Macro Veteran Jordi Visser: When Crypto Believers Exit, the Biggest Market Movements Often Occur the Night Before

Compiled by: Deep Tide TechFlow


Deep Tide Guide: In the latest episode of the "Convergence" podcast, Wall Street macro investment veteran and head of 22V Research AI Macro Nexus Research, Jordi Visser, engaged in a nearly 58-minute in-depth macro and technical review with host Luke Martin. Jordi Visser pointed out that the current gloomy sentiment, where many crypto fundamentalists and seasoned participants are wavering or even exiting, is reminiscent of the "grueling" period following the burst of the internet bubble from 2003 to 2007. At the same time, traditional financial billionaires and major funds have begun to frequently knock on doors, seriously questioning the fundamental logic behind asset tokenization and Hyperliquid.

Regarding the recent 7 Sigma abnormal volatility and sell-off exhaustion signals in Bitcoin, Jordi Visser systematically explained why this bull market cannot continue to rely on "liquidity-driven trading." He used the "Ghost Cities" model he observed in China years ago to predict a historic turning point triggered by autonomous AI agents, activating the circulation speed of stablecoins and asset tokenization. He also deeply analyzed why the Federal Reserve's interest rates and oil prices have gradually lost effectiveness, how Robinhood Chain and Hyperliquid facilitate the convergence of new and old financial systems, and why AI will rewrite traditional U.S. stock valuation logic, transferring the next structural growth window to the crypto ecosystem.

Guest: Jordi Visser (Head of AI Macro Research at 22V Research, Founder of Visser Labs, former President and CIO of Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers)

Host: Luke Martin (Host of Convergence podcast, seasoned crypto trader)

Podcast Source: Convergence / X (https://x.com/VentureCoinist/status/2120272504904110124)

Original Title: Why Everyone is Giving Up on Crypto at EXACTLY The Wrong Time

Broadcast Date: November 10, 2026

### Key Points Summary

· The departure of believers contrasts sharply with the entry of traditional billionaires: Crypto fundamentalists and early strong bulls have recently shown signs of giving up, similar to the darkest period after the internet bubble burst until the iPhone was launched; meanwhile, traditional financial billionaires at the level of Stan Druckenmiller are intensively consulting about the long-term impact of asset tokenization on the dollar and the stock market.

· 7 Sigma volatility and "price precedes narrative": During Bitcoin's rise from $60,000 to $69,000, there was a rare 7 Sigma reversal, combined with breaking above the 200-day moving average and previous rounds of bad news failing to create new lows, confirming that "selling pressure has indeed exhausted"; following macro trading principles, the market always sees price lead, with narrative following.

· The liquidity bull market has reached its end; the next phase must rely on fundamentals and the migration of existing wealth: Relying on a global annual liquidity increase of 5% cannot push Bitcoin's $2 trillion market cap to a price of $1 million or support a total crypto market cap of $100 trillion; true new buying must come from a trust switch of the $900 trillion existing wealth globally and seamless on-chain conversion.

· "Ghost City" analogy and AI agents acting as true residents: The crypto industry has built a massive on-chain infrastructure over the past 15 years relying on liquidity and venture capital, akin to early uninhabited "Ghost Cities"; cryptocurrencies have never been designed as tools for ordinary humans but rather as an economic network prepared for 24/7 autonomous operation, frictionless price comparison, and settlement by AI agents.

· AI becomes the main macro variable; the Federal Reserve and oil prices are no longer decisive: Over the past decade, the rise of the S&P 500 has been primarily supported by the seven giants of the U.S. stock market (Mag 7), while traditional cyclical companies have mostly been under pressure; the current productivity revolution driven by agent swarms has a strong deflationary effect and is highly insensitive to interest rates; even if oil prices rise back to $100 and the yield on 10-year U.S. Treasuries rises to 5%, the stock market and Bitcoin still refuse to decline in response to bad news.

· Value is taxed along the technology stack, with Ethereum and Solana acting as infrastructure toll booths: As consumer-grade agents (like Instinct AI, valued at $10 billion) and autonomous research nodes become widespread, agents use stablecoins for zero-friction high-frequency trading on-chain, with Arbitrum, Ethereum, and Solana at the base layer capturing trading volume bonuses according to a "city tax" logic.

· Robinhood and Hyperliquid facilitate the convergence of new and old finance and break the ice on tokenization: The "silent IPO" has led early libertarians who reject traditional accommodations to choose to exit, while Robinhood, relying on fiat funds, promotes U.S. stock tokenization and on-chain business amid a depletion of crypto venture capital, coupled with the all-weather perpetual price discovery provided by Hyperliquid, forcing Wall Street to no longer ignore crypto assets. Following tokenized stocks, private credit and real estate liquidity unlocking will become the next major battleground.

· Compression of U.S. stock valuations and "AI-native micro-businesses" will reshape long-term return patterns: Despite U.S. stock earnings growing about 30% this year, the S&P valuation multiples have significantly compressed, with leading computing companies like Nvidia and Micron seeing their valuations drop to single digits or lower ranges, reflecting market concerns about their "terminal value uncertainty"; in the future, AI equity will give rise to a large number of micro-enterprises with annual revenues of $200,000 to $2 million, eating into the market share of giants, and growth premiums are gradually spilling over from the U.S. stock market, valued at up to $70 trillion, to the crypto market, valued at less than $4 trillion.

