Crypto is becoming the settlement layer for autonomous AI agents, not just a token price play. Raoul Pal said blockchain rails are the only system that can handle billions of machine-to-machine transactions.
Forget the charts. Raoul Pal thinks the real story in crypto has nothing to do with whether Bitcoin is up or down on a Tuesday afternoon.
The Real Vision CEO said Wednesday that token price moves are the "smallest part of what's happening." What matters, Pal argued, is that crypto rails are becoming the settlement layer for autonomous AI agents – machines that negotiate, trade, and pay each other without human intervention.
"Money is about to start moving at silicon speed," Pal wrote on X. "Billions of agents transacting with each other, negotiating, settling and running full businesses at a velocity no human system can match."
Pal said regulators trying to control this new economy would look like they were "trying to catch a bullet with a butterfly net." He positioned blockchain networks as the only infrastructure capable of handling billions of autonomous transactions – which makes owning those networks, in his view, equivalent to "owning the operating system the next economy runs on."
Agentic payments are a specific category of fintech where AI goes beyond reasoning or recommendations to actually execute transactions. These entities hold their own wallets, trade assets, and pay for services independently.
Major crypto companies have already started building for it. Coinbase launched a platform in April that lets AI agents discover, integrate, and pay for services using the x402 standard – an internet-native payment protocol built on USDC. The Trump family-backed World Liberty Financial platform rolled out a similar setup where agents settle payments using its USD1 stablecoin.
Pal has consistently pointed to Layer 1 blockchains including Solana and Ethereum as the core investment opportunity in this phase. He said the shift from human-paced finance to machine-paced finance is what makes owning those networks a bet on the operating system, not a bet on a price line.
© 2026 AlphaScala Markets. All rights reserved.
Drafted by a large language model from the source reporting linked above, then screened by automated publishing checks. It is not read by a journalist before publication. Some articles cite our Alpha Score. Verify prices and figures against the original source. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.