Raoul Pal Says Most People Think Crypto Is About Tokens Going Up and Down, but Today It Is About 'Owning' the Operating System of the Next Economy

Aniket Verma

Sun, August 9, 2026 at 6:16 PM GMT+3 5 min read

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Macro investor Raoul Pal said on Wednesday that cryptocurrency's real significance lies in enabling AI agentic finance, rather than token price moves.

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In an X post, Pal argued that tokens going up and down is the "smallest part of what's happening."

"Money is about to start moving at silicon speed," the Real Vision CEO said. "Billions of agents transacting with each other, negotiating, settling and running full businesses at a velocity no human system can match."

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Pal said that regulatory attempts to control this new economy would be akin to "trying to catch a bullet with a butterfly net."

He positioned blockchain rails as the only system capable of supporting billions of autonomous economic interactions.

"Which is why owning a piece of it is owning the operating system the next economy runs on," Pal added.

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… pic.twitter.com/AtLFbKal0a

— Raoul Pal (@RaoulGMI) August 5, 2026

The Next Leap in Finance?

Pal has consistently emphasized that Layer 1 blockchains, including Solana and Ethereum, represent the core investment opportunity and are central to the next phase of the internet involving AI agents.

Agentic payments mark a new era in financial technology, where AI goes beyond reasoning and recommendation to finalize transactions on behalf of humans.

In the realm of cryptocurrency, these entities are designed to have their own wallets to execute transactions, trade assets, and pay for services independently.

Major cryptocurrency companies have started to build infrastructure to support the agentic economy.

Coinbase Global Inc. launched a new platform in April that will enable AI agents to discover, integrate and pay for services using the x402 standard.

x402 is an internet-native payment protocol developed by Coinbase that allows APIs and AI agents to make payments using the USDC stablecoin.

A similar initiative was launched by the Trump family-backed World Liberty Financial platform, where agents can make payments using the World Liberty Financial USD (USD1) stablecoin.

Photo Courtesy: Mdisk on Shutterstock.com

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