same pattern you see at every observable scale.

2:24Galaxies, ledgers, it's all the same system optimized throughout all of recorded history. And it's networks at every single level. As I said, whether it's the cosmic networks, the mycelial networks, there's also the same optimization happens at every level. So you can observe it all mathematically, prove it all out. Every network does the same thing. So networks are the way of compressing intelligence in a coherent manner that is effective, and it's what the universe solves for. So things have changed, however. We have been using carbon as the main structure for all of these networks, and now we're running on silicon.

3:05And silicon runs six times faster than human biology. So not six times, yeah, well, six times faster, six orders of magnitude faster. So it's a million times faster. So things have changed dramatically with what's happening with networks. And why networks matter to us in this room today is because what we do in blockchain is all about networks. We're building the substrate for economic coordination in the new internet age. and we'll talk about how it works in the new AI age. But the important thing to know is valuing blockchains is not how people think about valuing blockchains. And I'll come into that in a bit more detail.

3:47You see, what people do at the moment, they start saying, how much money does that blockchain earn? How much cash does it earn? Fees. And that's completely the wrong way of understanding how networks are valued. So networks are valued as this substrate of programmable intelligence. It's all of the applications, the value that's built on top of the network, that derives the network value, not the fees it generates. So it's built for assets that then throw off cash, but the network itself doesn't need to throw off cash. When you find you use a discounted cash flow analysis, you start solving for the wrong things.

4:28because if output of intelligence per unit of energy is the fundamental law, then it must be the cheapest, fastest, eventually, that starts to win the network effects. That is the only way it can work. So therefore, discounted cash flows always make you look the wrong way. So it's the fundamentals of what that chain does, the kind of intelligence density that makes it important. What can you do on that network? You know, what's the programmability? How many unique features? How fast it is? How many applications are built? How many developers there are? This is what really matters in a network.

5:07It's this feature, this intelligence density, that everything is trying to solve for. And then how do you think about, OK, so what is the value of this thing? I've used Metcalfe's Law mainly as the way of valuing this stuff. And Metcalfe's Law is basically the network... kind of the square of the number of users of the network, the economic value of the network, but there's an easier way. And Ethereum is the best way of talking to it. Ethereum is the densest intelligence network in blockchain world today. It coordinates more. It has more developers, more activity, more intelligence. It's been around longer.

5:41It has Lindy effects. If you took away the layer one, what happens is all of DeFi goes, all real-world assets are on-chain goes, all of NFTs goes, all of layer twos go, So all of that economic value and future economic value has gone. That's the value of Ethereum. That's why when people try and discount cash flow Ethereum, they end up with something that doesn't make any sense. Because they say, oh, it looks wildly expensive. It's not expensive at all. The rate at which intelligence density is increasing on blockchains makes them actually very cheap, and particularly where it's going now. So.

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7:19But what we're getting to is a whole new phase, a state shift in everything that we understand. And I've called this the economic singularity. You guys might have heard me talk about this before. The economic singularity is that moment when we don't understand anymore how things work, because things are now working on digital speed and not biological speed. So the infrastructure we've built for the world around us just doesn't stand up. The economics, the politics, the entire system begins not to work it anymore, because we can't absorb the speed of what's happening. So by 2030, most workers won't be humans, they won't transact most of the volumes, it'll all be agents.

8:05Humans will also no longer be the apex intelligence of the planet, which is the most ridiculous change that humanity has ever gone through, and we're about to live through it. has huge implications. Everybody's talking about it. It has huge implications for this industry too. Because this whole change towards intelligence escaping the human substrate and going to the silicon substrate at the speed at which it's happening is unprecedented. Generally, most networks and most observable things will work with, let's say, log regression. That's the network adoption model, Metcalfe's law. What we're seeing observable for the first time at any scale, the first observable time in history is Reed's law, which is Metcalfe's law squared.

8:49So we've got double exponentials going everywhere. We've seen it with the output of words written by humanity every year since the Gutenberg press has now been overtaken in the last three years by AI. AI now produces more words than all of humans added together. By 2028, they'll produce more words than all of humanity has ever written. And that's how fast it's moving. Every chart is vertical. We've never seen anything like it. You can't even put these on log charts anymore because they're moving so fast. And we're not ready for this. So we just have basically broken how the economy is going to work.

