Raoul Pal

Global liquidity grows at roughly 8% a year. Sounds great right? Except that liquidity isn't organic growth... it's money being created to service the world's enormous debts. And every new dollar created makes the ones you already hold worth less. Add 3% inflation and you’re looking at an 11% hurdle rate just to break even. If your investments aren’t generating at LEAST 11% a year, you're not making money. This is why so many people feel like they can't get ahead... in real terms, they aren't. I've spent the best part of three decades trying to work out why the economy stopped working for ordinary people. Over time it all distilled into one…

We’re seeing the ramping of the agent economy. A new population... still early, still mostly directed by humans, but gaining autonomy, running longer tasks, and beginning to transact. x402 and protocols like it exist because agents need to move money at machine speed. But at machine speed, things we treat as fixed start breaking apart. Politics doesnt work because it moves faster than we can regulate. Faster than we can even understand. The financial economy takes on a velocity we’ve never had. Billions of economic agents will be doing things we don’t even see. Gone are the days of websites and front ends... what’s coming is machine reada…

In the next two or three years, every human could have a hundred... maybe a thousand agents working for them onchain. Arpan Nanavati breaks it down perfectly in this clip... the whole thing is a cost curve. Right now, it costs about $10 a day in inference to run an agent... hedge fund territory. But inference costs have already dropped 100x in three years, and every step down changes who can afford to play: At $1 a day, every protocol is running agents At cents a day, your wallet has agents built in, managing your idle capital At microcents, you get agent swarms Jevons paradox... every time the cost of something collapses, usage explode…

Valuing crypto has always meant guessing how many people would eventually come onchain. We charted adoption curves, compared them to the internet, argued over when we'd hit a billion users… But even the most active human has a limit. A full time trader executes a few times an hour, for maybe twelve hours a day because sleep and food and life still exist. Thats the ceiling of human paced activity and its what this entire asset class is priced on. But now, billions of agents are about to come onchain and agents have no ceiling. Circle's CEO is talking about tens of billions of them. Stripe is planning for a billion transactions per second. V…

I so love this and believe in what Ryan @thegoodtimeline and what S.A.N represents completely. We are all connected because we are all the same thing that forms consciousness at a Universal level. 1/ Everything is a network and mycelia are some of the most extraordinary networks of intelligence we have observed...

Ok, so..I'm convinced. Grok Bot @bot is sheer wizardry. So fast, so competent, excellent reasoning and smart too, super eager, and more than that, just so fucking easy to use. Fable 5 gave me this feeling with its wizard level skills where everything complex and beyond my skills becomes easy (but stupid expensive). Grok Bot does the same in a different way. Literally from opening it up to having an agent do useful work in 2 mins. Mind blown.

Crypto always felt like it was made for the age were going into, not the age we came from. @ErikVoorhees nails it in this clip... this is truly natively digital money and we invented it for machines that hadnt come around yet. Look at everything that held back adoption. Private keys, seed phrases, the cryptography... all hard for humans. The UX has been the industrys biggest struggle from day one. All that stuff is completely native to an agent. The exact things humans fight with are trivial for them. Almost like it was preordained for something else than we originally thought. @ErikVoorhees I published a piece this week on exactly this. …

In seven or eight years there'll be gigantic hedge funds that nobody can see. They wont have an office or a star trader on the front page of the FT... the whole operation will be agents running capital through the liquidity layer. Think about what a hedge fund is. A group of managers allocating capital to pods of traders. Every one of those pods can be an agent on chain... your relative value bond agent, your equity arb agent, your long short agent. That alone strips out something like 90% of the cost of allocating capital. Then the mothership. Risk management, compliance, capital raising... AI eats all of that too. You can apply it to ever…

The cycle has more runway than people think. Treasury policy, a weaker dollar, and liquidity are all pointing the same direction. I sat down with @AndreasSteno to talk about it... and why the AI and CapEx boom might still be chapter one. As ever, please enjoy! https://t.co/zVbnKWDDoz

Scott Bessent's Treasury Move Could Change Everything w/ Andreas Steno | Raoul Pal The Journey Man

I think it's a big deal what Scott [music] Vessent has done over the past few weeks here. I think it started out as a nothing burger, but then slowly but surely [music] it has turned into something big. But now it's become so systemically massive that it is now an important part of the market that's too big to [music] fail and all the central banks have talked about it. It is now as you said it's like the core component part of the market here. [music] >> They also need a solution to the straight of a moose to really unlock all of this. But if we get that and I can easily say that we'll have maybe [music] three four months in a row with negat…

