Unchained - Why the Crypto Market Cap Could Reach $50 Trillion This Cycle

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

Ran Neuner argues crypto has finally found product-market fit, and a BlackRock report on AI agents and blockchain rails convinced him the thesis may be much bigger than he thought. ======================================================== Thank you to our sponsor! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Visit⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 1inch.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to swap tokenized securities, crypto and more. Simple. Secure. Self-custodial. Whatever asset you’re buying - swap it at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 1inch.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================================================== Quick favor: We're deciding what Unchained does next; new shows, stream times, what's worth paying for.⁠ Our listener survey⁠ takes five minutes, it's anonymous, and I read the write-in answers myself. Everyone who takes it can enter a drawing for a free year of Unchained Premium or Bits + Bips Premium. Open through Sunday, October 18. — Laura ======================================================== The 10-year Treasury yield just hit its highest level since 2007, and Ran Neuner thinks Scott Bessent will answer by bringing more money to the party. Neuner, founder and CEO of Crypto Banter, makes the case to Laura Shin that this is not just another Bitcoin cycle but crypto's first real bull market. His argument rests on two use cases. The first is social trading, which he describes as the world's biggest social network and casino "having a baby," with Hyperliquid and Pump.fun earning millions of dollars a day. The second is AI agents: he cites a study projecting one billion agents by 2029 and a new BlackRock report arguing machine-to-machine payments favor blockchain rails over ACH and card networks. They also cover why he calls RWAs magazines moved online, whether AI IPOs will drain crypto liquidity, and why he thinks Zcash may be more useful than Bitcoin. If he's right, his own 7x altcoin projection may prove conservative. Host: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Laura Shin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Host / Unchained Guest: Ran Neuner - Founder and CEO of Crypto Banter Timestamps 🏦 01:47 Why Ran thinks Bessent is engineering 'the ultimate short squeeze' 📊 04:45 Why an ETH/BTC breakout signals crypto's first real product-market fit 🎰 09:35 Social trading: a social network and a casino 'having a baby' 💧 14:03 1inch Aqua: Back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance at http://unchainedcrypto.com/go/1inch-yt 🤖 15:06 How a billion AI agents could send altcoins far past Bitcoin ⏱️ 29:14 Why Ran thinks AI agents will borrow against compute and tell time in blocks 🌐 37:01 Will AI IPOs drain crypto liquidity? Ran on why AI isn't the dot-com bubble 🛡️ 40:05 Privacy vs. social trading, and why Ran calls Zcash 'more useful than Bitcoin' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think when we talk about AI agents, we're not going to talk about what date and what time. We're just going to say it's block 16742. That's good. And when is the loan repayable? The loan is repayable in block 9,000, 9 billion, 9 trillion, whatever the block is. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin.

Thanks for joining this live stream, and we will first take a quick word from the sponsors to make the show possible. This episode is brought to you by One Inch Aqua, the shared liquidity, layer from 1 inch, back multiple liquidity positions with one wallet balance, and keep your tokens in your wallet until a swap fills. See how it works at 1inch.com slash aqua. Before we get started, I want to ask you for something. We're making a bunch of decisions right now about unchained. What we make next, when we go live, what we should be doing more of, and I'd rather hear from you before we make them than after. So we put together a survey. It takes just a few minutes. It's anonymous. And there's a box where you can tell me what we could

be doing better. I read all the responses. The link is in the show notes, or you can snap the QR code on screen, or go to unchained crypto.com slash survey. Thanks. Today's guest is Ron Nuh Nour, founder of Crypto Banter. Welcome, Ron. Laura, so good to see you. I was just saying, we were just talking in the back here and saying that you're one of the few people that started in crypto media around the same time that I started around 2016, 2017. In fact, I think you started before me. Yes, 2015. In the blockchain, not Bitcoin era.

Yeah, for those of you who don't know, Laura was actually right, you're writing for Forbes, right, in 2015? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So you and I have seen it all. And this morning, we're in an interesting place. The tenure is at its highest since 2007.