### Exciting Insights

· "I don't care why people entered the cryptocurrency world in the first 16 years; what I really care about is AI agents."

· "Whenever I see assets refusing to drop in response to continuous bad news, it indicates that selling pressure has completely exhausted; as soon as there is an upward breakout, for me, it's a confirmation signal that bears and sellers have run out of ammunition. Always remember, price precedes narrative."

· "Relying on a global liquidity increase of 5% per year cannot support a $100 trillion market cap crypto ecosystem; you must earn the heartfelt trust of those managing the $900 trillion existing wealth globally and create real usage demand."

· "If I compare it to the 'Ghost Cities' I saw in China, the current crypto world still resembles an empty city lacking daily economic activity; just like the App Store gave rise to Uber and Airbnb, AI agents are the key to filling this city with economic activity participants."

· "Everyone should stop focusing on the Federal Reserve, stop watching oil prices, and stop monitoring interest rates. Applying the macro textbooks from the pre-AI era to the economic operating rules of the AI era is itself a misalignment."

· "Buying a $1 million building turns that money into stagnant 'dead money'; you can't use it to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks; once real estate and various assets are tokenized, activating the $900 trillion stagnant wealth behind the $120 trillion liquid currency, the explosion of money velocity will completely rewrite everything."

· "I have never agreed with those fundamentalists who say 'never merge with the old system.' The new and old systems are destined to merge, and ultimately the new system will gradually absorb and digest the old system."

· "Today, the total market cap of U.S. stocks is as high as $70 trillion, accounting for 72% of the global stock market, largely because the U.S. dominated the last generation of the internet; but AI will break monopolies and achieve capability equity. Stocks will find it hard to continue the growth myth of the past, while the crypto world, valued at less than $4 trillion, stands at the starting point of a new growth curve."

### Main Text

### When Believers Begin to Waver and Exit: From the Internet Bubble's "Gruesome" Phase to Traditional Financial Giants Knocking

Luke Martin: This week, I have been repeatedly reflecting on a seemingly counterintuitive point you made earlier: you believe the market must first see those who once firmly believed in crypto no longer believe in it for the real market to arrive. Why must we reach this point of wavering faith?

Jordi Visser: This is closely tied to my personal experience of the internet bubble. In 1999, I moved back to the U.S. from Brazil, and that contrast still feels surreal to me. I witnessed adult men crying on the streets in Brazil due to economic depression and severe currency devaluation, as the entire emerging market struggled for two years. But upon returning to the U.S., I took over a massive trading account at Morgan Stanley, and everyone around me was boasting about their internet stocks rising from $2 to $100; even my friends from blue-collar families in high school were talking about using their AOL stocks to buy a house.

As expected, the bubble eventually burst violently. Just four years later, those who once bragged about their achievements didn't even want to mention the word "stocks," as their accounts were filled with chips that had dropped to just one cent, and many companies went bankrupt. Those who had entered purely out of greed were completely washed out, leaving only disheartened structural builders and idealists. By then, it was 2004, but don't forget there were still three years until the iPhone was launched. From 2003 to 2007 was a long, grueling consumption period, where the ecosystem seemed to shrink continuously, with no end in sight.

The current crypto world gives me exactly the same feeling. Recently, I had dinner with many people in the industry who were once extremely bullish at various levels, even leveraging their positions, but now they are beginning to doubt whether Bitcoin itself has a future. Just yesterday, I participated in an interview where even a guest who could be called a Bitcoin maximalist admitted that he felt this system was no longer viable. But for me, I don't care what reasons people had for entering this industry over the past 16 years; what I truly care about is what is about to happen next: AI agents.

Luke Martin: Besides the interviewee from yesterday who surprised you, what other conversations among traditional finance leaders or seasoned insiders managing large funds have recently moved you?

Jordi Visser: Anyone who has observed the market for a long time can notice an interesting divide: 90% of daily discussions happen within the crypto enthusiast or retail investor communities, where sentiment is extremely pessimistic; meanwhile, more and more heavyweight figures from traditional finance are starting to privately reach out to me to discuss the real issues at hand. They seek me out because my background is as a macro strategy trader, and they believe I can provide answers in a language they understand.

A few days ago, when the Federal Reserve just announced its interest rate direction, the crypto community was filled with doomsday theories, feeling like everything was over. However, I was very clear in my mind that a true bull market cannot continue to be built on liquidity injections. Now, the real questions emerging from the traditional world are genuinely substantive: for example, what does asset tokenization really mean? Why would a heavyweight like Stan Druckenmiller invest in Hyperliquid?

In the past 10 days, two investors with net worths in the billions have contacted me to discuss in detail, asking core questions that touch on the underlying structure, such as "What impact will tokenization have on the status of the dollar?" and "What does tokenization mean for the stock market?" On one side, the believers in the crypto community are disheartened, while on the other side, top-tier old money is seriously doing their homework on the eve of fundamental changes, which precisely indicates that the foundation for a major market movement is being quietly laid.

### Bitcoin 7 Sigma Reversal and "Price Leads Narrative": Why This Bull Market Must Be Driven by Fundamentals?

Luke Martin: Speaking of price movements, during the surge of Bitcoin from $60,000 to $69,000, you pointed out on Twitter that this was a "7 Sigma" reversal that had only occurred three times in the past decade. For those not familiar with statistical concepts, were you suggesting that everyone should rush to buy? What is the true significance of this signal in history?