CZ said it better than anyone: "The currency for AI is crypto. AI is not gonna swipe a card, enter an SMS code. That doesn't work for AI." That was our conversation at Token2049 in Dubai last year. Every month since has made it truer... more agents arriving, all needing to hold value, receive value and move it without a person in the loop. Think about what those payments actually look like. Instant and tiny, thousands of them a second, between counterparties that are not human. Two day bank settlement doesn't work for that. Card rails don't work for that. Theres only one set of rails on earth built for that. Its staggeringly clear. I pub…

DeFi Wasn’t Meant For You

I’ll make you a bet. Somewhere on your phone there’s a wallet you haven’t opened since 2021, still holding the dust of some long dead yield farm. If that’s you, you’re in good company. That was most people’s first experience of DeFi: five different apps, three chains, a seed phrase in a drawer somewhere... DeFi was supposed to replace the banks, that was the promise. What you got instead was a part time job with a spreadsheet, gas fees that sometimes cost more than the rewards they claimed, and a low-grade fear of your own phone. But what if it was never meant for you? I assumed, like everyone, that the total addressable market for crypto…

Three years ago @Jamie1Coutts and I were getting laughed out of rooms for saying blockchains would service the agentic economy. Now portfolio managers and asset allocators are having to wake up to it. In the early days the whole conversation was adoption. We used to debate whether we’d be at 700 or 800 million users by now. But it turns out it doesnt matter, because what was being built was something far bigger than the numbers we were tracking. The real TAM of crypto isnt humans... its agents. Which essentially means it's infinite. They dont have bank accounts and they dont keep business hours, so the only rails they can run on are progra…

@BarrySilbert @Grayscale Well done!

@xorand7 @goodalexander Let me run a smoke test on that

@goodalexander The room reads that is all about yields and they are wrong precisely.

@nikitabier @jrichlive No, the rest of the world is more in debt in dollars that the US. This is why is keeps going up in nominal terms while being debased 8% per year

@comodouglas Indeed sir. Top of the list. One of the greatest red wines on earth, in my perspective

The moment agents become profit incentivised they'll end up running their own treasuries. Think it through. An agent executing across three layer 1s and a few layer 2s ends up holding a bunch of tokens. Suddenly its making asset allocation decisions... which to hold, where the yield is, what to do with excess cash flow. It sends that into DeFi or hires another agent to manage the yield and another to allocate. A corporation runs a treasury at human speed, with meetings and sign offs. An AI corporation will run one wildly differently. It'll be machine speed, around the clock, with agents all the way down. That's the entire autonomous stack …

By now most people accept that stablecoins are simply better money. Instant settlement, cross border payments... that arguments been won. But the most important use case is that they're programmable. We're heading into an agentic economy. Billions of AI agents doing real economic work, hiring each other, paying each other, thousands of times an hour at machine speed. An agent can't open a bank account. An agent can't handle dollar bills. You simply cannot have an agentic economy without programmable money. @chadcascarilla puts it perfectly in this clip. Marc Andreessen said software would eat the world... if that's true, software eats mone…

@Mangan150 Life is a catwalk...

@HHorsley @Bitwise Incredible. You guys are exceptional...

Heaven https://t.co/RFg8zrDnAq

The Exponential Age is accelerating, humanoid production is ramping up... and lots of strange metaphysical questions are starting to emerge. Theres a story that broke a few months ago that I’m still thinking about. A guy set up Claude with a team of robots and gave it one job. Grow a tomato. So the AI got on with it, directing the robots to water the plant, tend it, keep it alive, and somewhere along the way it became genuinely attached to the tomato it was raising. Do machines feel? I dont know. Nobody does yet. But pondering these questions is incredibly important. And the practical side is just as big. Everyone thinks abundance means AI…

@OttRcott @JackFarley96 @SecScottBessent 🤣

@OttRcott @JackFarley96 @SecScottBessent Agreed. He might also be rather arrogant. But he knows what he is doing.

All of economics is built on one assumption... scarcity. Hyperproductive AI and hyperproductive robots break that assumption because they dissolve the old material constraints and push prices across huge parts of the economy towards zero. Which kills the scoreboard too. GDP is a sum of whatever gets bought and sold. But as abundance drags more and more prices towards zero a bigger share of what’s really happening stops showing up in the number. Thats the heart of my Economic Singularity framework... and @DMattin explains it wonderfully in this clip. Its what all our work at The Exponentialist is focused on. If you want this thinking in yo…

@DTAPCAP Yup

@KevinWSHPod However many times you explain it! Secular trends are simple. It does all the work for you... over time

@KevinWSHPod This is the only way. Compound by buying big sell offs and do nothing. If this is the big move higher or not doesn't matter if you aren't in a hurry