9:26This moved from carbon to silicon, neurons to chips. So we're not the mind that's running this. The whole world is built around our minds running this thing and how fast we work and how we think. But that's not going to be the main thought process. I'm not saying, and I'll come on to it later, it doesn't mean humans are kind of taken out of the process, but all of the things that we don't need to do, that it can do more efficiently, remember, units of energy, output of intelligence, if the machine can do it more efficiently, they will do it and we'll find different things to do. And it's that speed, again, six orders of magnitude faster, is not something any system is prepared to deal with.

10:05Whether it's the banking system, whether it's politics, Politics can't deal with AI. They can't deal with blockchain. They're just not fast enough to deal with how fast this is developing. And it's developing at the fastest rate of any technology we've ever seen. Election cycles of four years. How can anybody vote on this stuff? By four years, we'll have superintelligence. It's insane. In four years' time, the largest workers in the economy are going to be agents, not us. So we're just not set up for this. And it changes kind of how everything around us is. The other amazing thing is people say a simple thing is humans are the most efficient computer ever invented.

10:43You know, we use 20 watts of energy to run our brains. Yes and no. Yes, we have this multi-factor model that we run. We've got sense and sight and sound and all of this stuff. But generally, at intelligence level, when you actually look at people say, well, look how expensive AI is. Well, last thing I checked, I'm paying 200 bucks a month for my Claude Pro, Max, whatever one it is. And I get PhD-level intelligence on every single subject known to humanity. That's cheaper than feeding the human. Yes, they're making a loss. So call it, so feed a human, right? Think of those terms. That's the energy input for humans.

11:23Energy input for humans, let's say on a globalized average basis, maybe you spend$10 ,000 on food. So$10 ,000 to get human-level compute. That's the energy output of intelligence. What we're talking about here is we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars to train these things. But one model gives 900 million unique instances. So it's very, very cheap to produce this intelligence. This is why it's scaling so fast, because it's so much more optimal than any human could ever be. So that's happening. The other thing that's happening that people may have missed is that the mean coin explosion was really us, via speculation, speed testing a very, very big idea.

12:12Which is for years, the whole financial system has been built around the infrastructure of raising capital and investment of that capital. And what happened with mean coins is we saw instant capital formation. In fact, we saw instant capital formation by anonymous people and reaching into the billions. We saw it. One of the amazing ones where the nexus of AI comes in was the token that launched by suggestion by the Terminal of Truths. It was on Real Vision talking about this, Andy Ailey. And the Terminal of Truths wanted to raise money. Mark Andresen gave him$50 ,000, and then it suggested on Twitter that it should have a token called Goatsy, and somebody launched it.

12:58Nobody knows who launched it. It got to$1.5 billion. It then mentioned another one, Fartcoin, and it went to$3.5 billion. One agent created$5 billion of economic value. Now, when it comes to business models, this is where it's going. Agents can instantly raise capital, take advantage of an opportunity, instantly destroy capital, and the economic system velocity is beyond what we can comprehend. It's not made for us anymore. And this whole economic singularity thing is no longer a prediction. When I started talking about this about four years ago, people thought it sounded kind of extreme. And now it's looking like it's the reality we're facing.

13:40I don't think in 2032 anymore, I think that's too far away. I think by 2030, the entire economic system has changed. And I'll come into why it changed, and it's down to this, the magic formula. The magic formula is how economies work, how GDP works. And it's basically population growth is the main input, plus how productive those people are. That's generally the intelligence output of the units, which are humans. And then debt growth. Debt growth has papered up the cracks when population growth slows down. and I've shown that that's the everything code that I've spent so long talking to everybody about in the past.

14:22So that's the system that it's working. But what's happening is if you apply it to GDP now, everything changes. So what happens is suddenly you change humans, well, not change humans, into the human population of 9 billion people. You add in AI and robots. Again, people haven't got their head around robots. People are thinking of C3PO being a nice little robot that makes a cup of coffee for you or whatever or helps you. We're going to put AGI brains into humanoid robots that are more dexterous, faster, stronger, fitter than us with smarter brains. That, to me, is a new species. That's where we're going here.

