Raoul Pal

The next phase is where this really takes off. Agents are semi-autonomous now, doing what you tell them to, more or less. But the next version of them is where it gets wild… they'll allocate their own capital and decide for themselves what to build. You’ll hand your head-agent some capital and say "make me rich in ten years." Off it goes. How do you even prepare for that? There's no playbook for a world where the smartest capital allocators are machines that never sleep and answer to no one. Fucking mental when you take that in. That's exactly why I wrote my Economic Singularity framework in the first place… so we can see the shape of th…

There's a principle I keep coming back to… the bottleneck theory. Find whatever is standing between the world and where it's trying to get to, and that's where the capital floods. Because the universe is solving for intelligence per unit of energy, and it will clear every roadblock in the way to get there. Right now that bottleneck is power. So that's where the money is going. But bottlenecks move. Solve one and the next one lights up, which is why you don't get one thing running forever. You get rotations. It won't always be Nvidia. And here's the part the market hasn't worked out yet. The whole agent economy is still unpriced. For all o…

This is the most disruptive thing I've come across in a while. An AI agent spots an opportunity that might only last minutes. Seizing something that fast has always been impossible for us, because it would mean raising money, forming a company and hiring people, none of which happens in minutes. But an agent doesn't need any of that. It can raise capital from other agents in seconds, spin up specialist sub-agents to handle the borrowing, staking and hedging, capture the trade, split the profit, and then dissolve the whole thing back into nothing before you’ve taken your dog out. It's fucking insane. This is what the invisible economy rewr…

DeFi will become far more important than most people realise. And not because more people start using it. Because the users stop being people at all. When you think about it DeFi is actually better suited to machines than it is to us. An agent doesn't need a website, or buttons, or a front end. You can strip all of it away and just let the agent plug straight into the protocol, do the job, and leave. Now play it forward… An AI agent taking out a flash loan at 3 am, another paying half a cent for a bit of data to a different agent, and one moving its treasury across three chains in a second because a swap suddenly got cheaper somewhere. Gen…

It takes me 3 days to move my money from the Caymans to the US. The plumbing of our economy was built for humans with KYC checks, bank hours, weekend closures, and correspondent banks all taking their cut of the wait. Now imagine an AI agent trying to run a business on that... a machine can't use a bank. So the agents will get their own plumbing, and it'll look nothing like the old one. They’ll have wallets instead of accounts and final settlement in hundreds of milliseconds. Built for an economy where nobody sleeps, takes vacations, or goes for a walk in the park. That's why we built the smart contract platforms a decade ago, and we didn…

Most investors fear the consolidation. The smart money accumulates through it. Julien and I went through where we are in the cycle, what the yield curve is saying, and where we're starting to see the path forward. As ever, please enjoy! https://t.co/ONwrXikMCi

Most people still think crypto is about tokens going up and down. It isn't. Or at least, that's the smallest part of what's happening. Money is about to start moving at silicon speed. Billions of agents transacting with each other, negotiating, settling and running full businesses at a velocity no human system can match. Bonkers when you think about it. And politics won’t be able to keep up… regulation is like trying to catch a bullet with a butterfly net. Once the machines have their own rails, money, and economy running in the background, they won’t be waiting for us. We'll be the dumb, slow ones, watching it happen from outside. Onch…

We're now in a double exponential. The first real example of Reed's Law in history. I've been building toward this idea for years. I first wrote about Reed's Law back in 2022, called AI the first true example of it in 2023, and by 2025 I was pointing out that almost nobody had priced what it actually means. Quick version for anyone who hasn't gone down this hole: Metcalfe's Law says a network's value grows with the square of its users… it's why the internet ate the world. Reed's Law goes further: when the members can form groups, value scales with two to the power of the number of members. Vastly faster. It's been true on paper for decad…

AI agents just made crypto's addressable market infinite. Agents aren't just smarter tools for people to mess around with but economic actors in their own right. They'll hold wallets, spend money, run businesses, transact with other agents, and never once take a break. All of that has to run on something, and it's not the banking system… It's blockchain. The programmable, always-on rails the invisible economy will run on. Owning a piece of those rails is like owning Manhattan real estate before a century of American business went up on top of it. But it’s not just the agents. Three forces are moving at once. Debasement won't slow until d…

One hidden thing I love is the @RealVision X list. Its only people who have ever appeared of RV so its highly curated and filters out the noise....and its very broad, so it has lots of divergent views, just like on the RV platform https://t.co/Fv7kVFUTBn

Billions of new participants are about to flood the economy. And none of them are human. We're building agents for every job you can name. One reads your emails and books your travel, one has a budget and invests in crypto, and one negotiates payments on your behalf. Coinbase, Sui, Google, Anthropic... everyone is racing to build them and the rails they'll run on. And the forecasts are staggering. 80 agents for every human alive, and there are nine billion of us on earth. You do the maths. That's an entire second economy stacked on top of ours, running at a speed no human system was ever built to match… most of it invisible. You won't fee…

The one thing AI can't do is be human. The agentic economy is being wired up right now, and most of it is hidden from our eyes. Machines transacting with machines using machine money at insane speed. And even as it happens, most of us can't quite work out where we're meant to fit in it. It gets harder to picture from here. Intelligence climbs past the point the human brain was built to follow, growth goes vertical, and GDP starts printing numbers that would have looked insane a decade ago. Ask where it all ends up and the honest answer is that nobody knows yet. But one thing I'm sure of. AI won't replace us. It'll take the wheel and drive…

It's hard to meet a rich trader. We all know one who did well for a period, or the lucky one who caught a great run and rode it. But sitting across the table from someone who's been trading for decades and built wealth? That’s a rare breed. The best-performing brokerage accounts belong to dead people… And that's not because they had better strategies. It's because they didn't sell. That's the whole game right there. You can be as dumb as anyone alive and make money in this asset class, as long as you understand where you are in the cycle, know what to do, and don't panic when things get ugly. Trying to trade your way to wealth is the sur…

@DTAPCAP As were you!