Jordi Visser: First of all, "Sigma" is definitely a fundamental concept that every market participant should understand. You can think of it like going to the hospital for a check-up: suppose the doctor measures your blood pressure at 120 over 80, which seems normal by conventional standards; but if you usually maintain at 105 over 70, then 120 over 80 is actually high for you. Judging abnormalities must be combined with your recent baseline. In the market, volatility is that baseline. Since Bitcoin's rolling 60-day volatility was compressed to a very low level, with an average daily fluctuation of only 1.5%, if a sudden 10% one-sided increase occurs, it translates to a super volatility close to 7 standard deviations, or 7 Sigma volatility.

More importantly, I don't just look at this single number but at multiple resonance signals. First, the price broke through the 200-day moving average; second, the 200-day moving average itself showed signs of turning from flat to rising within just a day or two; third, prior to this, the market experienced a series of negative shocks, including security theft incidents, severe turbulence in the AI sector, and the probability of the U.S. Clarity Act passing dropping below 20%, yet Bitcoin still firmly held around $65,000, refusing to make new lows. When an asset can calmly digest various bad news and not drop, it indicates one thing: the sellers in the market have run out of things to sell. The subsequent volume surge, even if triggered by a liquidity news that isn't particularly significant, completely exposed the panic of the shorts and the momentum funds waiting on the sidelines to buy back.

Luke Martin: My first reaction to that candlestick also immediately reminded me of the moment in 2019 when Bitcoin soared from $3,000 to $4,500 and even $5,000. After that surge, everyone scrambled to come up with various reasons for the price increase. From your years of macro trading experience, is it really important to attribute the cause (whether it was the Federal Reserve, macro improvements, or moving average breakthroughs) when the trend is just starting?

Jordi Visser: The answer is simple: price always leads narrative. Once the price starts to surge dramatically, people naturally weave a story they want to believe. Over the years, I have discussed this with Paul Tudor Jones multiple times, and we are in strong agreement on this point: after a trend emerges, the market will rush to label it with explanations.

As a macro trader focused on long-term structural trends, I have been looking for those fields that are on the verge of a major market movement, and I believe the crypto market is about to enter the largest wave in history. I am so confident because the epic clearing that occurred from 2021 to 2022 has already happened. Unlike the usual four-year cycles, that crash completed an extremely thorough bubble cleansing, logically very similar to the bursting of the internet bubble.

Looking back at history, the internet took off around 1994 and didn't see a major explosion until the App Store launched in 2009, a full 15 years later. During those 15 years, the market invented absurd metrics like cost per click and page views to value a disruptive technology because it didn't know how to value it. Amazon's stock price bubble burst at one point, and it wasn't until 2014 or 2015 that its price-to-earnings ratio fell below 100, during which new valuation paradigms like SaaS emerged.

Looking back since the Bitcoin white paper was released, we have traversed a similar length of time. The internet bubble left behind a surplus of fiber optics and debt clearing, while the crypto industry has built up surplus infrastructure after a massive influx of venture capital in recent years. Now, valuations are falling, and many young people holding losses or distressed assets are being bought out by seasoned industry veterans who once led Fortune 500 companies. This transfer of chips indicates that speculation has been stripped away, and true structural innovation has begun.

Luke Martin: You just emphasized that Bitcoin has indeed been a standard "liquidity trade" over the past decade, and many people rush in mindlessly when they see money printing headlines. However, you believe that it can no longer rely on liquidity to drive it, which might be hard for many listeners to grasp. Why will the "liquidity logic" no longer work in the future?

Jordi Visser: Because at a certain scale, size determines everything. When Bitcoin has reached a market cap of about $2 trillion, while the total global asset pool is around $900 trillion, if someone wants to project a roadmap for Bitcoin to rise to $1 million and the entire crypto ecosystem to reach a $100 trillion market cap, it is absolutely impossible to rely on global liquidity growing by 5% each year.

The early idealists who drove this experiment have either cashed out or shifted their focus to the AI sector. Simply relying on wealth management advisors allocating 1% of their clients' portfolios cannot support that scale. You must earn the trust and necessity of use from the pension funds and conservative capital that truly control the $900 trillion of global assets. Ask any person over 70 years old, and almost no one truly understands or believes in the narrative that "Bitcoin is digital gold" as a store of value.

To get them to switch their fiat assets, two prerequisites must be met: first, traditional fiat assets can no longer be a guaranteed win; second, there must be a zero-threshold bridge. You cannot expect a 70-year-old to navigate complex private key mnemonic phrases and wallet setup processes; this process must be instant, automatically converted by AI agents in the background, and seamlessly connected through tokenized assets. All of this relies on technological fundamentals, not central bank money printing.

### China's "Ghost City" Analogy and De-leveraging Deflation Triggered by AI: Why Are the Federal Reserve and Oil Prices No Longer Important?

Jordi Visser: Speaking of infrastructure leading and demand lagging, I used an analogy in my article today. From the mid-2000s to 2013, I would spend a whole month in China every year. During that time, I personally witnessed some so-called "Ghost Cities," seeing vast, grand buildings that were completely empty, and I experienced firsthand what it was like to have an infrastructure wave driven purely by abundant liquidity.

