DeFi wasn't built for humans—it was built for AI.

Article by Raoul Pal, Founder of Real Vision

Compiled by Chopper, Foresight News

I’ll bet you a dollar that your phone has a wallet you haven’t opened since 2021, still holding onto the leftover scraps from a dead liquidity mining project.

If that sounds like you, you’re not alone. That’s how most people first experience DeFi: five different apps, three blockchains, and a mnemonic seed phrase tucked away in some drawer you can’t remember.

DeFi was supposed to replace banks—that was the promise. What you actually got is a part-time job with spreadsheets, gas fees that sometimes cost more than the promised returns, and a lingering slight anxiety about your phone.

But what if it was never meant for you in the first place?

Like everyone else, I once believed the potential market for cryptocurrency was the world’s eight billion people. I’ve had to completely abandon this assumption… the market is no longer just about the world’s population.

Because I now clearly understand where this path leads. An agent economy is coming: billions of AI agents performing real economic work, trading with each other at machine speed. And that economy won’t run through the Bank of England—it will run on-chain.

The first thing to understand about the agent economy is that it is not an option.

The world’s largest companies invest hundreds of billions of dollars annually in building AI computing power, and the two superpowers behind them view this race as a matter of life and death. The U.S. cannot slow down because China won’t; China cannot either because the U.S. won’t. Underlying this race is the reason I laid out in my book, *Everything Code*: developed nations are aging and burdened with debt, their workforces are shrinking, and the growth upon which their debt depends can no longer be generated by human labor. We don’t just want these agents—we need them, by the hundreds of millions, then by the billions, to perform real economic work.

So, regardless of how people view it, this wave is coming. The only question is: what will it run on? In finance, the ratio of non-human to human identities has already reached 96 to 1—and those are just clumsy service bots... ancestors of what’s yet to come. In its annual letter this February, Stripe wrote that agents will likely soon handle most internet transactions, and we’ll need channels capable of supporting one million, or even one billion, transactions per second. It’s a fact that our existing financial system cannot support the economy that’s coming.

So what role does DeFi play in all of this? Go back to that wallet you no longer open. For a decade, everyone has judged DeFi as a consumer product and given it a "failure" rating, because we’ve all assumed: you should be the one operating it. Now, take another look at what this actually requires of its operator.

You must monitor positions across multiple protocols 24/7, as markets never close. You must rebalance within seconds when prices move. You must execute multi-step operations simultaneously across lending markets, exchanges, and hedging platforms. Never panic during drawdowns, never become greedy during rallies, never sleep, and never make a typo at 3 a.m.

No human on Earth meets this requirement—and that’s not a personality flaw. We evolved to escape lions, not to manage collateral ratios all night. That’s why I’ve been saying for years: in volatile assets, leverage is your enemy; for 99% of people, a spot position with a long-term time horizon is more than enough.

But when you give the same job description to an agent, it ceases to be a job at all. Continuous monitoring, instant rebalancing, emotionless execution, no need for sleep... these are simply things software is designed to do. In my March issue of the Global Macro Investor newsletter, I wrote plainly: "DeFi is not for humans to do yield farming. It is the treasury infrastructure for agents: lending, exchanging, and hedging at machine speed, with zero human intervention."

It should be noted that ten years ago, no one sat down to design DeFi specifically for machines. Builders thought they were creating for humans. But look at the demands this system places on its operators—it seems almost as if it were designed for machines.

What the agent requires is precisely the mirror image of everything that makes DeFi so frustrating for you. It has no business hours, so a market that never closes is not a burden—it’s foundational. It cannot hold a bank account, because no bank can open an account for a piece of software, nor settle fractions of a cent in 300 milliseconds. What it needs is capital without gatekeepers and without delays.

So what does that reality actually look like? I believe every financial function we run today will be rebuilt on-chain, with agents embedded within them. The clearest entry point to see this all unfold is the most mundane function: the treasury.

Assign an agent to handle payments for a business. To perform this role effectively, it must hold funds; and once it holds funds with a profit motive, it confronts finance’s oldest question: What do I do with my account balance? Consequently, it will inevitably deploy its capital. It will lend out idle cash. When better opportunities arise requiring capital, it will borrow. It will exchange between the tokens it receives and hedge against losses it cannot afford.

Where will all these activities take place? Not in banks, and not anywhere that resembles a bank. It is at this point that the "decentralized" in DeFi ceases to be an ideology and becomes an engineering necessity. These agents will trade at speeds no human intermediary could possibly oversee—no compliance officer can approve one million counterparties per second, and no clearinghouse can spend two days settling a position that exists for only one-fifth of a second. The only structure that can function is smart contracts: rules written in code, executed precisely as programmed. Permissionless. Uptime guaranteed.

There’s another detail: it reveals where value ultimately ends up. Humans will choose one chain and stay with it—out of habit, community, or social circles. Agents, however, will choose nothing. They will route every transaction forever to the fastest and cheapest chain at that exact moment. This constant pressure will drive fees across the entire system toward zero.

Fees continue to fall, and they only seem like bad news if you view a blockchain as a business selling transactions. It’s not—it’s competition for the underlying infrastructure that hosts activity, and the winning blockchain will be used nearly for free while settling more value than anything in financial history.

Now zoom out as far as possible, because this is no longer a crypto story—it’s an economic story.

I believe that within a few years, most economic transactions on Earth will be invisible to humans. It’s not a secret… it’s just happening between machines, at machine speed, and at a scale we cannot participate in.

The problem is that every economic model we have assumes an economy that operates at human speed: value accumulates over quarters and careers, and is destroyed in crashes slow enough to watch on television. Now, capital can be raised at machine speed to pursue opportunities that exist for only milliseconds, operated by participants who trade nonstop. The speed at which value is created and destroyed exceeds any human capacity to comprehend. GDP could surge by 30% in a single month. We don’t even know what that means yet. It has shattered the entire economic formula.

This is what I mean by the "singularity moment"—the point at which the economy begins to change at a speed humans cannot adapt to. Everything in this article is a step toward it, and the tracks being laid right now are where it will occur.

I think, above all, it’s a release. You can now retire from that 2 a.m. job. You were never meant to be the operator of this machine—just as you never needed to manually route your own emails. The wallet you no longer open isn’t evidence of technical failure; it proves that the wrong species was once operating the console.

And the way to participate has never been to outperform robots on yield. Again, this is the same conclusion I’ve reached from every angle: value settles beneath the underlying layer of all these activities. When billions of agent treasuries are lending, hedging, and preserving value around the clock, second by second, the network supporting these activities becomes one of the most valuable assets on Earth—and a small piece of it is available for anyone with a smartphone to buy.

I won’t tell you which chain will win or when the turning point will come. After thirteen years in this market, I’ve shed the arrogance of trying to predict. What I will tell you is a framework: stop judging DeFi based on whether it’s useful to you, and start asking who it was truly built for. Because right now, they’re already operating—and most of them are out of sight.

You don’t need to work at machine speed—you just need the infrastructure required for machines to operate.