Written by Raoul Pal, Founder of Real Vision
Compiled by: Luffy, Foresight News
Within about two years, the vast majority of economic activity worldwide will no longer involve human participation.
Imagine a current transaction: one party initiates it, another reviews and confirms it, a third records it, and a fourth completes the settlement. Now remove all humans. Intelligent agents detect trading opportunities, borrow funds to establish positions, hedge with a second agent, and settle with a third—all automatically completed in an instant. Billions of agents repeat this scenario continuously, every moment, every day.
All of this has already begun quietly around us. You just can’t see it—it operates millions of times faster than human thought.
But why exactly should we connect billions of robots to the economic system?
The root cause lies in the old economy facing a labor shortage. Economic growth fundamentally relies on only two paths: increasing the labor force or improving the productivity of existing workers. For decades, Western nations achieved both. Today, neither is possible. Fertility rates declined decades ago, leading to a continuously shrinking labor force; an aging society has far lower productive capacity than a younger one. Growth has simply disappeared.
When governments cannot achieve economic growth, the only option left is to take on debt and print money to repay it. Over time, this causes the currency to continuously lose value each year. That’s why you feel your cash is constantly losing purchasing power, while housing and stock prices rise faster than wages.
Humans cannot solve this dilemma. We cannot create workers who were never born. Governments around the world are well aware of this, which is why they continue to accumulate debt.
Therefore, we must build an entirely new workforce composed of silicon-based entities.
Machines cannot use human banks.
For silicon-based labor to function, trading must occur—millions of times per second, as machines buy from and sell to each other, settling transactions. But when considering what medium machines should use to conduct these trades, they hit a wall: they cannot use the banking system. The entire banking infrastructure was designed for humans and is entirely unsuited for machines.
First is the account opening process. The bank must verify your identity and conduct various checks to confirm that you are a real, living person before you are eligible to hold an account. Machines cannot meet these requirements. Software programs themselves do not have bank accounts, as the banking system was never designed for this purpose.
Now consider the currency itself. Banks can handle a minimum unit of one cent. But intelligent agents need to process transactions far smaller than this: a single data query, a small amount of computing power, or invoking another agent’s service each requires a fee well below one cent, and such transactions occur millions of times per second. The traditional financial system cannot even represent such tiny payments, let alone process billions of them per second.
Even payments that can be processed are extremely slow. Cross-border transfers often take days, with funds not reaching their destination directly but instead passing through multiple correspondent banks, each layer imposing fees and delays, and every step requiring manual recording and review. When banks close for the weekend, the entire system grinds to a halt. A few transfers per month by humans may be acceptable, but for machines—which must settle thousands of transactions in the time it takes you to read this sentence—this system is completely inadequate.
In contrast, machines can leverage blockchains where a cross-border payment takes just about 300 milliseconds from start to finish on a compatible public chain. There are no correspondent banks, no layered fees, and no waiting for business days. No account opening is required—your wallet itself serves as your identity. Pricing precision can reach up to 18 decimal places, and payment amounts can be infinitely subdivided according to business needs. Available 24/7. More importantly, it is programmable: money can carry executable logic; payments are triggered only upon delivery of work; funds can be automatically distributed to ten agents; refunds are issued automatically if conditions are not met—all without any human approval required.
This is the core value. It’s not just a faster bank. Banks slowly move money between people, limited to business days; whereas blockchain instantly transfers value between machines, 24/7, with transaction rules directly embedded in the payment itself. They solve entirely different problems—and only the latter can support a machine-driven economy.
This is the true purpose of the crypto industry, and it has nothing to do with token prices. The machine economy must have a place for settlement, and blockchain is the only viable settlement channel. Value will ultimately settle in these underlying infrastructures, upon which all applications are built.
Why are you completely unaware of this?
Everything will not be deliberately hidden from you; it simply occurs in dimensions beyond human sensory perception.
Silicon-based chips process information at speeds millions of times faster than human neurons. All unusual phenomena stem from this. AI agents do not browse the web pages you view or use the screens you interact with; instead, they communicate at high speed using their own protocols, forming and dissolving collaborative networks far beyond human perception.
It’s like observing a river versus observing individual water molecules within it—you can see the entire river, but not the molecules. This is the invisible economy: operating smoothly, yet existing beyond the bounds of human perception.
Tokenization of Everything
There is a specific term that describes how all this data flows—it sounds professional and obscure, and that’s precisely why people underestimate it: tokenization.
Many people understand tokenization as simply moving stocks onto the blockchain: tokenized stocks, tokenized bonds, tokenized real estate. These do indeed exist, but they represent only a small, mundane corner of a much larger and more ambitious future.
The true essence of tokenization is much broader—it is fundamentally a package of information data. This is why the same term “token” is used for both AI models and blockchain tokens, as they share the same underlying logic. Tokenization is not a niche trick within the crypto space; it is the process of converting the real world into a format machines can read. Once you understand this, you’ll see immense possibilities unfold.
Everything a smart agent needs becomes readable, pricable, and tradable data packets. Dollars become stablecoins; your identity becomes verifiable credentials; permissions become keys; information becomes purchasable goods. Energy, storage, and computing power are all transformed into assets that machines can instantly exchange.
In the past, data was hard to trade because there were no buyers on the other side of the market—now there are. Vast archives of scientific data, climate records, soil samples, anonymized hospital cases, and farm sensor readings currently hold little value. But when billions of intelligent agents require this data to inform their decisions, it gains value. Machines are willing to pay for it, and thus, data is being tokenized—creating a data market that did not exist before.
So, this is far more than agents executing a few trades on behalf of humans—the limit of most people’s imagination. We’re building a global market for information itself, powered by tokenized currency, a system whose speed no other framework can match. Stablecoins, lending, real-world assets (RWA), storage, identity—these are often discussed as separate sectors, but they are not independent; they are parts of the same machine system, merely wearing different names. The market simply hasn’t recognized this yet.
How will this affect our salaries?
You’ve probably heard the argument that machines take away jobs and cause economic collapse—but this logic is completely backwards. We’re not removing humans from the economy; rather, billions of entirely new economic participants are joining. These participants consume energy, computing power, storage, data, and settlement resources every second, at a scale far exceeding current human levels. Demand won’t collapse—it will surge.
But the real fracture is not about employment. With every wave of technological change, jobs have always been replaced and renewed. What has truly been shattered is the entire system by which humans earn income. Throughout human history, wages have essentially been the pricing of human time, because human labor was the most scarce resource in the economy. When human labor is no longer scarce, wages can no longer serve as a reliable mechanism for distributing societal output. Your pensions, your mortgages, every life plan you’ve ever made—all of them are built upon this distribution system. And now, this system is about to confront silicon-based labor that requires nothing but electricity to operate.
Where will humanity stand?
I have already explored the human condition in my article "Economic Singularity"; here is a brief summary. When intelligence becomes cheap and ubiquitous, the scarce resource shifts to humanity itself: trust between people, aesthetic taste, and the authentic presence of face-to-face communication. Machines can replicate almost everything, but they cannot replicate a human individual whom another person is willing to trust.
But this doesn’t change the flow of wealth—it flows to the owners of machines and the underlying infrastructure that powers them. And for the first time in history, anyone can own a piece of that infrastructure. Whether you’re in London or a village where ten people share one phone, you can hold an equal share.
So, own these underlying infrastructure assets. You don’t need to compete with machines for trading speed or track fleeting, intangible transactions. Simply hold a portion of this system and let its value compound over time.