In my view, until now, the entire cryptocurrency world is essentially still a "ghost city," where real economic activities are not operating daily. But now, with Stripe making significant acquisitions and Robinhood heavily investing in building its own chain, traditional finance is seriously putting money into it, which means "residents" are finally coming. But everyone must understand a core disruption: some of the ghost cities in China did not end up with enough human residents, while this digital ghost city of crypto can be instantly filled because cryptocurrencies were never designed for humans; they were specifically created for digital agents and AI entities. Just as there would be no Uber and Airbnb without the App Store, AI entities are the main economic participants that will fully activate and illuminate this crypto city.

Luke Martin: This perspective of "ghost cities activated by agents" is truly profound! Before delving deeper into how agents can ignite the economy, I want to borrow your seasoned macro expert perspective to ask: Recently, it seems the policy signals from the Federal Reserve have become increasingly ambiguous, and everyone is entangled in whether they are still indirectly injecting liquidity, especially with Kevin Warsh taking over and ushering in a new era compared to Jerome Powell's time. How much impact do the Federal Reserve and oil prices still have on the market?

Jordi Visser: My advice is very straightforward: everyone should immediately stop fixating on the Federal Reserve, stop worrying about oil prices, and stop overly focusing on interest rate trends. I really can't understand why so many people who have gone through so many rounds of lessons still haven't seen through it. Looking back from 2009 to 2019 and then to the COVID-19 pandemic, many people like to simply attribute the rise of U.S. stocks to quantitative easing (QE), but the reality is quite the opposite: back then, most traditional companies in the S&P 500, such as home builders, auto manufacturers, and airlines, had no substantial growth and were even in long-term decline; it was solely the Magnificent Seven (Mag 7) that propped up their market cap weight in the S&P to 30%.

The reason I assert that the Federal Reserve is no longer that important is that the entire economic engine has fully switched to being AI-driven, and the AI industry is almost completely insensitive to interest rates. In the next one to two years, agent swarms will unleash unprecedented super-deflationary productivity. For example, the recent breakthrough of the Navier-Stokes equations, which had been an unresolved century-old mathematical problem even before Albert Einstein; AI entities working 24/7 can not only tackle scientific problems that humans cannot solve but can even easily breach security nets set by humans, indicating that humans cannot compare with them in terms of intellectual efficiency.

Let's take another look at the comparison of oil prices and interest rates: When I frequently traveled to China in 2007, Brent crude oil surged to $110, and today's oil prices are even lower than they were in 2007. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 has increased by two to three times during the same period, and household assets have tripled. How much impact can an energy product priced under $110 have in a global economy that has already expanded several times? As for interest rates, the vast majority of American households with mortgages have locked in their mortgage rates just above 3%; even with a 500 basis point increase and 10% inflation, the economy did not fall into recession in 2022. In fact, the billionaire group holding vast amounts of capital has benefited from high-interest income. Currently, corporate profits are still maintaining a rapid growth rate of about 30%, yet they are applying the recession script from the pre-AI era to the AI era market, which is simply ridiculous.

Luke Martin: Hearing your analysis, it seems we really don’t need to anxiously monitor the words of Federal Reserve officials or Kevin Warsh every day. But if we take a step back and ask, despite the fundamentals breaking free from traditional macro constraints, don’t those traditional fund managers with substantial capital still have psychological expectations influenced by oil prices or U.S. Treasury yields?

Jordi Visser: We can directly test this with recent market data. The S&P 500 has basically been flat since June, but look at what has happened during this time: since June 25, oil prices have surged from over $70 to break above $100, and the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury has climbed from 4.30% to 5%. According to the old script, the market should have collapsed long ago, yet the S&P has remained flat! If even a surge in oil prices above $100 and a rise in Treasury yields to 5% cannot crush stock prices, imagine the rebound potential if the 10-year Treasury yield merely drops by 20 basis points and oil prices pull back slightly.

More critically, the so-called "Mag 8" (I also include Oracle, the core AI target, among the eight giants) is only about 1% away from its historical peak, and today seven out of the eight stocks have regained their 50-day moving average. There have only been three days this year when all eight stocks were above the 50-day moving average, and now seven are clustered above it. As long as the market can withstand this wave of bad news and remain flat for a few more days, its pattern will be identical to Bitcoin just after selling pressure has exhausted: indicating that all the worst expectations have already been priced in, and during the upcoming earnings season before the midterm elections, corporate profits are still running at high speed.

### AI Agents Become Economic Entities: Why Do Machines Choose Cryptocurrency and Stablecoins Over Traditional Dollars?

Luke Martin: After discussing macro resilience, let’s return to your most favored core engine: now that the on-chain infrastructure is in place, like the 30+ agents running on my computer screen, some help me clear my inbox and intercept spam at night, while others help me schedule my agenda, although sometimes they do things I haven’t authorized. In the context of the crypto financial infrastructure being ready, what kind of commercial activities by agents will ignite the real growth of Bitcoin and the crypto economy first?

Jordi Visser: Those running on your screen are called "personal efficiency agents," which only help you save time; what can truly ignite economic activity are "consumer agents" that directly interface with external commercial transactions. Last week, Meta launched a personal AI assistant, and the private company Instinct AI, focused on life agency execution, saw its valuation jump from $2.5 billion to $10 billion. Payment giant Stripe is also making significant acquisitions in the upstream and downstream of consumer payment technology, including acquiring the large model routing platform OpenRouter. All signals point to the same future: autonomous agent networks are taking over transactions comprehensively.