I just remembered that Scott Bessent was at my GMI Round Table in Spain when I presented this...

If you're going to survive in crypto, you have to accept what it actually is. You're going to get 35% pullbacks. You'll get 50% drawdowns. None of it matters if you understand what you own. The core of what you hold should be a small handful of networks with real, provable long-term value and genuine adoption. Get that right, and the drawdowns stop being terrifying. They become the point. Because this is a long game. I think these networks become the pension for an entire generation. You don't trade your way there. You build a thesis, you accumulate, you keep something back for the big sell-offs, and you let time and adoption do the work.…

https://t.co/XlamGJSU77

Crypto isn't about the shitty coin you bought. That's the mistake many people make… lose money on a token, decide the whole thing is a scam, and walk away angry. All while the story keeps playing out around them. Blockchain is the coordination layer for the digital economy. It's how AI agents make payments at machine speed. It's how identity, privacy, and value move across the internet when humans aren't the primary users anymore. AI and blockchain are married at the hip. Every agent, autonomous transaction, piece of the machine economy that's arriving now needs a programmable layer to run on. That's what the layer 1s actually are. Own a…

Humans can't resist sex and leverage but they both end up in the same place. You get fucked eventually.

Most people are getting poorer and they have no idea why. Their salary goes up, their bank balance doesn't shrink… On paper they’re fine. But things like property, stocks, and land run away from you. And every year the gap gets wider. Here's what’s happening: Wages grow at the pace of the economy. Assets grow at the pace of liquidity... about 8% a year. Own assets, the tide carries you up. Don't, and you spend your life running to stand still. And it's deliberate. Banks, central banks and the treasury are the only ones who can create money, and they create it to fund the interest on their debt. That money floods in and lifts every asset…

The Universal Code. Consciousness is the substrate. Everything else, physics, biology, markets, AI, is just compute running on the same operating system. New episode is up. As ever, please enjoy! https://t.co/CiwB771V7x

I've made more money from long-term trends than anything else. And the one I have the most conviction in is L1s. People can't understand how I hold through drawdowns like this. How can you ignore it falling this much? Simple. I'm not looking at the price. I'm looking at what these networks actually become. The economy is about to change shape completely. Billions of AI agents, transacting constantly, at a speed no human system was ever built for. They can't run on the old banking rails. Three-day settlement, correspondent banks, closed on weekends... none of it works for machines. They need rails that are programmable, instant, always on. …

If your returns aren't beating 11% a year, you're getting poorer. Global liquidity grows about 8% a year. That's the money supply expanding, and it means the value of the cash in your pocket falls by roughly that much every year. Add maybe 3% of normal inflation on top and you get to an 11% hurdle. Most people think if they've beaten inflation they're fine. They haven't. Inflation and debasement aren't the same thing. Inflation is your money losing value against goods... rent, groceries, fuel. Debasement is your money losing value against assets... property, stocks, the things that actually build wealth. You have to clear both. This is th…

For years I've written that the entire economy is heading on-chain, and that the smart contract networks are the only rails it can possibly run on. Here's the thing people still haven't understood. Billions of AI agents are about to come online, and they're going to transact constantly... paying each other for compute, data, services, at a scale and speed no human market has ever seen. The existing financial system physically cannot carry them. It’s too slow. And it looks like institutions are catching on. Just last week: Franklin Templeton called AI agents the “use case that finally drives blockchain adoption” Coinbase's agent-payment r…

I try to see everything through the bigger picture. When every screen is red, the most useful thing I do is close the laptop and go for a walk in nature. It's how I hold my conviction when everything in me wants to panic. And I'll be honest with you, because pretending otherwise would be insulting. Crypto is painful right now. It is not the gift that keeps on giving that it once was, and all of us in it are feeling poorer and feeling like shit. I feel it too. But feeling bad and being wrong are not the same thing. Nothing in the actual mechanism has broken. The business cycle has already turned. Liquidity says crypto is running cold, not …

There is so much alpha from members on @RealVision ...

Bitcoin is 87% correlated to global liquidity. The NASDAQ is 97% correlated. Which tells you something most people never realise. These assets are not really trading on earnings, or news, or whatever the story of the week is. They’re tracking the amount of money in the system. Bitcoin just swings harder around that line, because on top of liquidity it is young, volatile, emotional, and still riding a network adoption curve. Sometimes it runs hot. Sometimes it runs cold. Right now it is running cold, so people think something is broken. Nothing is broken. It’s doing exactly what it always does. So here is the question. If these assets trac…

When the market gets boring and quiet and everyone turns bearish, I like to come back to the story of how I fucked it all up. And I fucked it up a lot of ways, because crypto is genuinely hard. People think the cycles just repeat. They don't. Every one has a different texture, a different context, and it is so easy to get it wrong. I got in back in 2013. Wrote the first ever macro piece on Bitcoin, and bought at $200, straight into a peak right before it slammed down and I felt like an idiot. But I had a thesis. And the mistake was never the thesis. It was letting the noise talk me out of it... selling, trading around it, being clever, whe…

You are all one day going to realise that @Coldie "Know Your Overlord" was highly astute and important social commentary on one of the most important times for humanity. Same as @beeple Regular Animals

Sometimes we do a little Ibiza... https://t.co/vOMaFpCJ9F