And you tweeted that you think this will bring fresh. liquidity into the system. So explain what it is that you think is about to happen and where you think this nascent crypto bull market is headed. So, I mean, I think you said it correctly that we're in a crypto bull market. I mean, I just want to show you one or two charts on the screen. Maybe it'll make it a little bit easier to digest. But we're in a crypto bull market. We have the peaks and then we have the one year bear markets. This bear market was about 11 months. And if you kind of like dig into what caused this increase in the bull market. It was when Scott Besant took on the bond market and basically said he's going to double

the treasury buybacks, right? And up until now, he's basically bought fists into a big fight because in order to make a dent in the long-term treasury yields, he needs to do much more than the $4 billion or the $6 billion worth of buybacks. And so yesterday we got two data points, which basically scared the bond market a little bit. The first data point that we got yesterday was the PMI numbers, which were kind of heated, and so the markets worried about inflation again. And the second data point that we got was that the US was struggling to sell its five-year treasury yields,

right? And so there's no demand for US treasuries. Now, what does the country do when there's no demand for its own treasuries? Well, ultimately, what they do is they'll end up buying their treasuries or they land up buying their debt back themselves. And Scott Bessent has basically come out to the market and basically said, look, we're going to buy our own debt. You know, we're going to double it, we're going to triple it. And ultimately, he's got an account called the Treasury General account. There's a trillion dollars in that account, which he could call on to buy back their own debt. And there are many other means that they can deploy.

The one thing you've got to remember, though, is that Scott Besant is a market genius, and specifically a currency is in bond market genius. He's done this for many years. He did this under George Soros back in the day. So he knows exactly what he's doing. And I think he's probably engineering the ultimate short squeeze. I think he's waiting for the bond vigilantes to pile into the long-dated bonds or to short-dated bonds. And then I think what he's going to do is I think he's going to create the ultimate short-squeeze by putting money into the economy.

And either way, I mean, I know the markets are starting to get a little bit gypsy. But the reason why markets are going up is because the markets are counting on Scott Bessent actually come to save the long-dated treasury yields. And the only tool that he has at his disposal is actually bringing more money to the party. So for me, that's really what started this Bitcoin bull market. That's, you know, when Scott Besson came out and said, I'm taking on the long end of the curve, that started this Bitcoin bull market. So that's the Bitcoin bull market thesis. I also think, as I said to you earlier, that we're going to crypto's first bull market.

So, I mean, everyone's going to go, not really, how can you say it's crypto's first bull market? I really think that we're going into crypto's first bull market, not Bitcoin's first bull market. We can probably break that down a bit later. Yeah, well, go ahead. I mean, that, so I don't know what you mean by that. So go ahead and say. So let me break it down for you. And I think, again, let's maybe just look at one or two charts, just because I just think

it paints a real picture here. So you and I have been around for a long time. We've seen multiple Bitcoin bull markets. And I think if we go back to the bull markets, I think. The last bull market for Bitcoin was the first bull market where Bitcoin was actually accepted, right? Like you could say that, you know, the first bull markets were very small on the Bitcoin radar. This was 2017. This was 2021. This was the last bull market. I think for those of us who have been around for a long time, Bitcoin only found real product market fit as a store of value and a hedge against a debasement trade, probably in the last bull market.

So that's Bitcoin. I want to show you another chart. This is the chart of ETH versus Bitcoin. And I'm just using this chart because ETH is probably the biggest altcoin, and it represents all altcoins against Bitcoin. And I think for those of us who've been here for the last nine, ten years, this is the chart. It's been a downward sloping chart. And if I were to break that down in a story, then I'd say ETH launched and had the promise of big things to come and it really outperformed Bitcoin for a very short period of time.

And then we kind of realize that smart contracts don't really work. They're too slow. They're too expensive. there's no real use case because the use case of ICOs basically died. And then we tried it again in 2021, DFI summer. We tried to create this market called DFI. And we did this thing called yield farming. And we used to emit tokens to get people to invest their money.

And that also collapsed because ETH was too slow and too expensive and practically unusable. And so we were rejected again. Ultimately, ETH has been a bit of a dog against Bitcoin for quite a long time. However, if you draw a trend line here, what you realize is that for the first time in nine years, we've actually broken out here. Now, that's a chart, but let's break down what that story actually means. It means that for nine years, well, initially the only use case for this crypto technology that we had was Bitcoin. And for nine years, no other use case managed to create an upward trend against the use case that we created for Bitcoin. until tokenization.