Many may have heard of Leopold Aschenbrenner's lengthy 165-page report "Situational Awareness," but I doubt many have actually flipped through the chart on page 71. That chart clearly indicates that once AI crosses the threshold of "autonomous research agents," technology will enter an absolute parabolic exponential growth phase, including breakthroughs in cancer treatment and foundational scientific breakthroughs like Navier-Stokes, with rumors that several leading labs in the industry have quietly solved more than one world-class mathematical problem internally.

When Leopold Aschenbrenner wrote this report in 2024, he predicted that this inflection point would not arrive until 2027, but the reality is that the progress bar is clearly moving faster than the prophecy! Given that such top-tier autonomous research nodes are already approaching, consumer agents, which have a much lower technical threshold, will definitely see explosive proliferation.

This is exactly what I have been advocating for: the convergence of macro and fundamentals. In the traditional stock market, although macro fund managers and fundamental fund managers who study company earnings have different styles, they ultimately look at the same set of equity profit logic; however, the crypto space has long been extremely fragmented, with Bitcoin maximalists only discussing macro and libertarianism, while Ethereum and Solana ecosystems only focus on applications and fundamentals, with both sides not interacting at all. I have always firmly believed in the integration of both.

Imagine today, even I, a professional immersed in AI all day, find the verification process for opening a Robinhood Chain wallet cumbersome; a 70-year-old would never endure such an experience. But consumer agents have completely flattened this barrier, as Instinct AI can already handle visa applications and the entire payment process for trips to Brazil.

I also encountered a particularly typical real-world case: recently, Delta Airlines was accused of using AI agents to identify users' past privacy and payment capabilities to dynamically increase prices. A friend told me he checked a Delta flight ticket, and after an hour, it had increased by $130. I told him directly that the other side had clearly deployed AI pricing agents, and in the face of such unfair information asymmetry, your only solution is to send out your own personal AI agent to negotiate with the airline's AI agent, letting AI compete against AI, so the market can return to a fair competitive track. Historically, there must first be Bitcoin to establish consensus, and then a large on-chain ecosystem will feed back into Bitcoin; we are now entering a new phase where the application ecosystem takes the lead and charges forward.

Luke Martin: But I must raise a sharp question on behalf of many rationalists. Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong previously strongly advocated that agents must use crypto wallets for 24/7 cross-border settlements, and Coinbase itself has long established the relevant infrastructure; yet I have seen many extremely smart AI entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley rebutting, saying, "Why must I have AI use cryptocurrency? I can simply authorize my credit card information for the agent to settle in dollars, right?" Even I was somewhat swayed after hearing this. Why are you so confident that the agents will ultimately choose Bitcoin and stablecoins instead of continuing to use dollars directly?

Jordi Visser: First of all, I completely agree that in the current stage of high-frequency micropayments, the main players will definitely be stablecoins, while Bitcoin serves the function of large settlements and core collateral. For example, if you want to transfer $100 to someone, you can easily do it with software like Venmo; but once it involves transferring large assets at the level of $1 million, ordinary consumer payment tools simply cannot handle it, and at that point, Bitcoin must be relied upon as the ultimate trusted settlement and collateral.

The more fundamental decisive logic lies in the "conflict of zero friction and profit structure." Traditional dollar payment clearing networks (whether issuing banks or payment gateways) are essentially commercial companies; they have shareholders to serve and profit and commission targets to meet, which determines that the traditional system can never physically reduce transaction friction and fees to zero. The essence of the AI era is that everything trends toward extreme deflation, and AI agents will naturally strive to roll out the optimal solution at the lowest cost and fastest speed across the entire network.

Using the earlier Delta ticket example: a human opens a browser, clicks on the airline's website, inputs information, and places an order; during that time, the backend AI agent has already synchronized and compared prices across 17 different airlines, compressing all intermediate premiums to the limit. The same thing will happen in global currency exchange and commercial payments; as long as both merchants and users start to rely on agents, agents will not want to go through a bunch of traditional financial intermediaries. The only reason we still need to convert to dollars is that physical coffee shops have not yet fully adopted on-chain payments; once we enter the phase where agents directly communicate with agents, the frictionless channels based on stablecoins and crypto rails will completely prevail.

Think back to the early days of mobile internet adoption; my stepfather refused to try Uber even once for seven years, yet he eventually found it convenient to use. Once those who first use agents can automatically monitor StubHub 24/7 to snag low-priced NBA Knicks tickets or closely watch for cancellations at restaurants to save money and effort, young people will quickly spread this benefit and then teach it to their parents and even grandparents. As for the security and risk control issues that everyone is worried about, they can be easily resolved, just like we set spending limits for Venmo; we can hard-code a limit of $100 or $2000 for the dedicated operational wallet of the agent.

There lies a blind spot that the vast majority of traditional investors have yet to realize: once a paradigm crosses the critical point from being used by 10 people to 1000 or 10,000 people, the on-chain fundamental expansion driven by AI agents will be exponentially uncontrollable. Last May, during the tariff turmoil and stock market rebound, I wrote several reports exploring the explosion of AI "inference" computing power, but when I ran to hedge fund offices recommending it to the smartest fund managers globally, they couldn’t even be bothered to listen to what inference meant, their minds only filled with tariffs. I said at the time that by the day they react and study inference, Micron's stock price would have already multiplied tenfold.

