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

All of this has quietly begun around us. It is just that you cannot see it, and its speed of operation 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 depletion of labor force. There are only two essential paths for economic growth: increase the labor supply or enhance the productivity of existing workers. For decades, Western countries have achieved both. Now, neither exists. Fertility rates have declined for decades, and the labor force continues to shrink; the productivity capacity of an aging society is far lower than that of a younger society. Growth has thus disappeared.

When governments cannot achieve economic growth, there is only one option left: to borrow money while printing currency to repay the debts. Over time, currency continues to devalue each year. This is why you feel that the cash in your hand keeps shrinking, and the rise in housing prices and stock prices always outpaces wages.

Humans cannot break this deadlock. We cannot create labor force that has never been born out of thin air. Governments around the world are fully aware of this, which is why they keep borrowing.

So we need to create a brand new labor force, one made up of silicon-based entities.

Machines Cannot Use Human Banks

For silicon-based labor to operate, transactions must occur. Millions of times per second, machines buy, sell, and clear transactions between each other. But when we think about what medium machines should use to complete transactions, we hit a high wall: they cannot use the banking system. The entire banking system is designed for humans and is entirely unsuitable for machines.

First is the account opening process. Banks need to verify your identity, perform various checks, and confirm that you are a real person before you are eligible to hold an account. Machines cannot meet these requirements. Software programs themselves do not have bank accounts; the banking system was never designed for that from the start.

Now let's look at the currency itself. The smallest unit that banks can handle is one cent. But intelligent agents need to handle transactions far smaller than this scale: each data query, a small portion of computational resources, calls to other agent services, all require payments far below one cent, and such transactions occur millions of times every second. The traditional financial system cannot even express such small payments, let alone process billions of them every second.

Even payments that can be processed are extremely slow. Cross-border remittances often take days; funds do not reach directly, needing to go through layers of intermediary banks, each layer will deduct fees and consume time, and every step requires manual recording and review. By the time the weekend comes, the entire system halts. While humans can accept a few remittances each month, machines need to complete thousands of transaction clearings in the time it takes you to read a sentence, making this system utterly unfit for them.

In contrast, the blockchain that machines can use, on an adapted public chain, requires only about 300 milliseconds for a cross-border payment to be completed from start to finish. No intermediary banks, no layers of deductions, and no waiting for business days. No account opening required; the wallet itself acts as an identity. The pricing precision can reach 18 decimal places, and payment amounts can be infinitely divided based on business needs. It operates year-round without rest. More crucially, it is programmable: currency can come with execution logic; payment is triggered only upon the delivery of work; funds can be automatically distributed to ten agents; refunds automatically occur if conditions are not met, with no human approval required throughout the process.

This is the core value. It is not just a faster bank. Banks transfer funds slowly between people and are limited to business days; meanwhile, the blockchain transmits value instantaneously between machines, without interruption year-round, with trading rules directly embedded in the payments. The two are addressing entirely different issues, and only the latter can support a machine-driven economy.

This is the true significance of the cryptocurrency industry, and it has nothing to do with token prices. The machine economy must have a place for clearing, and the blockchain is the only viable clearing pathway. Value will ultimately settle in these underlying infrastructures, on which all applications are built.

Why You Are Unaware of This

None of this is deliberately hidden from you; it is merely occurring 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 strange phenomena originate from this. Intelligent agents do not browse the webpages you look at or use the screens you use. They interact at high speed using their protocols, forming and dismantling cooperative networks much faster than human perception.

It is like observing a river and comparing that to observing individual water molecules in the river. You can see the whole river, but you cannot see the water molecules. This is the invisible economy, operating in an orderly manner, yet existing beyond the boundaries of human perception.

Tokenization of All Things

There is a specialized term used to describe all these flows of data, which sounds very technical and obscure; and this is precisely why people underestimate it. The term is tokenization.

Many people’s understanding of tokenization is merely moving stocks onto the blockchain: tokenized stocks, tokenized bonds, tokenized real estate. These do indeed exist, but they are just a small, mundane corner of a grand future picture.

The true connotation of tokenization is much broader; it is fundamentally an information data packet. This is also why the tokens used in AI models share the same term as blockchain tokens, as their underlying logic originates from the same source. Tokenization is not a small trick in the crypto world; it is a method for converting the real world into a format that machines can read. Once you understand this, you can see the vast imaginative space.

Everything that intelligent agents need will become readable, priceable, and tradable data packets. The US dollar becomes a stablecoin; your identity becomes a verifiable certificate; permissions become keys; information becomes purchasable products. Energy, storage, computational power, all transformed into assets that machines can exchange instantly.

In the past, data was difficult to trade because there were no buyers on the other side of the market, but now there are. Vast quantities of scientific archives, climate records, soil sampling data, hospital de-identified cases, and farm sensor readings currently have very little value. But when billions of intelligent agents require this data to aid in their decision-making, this data becomes valuable. Machines are willing to pay for it, and thus the data gets tokenized, giving birth to a data market that did not exist before.

So this is far beyond agents executing a few transactions for humans, which is where most people's imagination stops. We are building a global market focused on information itself, operating based on tokenized currency, and other systems cannot keep up with its speed. Stablecoins, lending, real-world assets RWA, storage, identity verification, these tracks that everyone discusses separately are not independent of each other; they are part of the same machine system, just under different names. The market simply has not yet recognized this.

How This Will Impact Our Wages

You must have heard a certain narrative: machines take away jobs, leading to economic collapse. This logic is completely inverted. We are not removing humans from the economy; rather, billions of brand new economic participants are joining in. These participants consume energy, computational power, storage, data, and clearing resources every second, at a scale far greater than what humans currently represent. Demand will not collapse; instead, it will surge.

But the real fracture is not in employment. With every round of technological revolution, jobs will come and go. What is truly being disrupted is the entire model through which humans receive compensation. Throughout human history, wages have essentially been a pricing of human time because human labor is the scarcest resource in the economy. When human labor is no longer scarce, wages are no longer a reliable mechanism for distributing the output of society. Pensions, mortgages, every life plan you have made, is built upon this distribution system. And now, this system is about to face silicon-based labor that can operate with just the cost of electricity.

What Position Will Humanity Occupy

I have already discussed human circumstances in my article titled Economic Singularity, and I will summarize briefly here. As intelligence becomes cheap and ubiquitous, the scarce resource instead becomes humanity itself: trust between people, aesthetic taste, the real person behind face-to-face communication. Machines can replicate most things, but they cannot replicate a human individual that another person is willing to trust.

But this does not change the flow of wealth; wealth will flow to the owners of machines and the underlying infrastructure supporting them. This is the first time in history that anyone can hold a part of this infrastructure. Whether you are in London or in a rural area where ten people share a phone, you can hold an equivalent share.

So, go own a part of this underlying infrastructure. You do not need to compete with machines on transaction speed, nor need to track fleeting invisible transactions. You only need to hold a part of this system and wait for the value to compound.

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