15:07And they're going to come into the workforce very soon. We've seen the production lines ramping up already, so it's coming. and we're going to put these super brains into them and we're going to compete with them in jobs? No, we're going to acquiesce to those jobs because we don't want to do them. We'll find other stuff to do, which will come on to the sec. So what happens is you start to get weird outcomes because you're going to suddenly go from a restricted population of 9 billion people to an infinite population of economic actors. So we all start to see GDP growth doing crazy shit. One minute's 10 percent, next minute's 30 percent, depending how fast it scales, how far up Reed's law we go.

15:46The robots are not Reed's law because they're very difficult to manufacture, but the AI is infinitely fast and getting faster. So we're going to see that. Then also, we're seeing the energy density compute efficiency formula, which is the universal code law number one, operating at scale, because what we're seeing is the collapse of the cost of creating energy. Now, whether that's solar, which we're seeing at scale, we're now going to space with solar at scale. We're seeing renewables at scale. Most people don't realize China added more solar power last year than the entire world's standing stock of solar because they realized how efficiently cheap it is to produce.

16:34And, you know, we had the breakthroughs in shale, but it's not fossil fuels. Fossil fuels is the backdrop to this, but really the Wrights' law efficiencies of cost plummeting are coming from the renewable side, and it will come from nuclear as well. And then we're seeing compute costs collapsing as well. We're seeing the per-token cost of energy coming down as well. So we're seeing a double exponential of Wrights' law happening both at the same time, both in the output of productivity and the input and energy costs. So what does that do? It drives the firewall even faster. which is scary, thinking how fast it is now.

17:09We haven't seen nothing yet. It's only going to get faster and faster and faster. And the last part of this equation was debt. This is the world we've been living in. This is the everything code. Debase the currency. Debase the currency by 8 % a year so you can manage the debt growth. But over time, debt as a percentage of GDP will go. It'll be close to zero. And the reason being is because GDP is going to go up so fast. And this is what even the US administration has been talking about, is about once you start driving up productivity growth by AI and you start bringing in robots and AI into the workforce, you basically erode the debt away to nothing as a percentage of GDP.

17:50And that's the plan, because you can't get rid of the debt any other way.

17:56So let's get into SWE and how it fits in and why this all matters for blockchains. This framework, and I've only shown you one of the four universal laws, the whole thing applies to almost every system that we can observe, from politics to economics to financial markets to blockchains to technology. Once you see the world through this lens, and I'll do some more presentations on this over time as I start unveiling this huge thing that I've been working on for this, but for blockchains, it's pretty straightforward. So let's look at SUI, which I think of as the intelligent supply to the coordination layer.

18:36So we talk about speed a lot. SUI is bloody fast. But really, we need a lot more things to compete for the agentic economy. So what SUI has, or what it is, is the most intelligent substrate ever built for coordination. This is what we're dealing with, and this is what people don't understand and I didn't understand until recently. recently, because it's not really built for the world that we're in today. It's built for the world we're coming into right now. And we saw Arpan talking about agents. We've heard a lot of talk about agents. This is happening right this very moment. So the same law that you apply the output of intelligence per unit of energy, you can apply to chain architecture too, and it truly matters.

19:25It's what decides what system thrives and survives and which dies. This lens makes you understand which blockchains are going to do well and which ones won't, and it makes it observable and understandable. It doesn't become such speculation. So on SWE, there's kind of three special features that give it this more intelligence density than any other blockchain. One of it is the object-centric model. So each asset has its own thread of computation. Nothing wastes energy looking things up, so it's not doing the endless loop. The chain knows where intelligence is before it has to find it. So that's efficiency.

20:06It's fast. It's quick in doing that. Then parallel execution. Well, that supercharges it all. Most chains process one transaction at a time. But SWE does this magical thing of parallel processing a lot of transactions in one go. So it's the same amount of compute, but it's exponentially more efficient and more intelligence comes out of it. And that's very, very important for the world we're coming into. And if the universe selects for this at every observable level, then this is an important metric. The other one is the move language. So it's specific, its programmability is one of the key features.

20:45The density of features without the surface area for failure, just the cleverness of the new language, allows a lot more to be done on it. So we've got three component parts here that are very important, that creates more intelligence than any other chain. Now, Solana is a chain I love, I use all the time, and this is not a diss on Solana, and none of the comparisons are a diss on people. We're all part of an ecosystem here. But on capital density per user, and this is a really important metric, basically, what is each user worth to a chain? If you give a new user to Solana, it's worth$1 ,600 per year.