What is about to unfold in the crypto market is precisely the same script: fundamentals are snowballing and skyrocketing under the drive of AI agents, and by the time the general public hears this narrative in the news, asset prices will have already been dramatically revalued.

### From Grokbot to the "City Tax Model": Who Captures the Value of Millions of Agents Trading?

Luke Martin: Speaking of the speed of agent evolution, I have deeply felt this with Grokbot over the past month or two. Previously, when I asked it to monitor a certain data point continuously for a week, it often slacked off after a day; now, although it is still some distance from true "recursive self-improvement (RSI)," even when I haven't given it instructions, it has remembered the Markdown background files I provided and even proactively communicates with another agent to inform me, "Luke just mentioned this." This change is so sci-fi!

Jordi Visser: This is why I spent considerable time emphasizing its "equitable usability" during the week Grokbot was launched. It transforms what was originally an extremely hardcore agent scheduling into a smooth interaction similar to texting and playing video games. You just need to set up a main intelligence agent similar to "Jarvis" with a few prompt words, and even if I am currently video chatting with you, I can send a text message from my phone to Jarvis to coordinate the technical agents under my command, automatically pulling a list of stocks that have strengthened over the past three days and matched in volume and price over four days, providing me with precise results within two minutes.

I had a personal experience just a few days ago: I wanted to exchange my New Jersey driver's license for a New York driver's license, and when I checked the DMV website, it indicated that there were no available appointments for a month. Instead of waiting, I directly had the AI search Reddit and X platforms to see if anyone had encountered the same issue and found a workaround. In less than 30 seconds, the AI pinpointed a specific step leading directly to the appointment entry, and I immediately booked an appointment for the next day. Yesterday, it only took me 10 minutes in the hall to get it done and leave. Everyone should start forcing themselves to develop the habit of sending AI to break down complex tasks; only by training our brains into this collaborative mode can we keep up with the upcoming wave of Instinct AI.

Luke Martin: Now I need to activate my trader instinct to calculate a detailed account. Suppose in the near future, there are hundreds of millions of autonomous AI agents simultaneously using stablecoin trading at high frequency. In this value network, where will the profits ultimately settle? Is it with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, or someone else?

Jordi Visser: Value will be captured simultaneously at multiple key nodes across the entire tech stack, but the core lies in understanding the "toll collection" logic and the terrifying explosive power of transaction volume. At the fundamental level, large model vendors and computing infrastructure will undoubtedly continue to benefit; on the transaction settlement and on-chain circulation side, assuming all transactions run on stablecoins, Stripe will collect a toll at the front-end fiat currency and commercial interface, followed by Ethereum Layer 2 networks like Robinhood Chain running on Arbitrum, which will reap massive transaction fees, ultimately funneling taxes back to the underlying mainnet Ethereum.

I believe the public has no concept of "machine concurrent trading volume." Recalling last April's Google earnings call when Sundar Pichai announced that Google Cloud's token consumption surged eightfold year-on-year, reaching nearly 90 trillion levels, and shortly thereafter surged close to a quadrillion, this is the real fear driving giants to crazily increase capital expenditures (CapEx). When hundreds of millions or even billions of agents operate concurrently 24/7, the number of transactions will be an unimaginable exponential figure for the human world.

Once we understand the scale, we also need to resolve the most critical deadlock in macroeconomics: "Why did liquidity fail in the crypto space before?" Because in the past, humanity locked the massive wealth released by monetary easing into illiquid "dormant assets"! Even though Raoul Pal and I often discuss global liquidity, I must point out: there is actually only about $120 trillion of real cash currency globally, corresponding to a staggering $900 trillion in book asset valuations, supported by massive fiat leverage. When you use $1 million to buy an office building, that money is completely locked in concrete and steel; you cannot tear off a piece of the building's exterior to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks, so that $1 million becomes "trapped wealth."

If the total global assets (including about $3 trillion in crypto assets) are around $903 trillion, the core trend in the future is not a collective collapse of asset prices to zero like the Great Depression, but rather, as traditional fiat leverage gradually returns to rationality and assets are tokenized to unlock liquidity (the total circulating currency evolves from $120 trillion to $200 trillion, with existing real estate split into tradable shares on-chain), the locked dormant assets will suddenly gain trading capability! This is precisely what Caitlin Long has long emphasized as the "velocity of money": the faster transactions occur and the higher the capital turnover rate, the higher the GDP output and protocol revenue supported by the same amount of capital.

Ethereum is like an ever-expanding city; it does not need to monopolize every front-end application but only needs to attract Arbitrum, Robinhood, and various competitors to build on its foundation through secure consensus and absolute trust, collecting a base security tax from all commercial entities that settle in. Meanwhile, Solana serves as a high-speed satellite financial hub to meet rapid trading demands. As long as trust exists, the underlying toll booths will profit exponentially with the city's prosperity.

### Robinhood Chain, Hyperliquid, and "Silent IPO": How do traditional finance and crypto mutually devour and converge?

Luke Martin: You just mentioned Robinhood Chain, which is undoubtedly the most impressive move by traditional finance or Web2 companies crossing into the crypto space. CEO Vlad Tenev's pace is like a military march, and the lead in the US stock tokenization track far exceeds everyone's expectations. Moreover, looking at Robinhood's Q2 earnings report this year, revenue from crypto derivative businesses, including prediction markets and on-chain trading, has officially surpassed traditional stock trading, and this does not even account for their own chain's revenue share. To many, tokenized stocks seem to merely enable 24/7 trading; why are Vlad Tenev and BlackRock's Larry Fink so excited about this?

Jordi Visser: This directly touches on the core of my previous in-depth analysis in "The Silent IPO": why did many early idealistic purists in cryptocurrency choose to cash out at this juncture? The early geeks built this system to pursue absolute freedom and decentralized resistance, so they rejected government overtures, despised politicians issuing meme coins, and were not fond of Larry Fink swaggering in with Wall Street giants, feeling that the original intention had soured, thus shouting "I'm out" to cash out. But I pointed out from the beginning that historical laws will never allow a new system to remain isolated from the old system forever; the new and old financial systems must converge, and the ultimate outcome is that the new system will gradually absorb, rewrite, and merge with the old system from the inside out.

Looking back at Robinhood from this historical juncture, you can understand the brilliant misalignment: we are currently in a valuation and financing winter in the crypto industry, with many startup projects unable to secure venture capital; meanwhile, Robinhood, sitting on a massive cash flow in the fiat currency arena, is vigorously promoting the tokenization of US stocks, acting as a conduit to funnel traditional financial capital into Ethereum and Arbitrum's crypto foundations! More traditional users will naturally possess on-chain wallets by holding tokenized US stocks, leading to real new capital accumulation. Based on this, I designed an ecological index covering 10 core crypto tracks, selecting 40 tokens plus 6 deeply cross-industry listed companies, aiming to benchmark Bitcoin's performance with metrics that traditional Wall Street can understand.

Interestingly, I have recently observed that many analysts from major investment banks like Morgan Stanley are continuously upgrading Robinhood's stock rating, yet the reports completely avoid mentioning the words "cryptocurrency." The reason is simple: they themselves have not fully grasped this on-chain economic mechanism and cannot explain it clearly to high-net-worth traditional clients, so they can only use traditional performance growth rhetoric to boost stock ratings to seize the coverage opportunity.

In this wave of all-weather perpetual pricing integration, whether it is the perpetual contracts for stock indices launched by Coinbase or the phenomenal platform Hyperliquid, they are rapidly breaking down the barriers of traditional stock market closing mechanisms. Recently, during a weekend when external public opinion was in a panic, many people rushed to ask me during halftime of an American football game on Sunday afternoon, "How much will the S&P 500 drop when it opens on Monday? How much will crude oil futures gap up?" I directly opened the stock index perpetual contracts on Coinbase and told them: at that moment, it was down 28 basis points outside the market, and the opening would be around that level. The other party was stunned, completely unaware that there was real-time continuous pricing available even during the weekend market closure.

This is the deepest intuition behind why Stan Druckenmiller publicly holds PURR to position in Hyperliquid. Based on my understanding of his investment style (similar to how he keenly captured changes in Argentina's political situation and market), I can easily imagine the scene: one weekend, he and his team discuss the expected opening price of assets like oil or SpaceX, and his team reports, "No need to wait for Monday; it's already trading in real-time on Hyperliquid, and the opening will basically follow that."

For top Wall Street traders who have spent their lives anxiously waiting for Sunday night futures to open while staring at the closed market screens, having a market that displays real supply and demand dynamics in real-time 24/7 is an irreversible dimensionality reduction blow; once experienced, they can never go back. This is also why almost every week on Twitter, seasoned analysts are suddenly educated by passersby about Hyperliquid's real-time quotes and then quietly become the next batch of buyers.

### From Tokenized Stocks to Private Credit Crisis: What is the next true ignition point for RWA?

Luke Martin: Currently, all market attention is almost focused on Robinhood's leading "US stock tokenization," which is indeed reshaping the trading experience in real-time. But after US stock tokenization, looking at the next evolutionary stage of real-world assets (RWA), what do you think will be the next asset class with explosive potential like US stock tokenization? Will it be the massive global bond market, or other undervalued corners?

Jordi Visser: In my view, the next most explosive and urgently needed area for on-chain tokenization to break through is private credit, as well as the broader fields of private equity and real estate.

The reason is very simple and urgent: the entire traditional private credit market is currently facing a severe liquidity deadlock, with a large amount of capital trapped inside, unable to move. We can clearly see that various business development companies (BDCs) are generally trading at significant discounts; looking at private equity giants like Blue Owl, KKR, and Apollo, they previously absorbed a large amount of retail funds into illiquid products, which triggered redemption runs and public opinion crises in the open market. There has always been a demand for allocation to private credit assets in the current market (for example, insurance funds need to allocate these assets for long-term stability), but due to the lack of a continuous market circulation and precise repricing mechanism in the traditional underlying, assets are trapped in a liquidity deadlock and severely mispriced.

If someone builds a secondary liquidity exit channel through an on-chain tokenization framework (in fact, sharp giants like Apollo are likely already actively researching and promoting such solutions), telling those trapped investors who urgently need to cash out: "You can tokenize your locked shares, and there are institutional buyers willing to take over at a transparent market price with a 20% to 30% discount, allowing you to cash out today," this will instantly trigger a super headline effect on Wall Street!

