Written by: Raoul Pal, Founder of Real Vision
Translated by: Luffy, Foresight News
In about two years, the vast majority of the world's economic activity will no longer involve human participation.
Consider a current transaction: one person initiates the transaction, another reviews and confirms it, someone records it, and another settles it. Now, remove all humans from the picture. Intelligent agents spot trading opportunities, borrow funds to establish positions, hedge with a second agent, and settle with a third. The entire process is completed automatically in an instant. Billions of agents repeat this scenario day after day, every moment.
This is already quietly starting all around us. You just can't see it; it operates millions of times faster than human thought.
But why are we connecting billions of robots to the economic system in the first place?
The root cause lies in the old economy facing a labor force depletion. Economic growth essentially has only two paths: increase the labor force or improve the output efficiency of existing workers. For the past few decades, Western countries have had both. Now, both are gone. Population birth rates began declining decades ago, and the labor force size continues to shrink; an aging society's production capacity is far lower than that of a young society. Growth disappears.
When governments cannot achieve economic growth, they are left with only one way out: borrow money and simultaneously print money to repay the debt. In the long run, money continues to depreciate every year. That's why you feel the cash in your hand constantly shrinking, and why house prices and stock prices always outpace wage increases.
Humans have no way to solve this dilemma. We cannot magically create workers who were never born. Governments around the world know this, which is why they keep borrowing.
Therefore, we must create a new labor force, one built on silicon.
Machines Cannot Use Human Banks
For a silicon-based labor force to function, it must conduct transactions. Millions of times per second, machines buy from and sell to each other, settling trades. But when considering what medium machines should use to complete transactions, they hit 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 process. Banks need to verify your identity, perform various checks, confirm you are a real natural person before you are eligible to hold an account. Machines cannot meet these conditions. Software programs themselves do not have bank accounts; the banking system was not designed for this from the outset.
Then look at the currency itself. The smallest unit a bank can process is 1 cent. But intelligent agents need to handle transactions far smaller than this: a single data query, a small amount of computing resources, calling another agent's service—all require payment of much less than 1 cent, and such transactions occur millions of times per second. The traditional financial system cannot even represent such small payments, let alone process billions of them per second.
Even for payments it can handle, the speed is extremely slow. Cross-border remittances often take days; funds do not move directly but pass through layers of correspondent banks, each layer charging fees, consuming time, and requiring manual recording and review. On weekends when banks are closed, the entire system halts. Humans can accept a few remittances per month. But for machines that need to complete thousands of transaction settlements in the time it takes you to read one sentence, this system is completely unusable.
In contrast, consider blockchains that machines can use. On a compatible public chain, a cross-border payment from start to finish takes about 300 milliseconds. No correspondent banks, no layered fees, no waiting for business days. No account opening needed; the wallet itself is the identity. Precision can go up to 18 decimal places; payment amounts can be divided infinitely according to business needs. Operates 24/7. More crucially, there's programmability: money can carry executable logic; payment triggers only upon work delivery; automatically distributes funds to ten agents; automatic refund if conditions are not met, with no human approval needed throughout.
This is the core value. It's not just a faster bank. Banks slowly move money between people, limited to weekdays; whereas blockchains instantaneously transfer value between machines, non-stop all year, with transaction rules directly embedded in the payment. The two solve completely different problems, and only the latter can support a machine-driven economy.
This is the true reason the crypto industry exists, and it has nothing to do with token prices. The machine economy must have a place to settle, and blockchain is the only viable settlement channel. Value will ultimately settle in these underlying infrastructures; all applications are built on top of them.
Why You Are Unaware of This
None of this is deliberately hidden from you; it just happens in a dimension beyond human perception.
Silicon chips process information millions of times faster than human neurons. All peculiar phenomena stem from this. Intelligent agents don't browse the web pages you see or use the screens you use. They interact at high speeds using their own protocols, forming and disbanding collaborative networks faster than human perception.
It's like the difference between observing a river and observing individual water molecules within it. You can see the entire river, but not the molecules. This is the invisible economy, operating methodically, yet existing beyond the boundaries of human perception.
The Tokenization of Everything
There's a specialized term to describe the flow of all this data. It sounds professional and obscure, which is precisely why people underestimate it. That term is tokenization.
Many people understand tokenization as merely moving stocks onto the blockchain: tokenized stocks, tokenized bonds, tokenized real estate. These indeed exist, but they are just a small, mundane corner of the grand future picture.
The true meaning of tokenization is much broader. It's essentially a packet of information data. This is also why AI models use the term 'token' and blockchain uses 'token'—the underlying logic is the same. Tokenization isn't a crypto gimmick; it's about converting the real world into a format machines can read. Once you understand this, you can see the immense possibilities.
Everything intelligent agents need will become readable, priceable, and tradable data packets. The US dollar becomes a stablecoin; your identity becomes a verifiable credential; permissions become keys; information becomes a purchasable commodity. Energy, storage, computing power—all transformed into assets that can be exchanged instantly between machines.
In the past, data was hard to trade because there was no buyer on the other end of the market. Now there is. Vast scientific archives, climate records, soil sample data, anonymized hospital cases, farm sensor readings—these have little value today. But when billions of intelligent agents need this data to aid decisions, this data gains value. Machines are willing to pay for it, so the data gets tokenized, and a previously non-existent data market is born.
So, this is far more than agents executing a few trades for humans, which is where most people's imagination stops. We are building a global market for information itself, operating on tokenized currency; no other system can keep up with its speed. Stablecoins, lending, Real World Assets (RWA), storage, identity verification—these topics people discuss separately are not independent at all. They are part of the same machine system, just under different names. The market simply hasn't seen this clearly yet.
How This Will Affect Our Salaries
You've probably heard the argument: machines take jobs, and the economy collapses. This logic is completely inverted. We are not removing humans from the economy; rather, billions of new economic participants are joining. These participants consume energy, computing power, storage, data, and settlement resources every second, on a scale far exceeding current human capacity. Demand won't collapse; it will skyrocket.
But the real fracture isn't about employment. With each technological shift, jobs transition from old to new. What truly gets broken is the entire model by which humans receive compensation. Throughout human history, salary has essentially been the pricing of human time because human labor was the scarcest resource in the entire economy. When human effort is no longer scarce, salary is no longer a reliable mechanism for distributing social output. Pensions, mortgages, every life plan you've made—all are built upon this distribution system. And now, this system is about to face a silicon-based labor force that runs on electricity bills alone.
What Position Will Humans Be In?
I've discussed the human position in my article "Economic Singularity"; here's a brief summary. When intelligence becomes cheap and ubiquitous, the scarce resource instead becomes humans themselves: trust between people, aesthetic taste, the genuine personality of face-to-face communication. Machines can replicate most things, but they cannot replicate another human individual that a person is willing to trust.
But this doesn't change the flow of wealth; wealth will flow to machine owners and the underlying infrastructure that supports machine operation. And for the first time in history, anyone can own a part of this infrastructure. Whether you're in London or a village where ten people share one phone, you can hold an equal share.
So, own a piece of this underlying infrastructure. You don't need to compete with machines on transaction speed or track fleeting, invisible trades. Just hold a part of this system and quietly wait for the value to compound.