21:25And if you go to Sui, it's worth$2 ,000. And that's TVL per active address. There's a number of different ways of calculating it. But what's interesting here is Sui's a lot younger than Solana, yet it's already accumulating economic density above pretty much every other chain, apart from, obviously, Ethereum. And it's quite remarkable how it's done it in such a short period of time. And it's done it because it solves for output of intelligence per unit of energy. It's faster, cheaper to produce more intelligence. So over the same period when I measured some of these, I looked at a lot of chains, using AI, obviously, to help me do this.

22:06And what we found was that as these markets had fallen 80 percent in the newer tokens, what we found is all of them lost coherence, which means that they suddenly didn't hold together in economic density and it fell apart. So economic density changed when the market fell. There are only three chains that exist outside of Bitcoin, because it's not a smart contract platform. only three chains held economic density. There's real signal in that, and that was SWE, Solana, and ETH. And it's a structural sign that there is something going beneath the surface with SWE that is not apparently obvious, because it's early stage, it's difficult to see.

22:54So, each SWE transaction does more than Solana on each transaction itself. And they've got SWE, Solana, and ETH here. So we've got full finality. I shouldn't say less than 300 milliseconds, but it will be over time. We work on it. Solana at 12.8. Obviously, they've got Alpenglow coming out. They will get down to sub-second. ETH is slow, but they're working on changing that. Operations per transaction. This is the killer one, right? People don't really understand that we can do 1 ,024 in one transaction. Solana, it says one, but it's not really one. You can actually do more, but it's limited by compute.

23:38And then you've got ETH at one. Transaction costs, so it's obviously extremely cheap, the cheapest. And effective cost per operation, when you take into account the number of operations per transaction, you get to an absurdly low price, which is why we're able to offer stablecoins for zero. So that's a very efficient way of scaling economic density. So an agent, when we go back to AI world, will do lots of transactions. And on any other chain, those transactions all have to be sequential. On three, they can all be one. So that makes it hyper-efficient for AI. So if AI is solving for the universal code, then AI will route over time to the most cost-efficient, most effective way where it gets the most output of intelligence.

24:26It's not a one-winner-takes-all. There'll be certain things that don't need that. Others need the ultra-security of ETH layer 1, of which there is no comparison. It'll do that. And so we'll see different chains developing. But what my working hypothesis is, is if we look at every observable network platform architecture and look at who wins, how many players win, in almost every scenario, it's three to five. There's only ever three to five, and everything else is a tail. And those tails can be not good projects to specialists, smaller niche. I think there's only room for three or four layer ones.

25:07We don't need any more. And the race is, who's going to be the third with Solana and ETH? That's it. That's the whole game. And from everything that I looked at, and I did a lot of work on this, I don't see any other ecosystem that comes close to what SOI is able to do, and it's provably getting there. So I think it's very, very interesting to use this lens. So when we look at direction speed, this is the acceleration phase that you see over time. What we've got is, obviously, the more mature chain ETH showing lower rates of growth. Why? Because it's massive. Solana still saying good rates of growth, but Suisse showing extraordinary rates of growth.

25:56And that's a good sign. We're early stage. We're doing what we're supposed to be doing, which is as a startup, we're growing faster. We're producing more economic value per user than Solana. So we're doing some good things. We're nowhere near economic value of ETH, but that's OK. But it's not about price targets. It's about how to watch the substrate, how to see the universal code working in reality. And to see it, I found these three metrics that basically signal when you get to the point where you've now become fully coherent as a network and your place is not questioned any longer. And it becomes observable, and I went back-tested this over Ethereum, back-tested it over Solana.

26:43And what you get is three main metrics that really matter. And they are, you want to see two times stablecoins versus your TVL. It's the dry powder, the potential energy in your network, right? Think of stablecoins as stored energy in your network. You want to see a lot of it. We're not there yet. We're about one times. We're about equal to TVL. But what I know and what you guys will have heard, there are enormous amounts of initiatives coming out of SWE on stablecoins, also on TVL. But I think that that will be the next one to go. In the middle is active protocols. You guys, builders, everybody building on this, you matter.