So I think for the first time, crypto's found product market fit. What is the product market fit? Well, I think there's a couple of product market fits. The first one is tokenization. And I think this cycle, tokenization is happening. It's happening on ETH, on ETH, side chains, on Solano. We are using ETH as a proxy for all altcoins over here.

And so I think for the first time, we've got a real use case in crypto. What is the real use case in crypto? Well, I actually think there's two use cases in crypto. Before I take you there, I want to show you one other chart. This is the chart of others. Others is the smaller old coins against Bitcoin. Pretty much paints the same story, right? So 2017, the old coin market runs against Bitcoin.

It then gets rejected because all the altcoins are shitcoins. 2021, the same thing happens. We got up here in the excitement and then it all gets rejected. But ultimately, what you can see is it isn't upward sloping trend, means that the technology against Bitcoin is actually starting to improve. I think that in this cycle, this chart does something like this. I'll show it to you. So I think that this cycle looks something like this for altcoins.

I mean, I'm not going to draw it exactly, but that's what it looks like, right? Now, the question is, what could take the old coin market cap to give you a 7x against Bitcoin? So what could make altcoins outperform Bitcoin by seven times, which is by the way, what I think is going to happen in the cycle. Now, you may say that's crazy, but if you look at the last cycle, so that's 2017, the old coins outperform Bitcoin by 19 times. If you look at 2021, and I'll draw the line of first year, the old coins outperform Bitcoin by six times. So it's not impossible that if we draw this line over here, that we outperform Bitcoin by five or six times or seven times. So what could cause the market to do that? And I think that there's two things that Bitcoin found its product market fit.

And I think that crypto found its own product market fit. Bitcoin's product market fit pretty simple. Current CD basement trade, you want to hold scarce assets, hold Bitcoin. That's been the thesis for the last couple of cycles. For crypto, there are two use cases. The first use case is what I call social trading. So what is social trading? It is, imagine the world's biggest social network and the world's biggest casino having a baby.

So just like imagine the world's biggest social network and the world's biggest casino having a baby. That's FOMO, that's Pump Fun. And yes, right now they are mean coins and stuff like that. But ultimately, what these platforms have created is the ultimate investment dopamine machine. Now, what I mean by that? Well, if we think about how these platforms actually work, why is Instagram and why is Twitter so successful? Because they managed to release dopamine in your brain. How do they do that? Well, dopamine is the reward, self-validation, motivation drug.

So if you do work and you get validated, it releases this drug in your brain called dopamine, which says, you're a genius. So if you write a nice tweet, you post a tweet, you get a lot of likes. You feel like, yeah, man, I'm a genius. Why? Because you're getting self-validation and that's the drag of dopamine. That's how these social networks work. They're dopamine machines, right? They've been criticized for being dopamine machines. You do work, post your picture on Instagram or you post a tweet on Twitter, and the dopamine just keeps running in your brain because you get the self-validation of the likes. Now, how much more so when the validation is not only likes, but actual money? And that's what's crypto's,

created. It's created transparent trading machines where everyone can see PNLs and people are starting to share it. So if you look at apps like FOMO pump fun, we've created a master use case in crypto, which is dopamine-driven social trading. And what I think is actually going to happen, if you take that and you combine that with the tokenization of everything, all of a sudden you've got this industry, which is a combination of a casino and a social, network, but instead of casino, let's call it an investment house, an investment house with a social network. Now, that's a monster business.

That's more powerful than any social network. And in fact, I kind of think that Elon Musk and Twitter have seen this because they're starting to incorporate trading into your Twitter, people that are testing the Twitter buttons. And so the ultimate social network doesn't only reward you with likes, but actually rewards you with increasing net worth. And to me, that's the first use case in crypto. And it's the first time that we've had it. And the reason why we've had is because we're tokenizing everything, everything legally.

And now all P&Ls basically get brought onto chain. And everything becomes a bit more transparent. And so people are going to trade more because it becomes more social, et cetera, et cetera. With people trading more, I mean, I think you understand how that's more transactions. More transactions means more work on blockchains, et cetera, et cetera. So why did I say it's crypto's first. real bull market because it's the first bull market where crypto applications are actually making money. Who's making money? Well, social trading apps. Who are the social trading apps? Hyperliquids making

three, four, five million dollars a day sometimes. