Written by: Raoul Pal, Founder of Real Vision

Translated by: Luffy, Foresight News

In about two years, the vast majority of economic activities in the world will no longer involve human participation.

Imagine a current transaction: one person initiates the transaction, another reviews and confirms it, someone records it, and yet another completes the clearing. Now, remove all humans from the equation. Intelligent agents capture trading opportunities, borrow funds to establish positions, then hedge with a second agent and clear with a third agent. The entire process is completed automatically in an instant. Billions of agents repeat this scene day after day, moment by moment.

This is already quietly starting around us. You just can't see it; its operating speed is millions of times faster than human thought.

But why do we need to connect billions of robots to the economic system?

The root cause is that the old economy is facing a labor shortage. There are essentially only two paths to economic growth: increasing the labor force or improving the productivity of existing workers. For decades, Western countries achieved both. Now, neither exists. Decades ago, the birth rate began to decline, and the workforce has been continuously shrinking; the productive capacity of an aging society is far below that of a young society. Growth thus disappears.

When governments cannot achieve economic growth, there is only one way out: to incur debt while printing money to repay it. Over time, currency continues to depreciate year by year. This is why you feel the cash in your hands is constantly shrinking, and the increases in housing prices and stock prices always outpace wages.

Humans cannot break this deadlock. We cannot create workers who have never been born. Governments around the world are well aware of this, which is why they continually accumulate debt.

Thus, we need to create an entirely new workforce, composed of silicon-based labor.

The machine cannot use human banks

For silicon-based labor to operate, it must engage in transactions. Millions of times per second, machines buy and sell from each other and clear transactions. But when considering what medium the machine should use to transact, it hits a wall: they cannot use the banking system. The entire banking system is designed for humans and is completely unsuitable for machines.

First is the account opening stage. Banks need to confirm your identity, execute various verifications, and ensure that you are a real natural person to qualify for an account. Machines cannot meet these conditions. Software programs themselves do not possess bank accounts; the banking system was never designed for this from the beginning.

Next is the currency itself. The smallest unit that banks can process is 1 cent. But intelligent agents need to handle transactions far smaller than this: a single data query, a small portion of computing resources, calling other agent services once, all require payments far below 1 cent. These transactions occur millions of times every second. The traditional financial system cannot even express such small payments, let alone handle billions of them every second.

Even payments that can be processed are extremely slow. Cross-border remittances often take several days, funds do not go directly through; they need to undergo multiple transfers through intermediary banks, each of which will charge fees, consume time, and require manual recording and audits at each step. At the weekend when banks are closed, the entire system comes to a halt. A few remittances per month may be acceptable for humans. But for machines, thousands of transaction settlements need to be completed in the time it takes to read a sentence; this system is completely unusable.

In contrast, on blockchains that machines can use, along compatible public chains, a cross-border payment takes only about 300 milliseconds from start to finish. There are no intermediary banks, no layers of fees, and no need to wait for business days. There is no need for an account; the wallet itself serves as an identity identifier. Pricing accuracy can reach up to 18 decimal places, and payment amounts can be infinitely divided based on business needs. It operates year-round without a break. More importantly, there is programmability: money can come with execution logic; payment is only triggered upon the delivery of work; funds can be automatically distributed to ten agents; refunds can be processed automatically if conditions are not met, all without human approval.

This is the core value. It is not just a faster bank. Banks slowly circulate funds between people, only during business days; while blockchain instantly transfers value between machines, operating uninterrupted all year round, with trading rules directly embedded within payments. The problems that the two aim to solve are completely different, and only the latter can support a machine-driven economy.

This is the true significance of the cryptocurrency industry, unrelated to 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, and all applications will be built upon them.

Why you have no perception of this

None of this is deliberately hidden from you; it simply happens in dimensions that human senses cannot capture.

The speed at which silicon-based chips process information is millions of times that of human neurons. All peculiar phenomena stem from this. Intelligent agents do not browse the web pages you see or use the screens you use. They interact at high speed using their protocols, organizing and dismantling cooperative networks far beyond human perception.

It is like observing a river versus observing individual water molecules within that river. You can see the entire river but cannot see the water molecules. This is the invisible economy, operating in an orderly manner while existing beyond the boundaries of human perception.

Tokenization of everything

There is a specific term to describe the way all this data flows; it sounds very professional and obscure, and this is precisely why people underestimate it: tokenization.

Many people understand tokenization as merely putting stocks on the blockchain: tokenized stocks, tokenized bonds, tokenized real estate. These do indeed exist, but they are just a small, bland corner of a grand future picture.

The true connotation of tokenization is much broader; it essentially is an information data packet. This is why the tokens used by AI models share the same term as blockchain tokens; the underlying logic stems from the same source. Tokenization is not a trivial trick in the crypto world; it is about transforming the real world into a format that machines can read. Once this is understood, vast imaginative space can be seen.

Everything intelligent agents need will be transformed into readable, priceable, and tradable data packets. The dollar becomes a stablecoin; your identity becomes a verifiable credential; permissions become keys; information becomes purchasable goods. Energy, storage, computing power, all transformed into assets that machines can instantaneously exchange.

In the past, data was difficult to trade because there were no buyers on the other side of the market; now there are. Massive scientific archives, climate records, soil sampling data, anonymized hospital cases, farm sensor readings, currently have little value. But when billions of intelligent agents require this data for decision-making, that data will have value. Machines will be willing to pay for it, thus data is tokenized, giving birth to a market for data that did not previously exist.

So, this goes far beyond agents executing a few transactions for humans; most people’s imagination stops there. We are building a global market aimed at the information itself, operating based on tokenized currency, while the speed of other systems simply cannot keep up. Stablecoins, lending, real-world assets (RWA), storage, identity verification—these tracks that people discuss separately are not independent of each other; they are all part of the same machine system, just with different names. The market simply has not seen this yet.

How this will affect our wages

You may have heard a narrative: machines take away jobs, and the economy collapses. This logic is completely reversed. We are not excluding humans from the economy but instead, billions of entirely new economic participants are joining. These participants consume energy, computing power, storage, data, and clearing resources every second, far exceeding the current scale of humans. Demand will not collapse; on the contrary, it will explode.

But the real fracture is not in employment. In every round of technological transformation, jobs will evolve and change. The real disruption is the entire model by which humans obtain compensation. Throughout human history, wages have been essentially the pricing of human time because human labor is the most scarce resource in the economy. When human labor is no longer scarce, wages will no longer be a reliable mechanism for distributing social output. Pensions, mortgages, every life plan you’ve ever made, has been built upon this distribution system. And now, this system is about to face silicon-based labor that can operate with just electric costs.

What position will humans occupy

I have discussed the situation of humans in my article "Economic Singularity", so here’s a brief summary. When intelligence becomes cheap and ubiquitous, scarce resources instead become human beings themselves: trust between individuals, aesthetic taste, the real personality of face-to-face communication. Machines can replicate most things but cannot replicate a unique human individual that another person is willing to trust.

But this does not change the direction of wealth; wealth will flow towards machine owners and the underlying infrastructure that supports machine operations. And for the first time in history, anyone can hold a part of this infrastructure. Whether you are in London or in a village where ten people share a phone, you can hold a proportional share.

So, go and own these underlying infrastructures. You do not need to compete with machines on transaction speed, nor track fleeting invisible transactions one after another. Just hold a part of this system and wait for the compound growth of value.