{{ AI Agents + Blockchain + RWA / TradFi + Tokenization = Institutional Adoption > Industrial Adoption (Manufacturing, Logistics, Robotics) > Consumer Adoption }}
Crypto first found its audience among the cypherpunks and degens; adventurous early adopters and experimenters. That was critical to creating the foundations of the technology and testing potential use cases. The nostalgia for that era now, however, is in danger of keeping us blind to the technological and management maturity needed to evolve blockchain and crypto towards its full potential. Acceleration looks like institutional adoption next, followed by industrial adoption and then consumer adoption. That is where the puck is going. Skate there, in that order.
What Is Already True
- Tokenization
- Tokenized Treasuries and cash products are live right now, moving multi-billions on chains like Canton and others. These are no longer experiments.
- Tokenized securities (and “securitized tokens” like crypto ETFs) exist but are still growing as an asset class. I expect that to continue growing rapidly. There is a good market for both, but Tokenized equities will grow first because it serves TradFi, while Crypto ETF products will see larger adoption later with retail investors in the consumer distribution phase.
- The interesting TradFi+RWA case is found inside the existing institutional workflows (not in any virtual world, but in the real world). Bringing real institutional workflows onchain serves institutions, which are the next to adopt.
- Agents
- Agents are shipping, along with agent payment standards like x402.
- Onchain identity is extensible to agents readily on chains like Geode, and is growing on chains like Canton and Ethereum and others.
- MCP access is becoming widespread to give agents access to onchain asset data, and in some cases like Geode, to app tools agents can use natively.
- Agents can already transact onchain now.
- The interesting thing will be what percentage of activity agents will account for onchain and what policies or standards they will follow (if any). Given that more than 50% of all internet/website usage is now agentic, with a prediction of that increasing to 90% in the next year, I would expect similar onchain agent dominance.
- TradFi Moving Onchain
- Institution-first chains with configurable privacy exist now (Canton is a great example of that). Institutional privacy is important for dealer books, margin processes, syndicated loans, and other use cases.
- DTCC, Visa, asset managers, and and market-infrastructure firms are moving significant institutional value on Canton now, with additional pilots underway.
- Institutions change slowly, so the demonstrated adoption and exploration is a significant sign that institutions see the potential for a large upside for themselves. As Yuval Rooz points out, the issue is not cryptography, but getting on bank roadmaps. I agree.
- An additional challenge sits at the boundary of where Regulated TradFi attempts to meet unregulated, anonymous free range defi. Independent intermediary chains are likely the answer there but it needs to be explored.
- Stablecoins
- Stablecoins are well established and becoming the settlement tokens of choice for agents.
- Stablecoins are not yet how most people in the United States and other “first world countries” pay their rent, but ARE becoming the currencies of choice in many “developing countries”. Quotes intended as I question who is really behind who.
- As consumer adoption will be the slowest to arrive, I would focus on stablecoins in the institutional cases first, then industrial cases, and lastly in the consumer case.
Assumptions To Be Tested
- For institutional use, agents need permissioned identities: who authorized this agent? What actions may it take? How is permission revoked? And how is it tracked for regulatory accountability? A public reputation token or NFT is not enough.
- Privacy and audits will need to coexist in the same applications. Confidential compute (for agent actions and personal uses), sub-transaction privacy, and user-selected disclosure rules will have to meet approval of regulatory bodies and of users alike. This will be a sticky topic on both sides. Independent intermediary chains might solve this at the regulated/free boundary.
- Consumer onboarding happens only after consumers TRUST. That trust will be earned by seeing governments, institutions and large companies adopting it all first.
How I Would Underwrite It
I would favor middleware that custodians, transfer agents, institutions, collateral platforms, etc would actually be wiling to install and use. The focus is bringing Institutions/TradFi onchain and then giving agents access to those onchain rails. I would avoid anything “degen” flavored, including any use of memecoins (for agents or not). Combining a bad idea with agents, does not make it a good idea. Agentic memecoins are a perfect example of the kind of wrong combination that does not offer third derivative effects.
| UNDERWRITE | AVOID |
| Privacy-preserving settlement for regulated workflows. Tokenized treasuries or securities. Allowing collateral to move into existing systems. Permissioned identity, policy engines and kill-switches for onchain agents in TradFi systems. Custody and transfer solutions for regulated operations. | Consumer RWAs (not bad, it just comes later). Anything that cannot answer the privacy/audit issue. Any agentic system with no accountable human and no kill switch. Anything that does not transfer real world value (like memecoins). |