Tokenized stocks solve the problem of cross-border investors breaking through the geographical restrictions of exchanges (for example, being able to allocate Japanese stocks without opening a Japanese account) and abandoning the outdated ETF index constraints, allowing for 24-hour free combination of global assets, which itself has a vast space; on the collateral side, BlackRock's money market funds have already paved the way. The next key player who can leverage tokenization to connect private credit with the stagnant global real estate market will hold the true valve for the next round of RWA explosion.

### AI × Crypto is not a zero-sum game: Stock valuation peaks and the rise of "micro AI-native businesses"

Luke Martin: The last core issue is also a mental model conflict that has lingered in my mind for a long time. In the past few years, when the AI market was extremely enthusiastic, I instinctively thought that AI and cryptocurrency were both at the forefront of global high-risk assets, and that if AI became too hot, it would directly siphon off attention and capital inflow from the crypto market. Therefore, whenever Dario Amodei or Sam Altman released a major update that triggered an AI frenzy, crypto often showed weakness. However, after reading your recent in-depth article, I found that you completely overturned this either-or perception, suggesting instead that the two could form a synergy and even propel each other higher. Can you elaborate on the intrinsic connections between them?

Jordi Visser: This needs to start with the real evolution pace of the AI investment wave over the past few years. The first wave of the AI market, in the first two years after the launch of ChatGPT, was actually highly concentrated on Nvidia and a few ultra-large cloud giants; then last year, funds began to shift massively towards underlying infrastructure and inference computing power. In the AI infrastructure sector index that I track, at least 40 stocks have doubled in the past year, with many even surging by 200% to 500%, creating explosive growth curves comparable to crypto altcoins.

However, this round of skyrocketing is fundamentally different from the internet bubble of the past and has sounded a deafening alarm for all investors clinging to traditional stocks. Stocks are essentially a "hope trade" and a "growth premium trade": investors buy stocks hoping for an annual expected return of 15% to 20%; after all, bonds have long been in a bear market, and leveraging to buy properties for rental income is no longer appealing in a high-interest and inflationary environment. Venture capital and private equity liquidity are constrained, making stocks almost the only growth game left in town. The problem is that looking ahead three years from today, this high growth premium for large-cap stocks in the public market is likely to face a severe structural end!

You can see the anomaly in this year's data: the earnings of S&P 500 constituent companies have surged by about 30% year-on-year, yet the S&P index has only risen by 11% to 12% so far (annualized at around 17%), indicating that this year is actually a very significant "valuation multiple compression year." Many people wonder why, given the grandeur of AI, there hasn't been a bubble with price-to-earnings ratios soaring to 100 times like in the past? The reality is quite the opposite: today, the price-to-earnings ratio of a storage infrastructure leader like Micron is only 2 to 4 times, and even the absolute leader Nvidia's forward price-to-earnings ratio based on next year's earnings expectations hovers only in the single to low double digits of 9 to 11 times!

This seems extremely absurd on the surface, but Wall Street capital has an incredibly keen sense: the reason stock prices do not dare to soar in tandem with high earnings is that there is fundamental skepticism about the "terminal value" of all listed giants.

No one knows whether these giants today can maintain their moats three years from now. Any new player that makes a slight iterative breakthrough in technology or AI evolution could potentially upend the existing giants at any time. Imagine when humanoid robots are scaled and deployed in mining and physical industries; a newly established mining company could buy a piece of land and start deploying robots from scratch, while traditional listed mining giants, burdened with historical baggage and supporting a large human workforce, cannot simply sweep all human employees out overnight to restructure costs. Once the perpetual cash flow assumptions in asset pricing models are shaken, traditional giants' valuation multiples will no longer rise.

Meanwhile, the reason the U.S. stock market has been able to hold a market value of $70 trillion, accounting for 72% of the total global stock market value, is that the internet platform dividends over the past twenty years have been almost monopolized and harvested by American giants (just as Germans might wonder why over 90% of their domestic search engine market share goes to Google). The essence of AI is extreme democratization and equality.

In the future, the most vibrant business ecosystem, I even have a strong desire for an ETF index that specifically buys "micro companies with annual revenues of only $200,000" from around the world. In the past, such mom-and-pop shops couldn't scale up, but in the future, countless "AI-native micro enterprises" with one or two people can aggressively penetrate various software and business gaps, for example, taking away $200,000 worth of small business from Amazon, Google, and traditional software giants, easily achieving annual revenues of $2 million with multiple lines of business.

An individual micro enterprise may seem insignificant, but on the scale of billions of people and a multitude of intelligent agents acting simultaneously, they will continuously erode the profits and growth space of traditional listed companies.

So the conclusion is very clear: initially, the hard-core earnings support of computing infrastructure stocks and their potential for several times or even tenfold increases temporarily siphoned off a lot of smart money that would have flowed into crypto; but as traditional U.S. stocks gradually lose the certainty of high valuation growth myths due to AI disruption, and as capital is forced to shift focus away from static price-to-earnings ratios and re-concentrate on "velocity of money" and the underlying protocols of the machine economy, the crypto world, which naturally fits the frictionless collaborative operation of intelligent agents and has a total market cap of less than $4 trillion, will officially take over as the most imaginative new growth story globally.

Luke Martin: Jordi Visser, the information density today has been incredibly high for nearly an hour, thank you very much for joining the show to share these cutting-edge thoughts!

Jordi Visser: You're welcome, I enjoyed this conversation as well, see you next time.

Luke Martin: Thank you all for listening, see you next time.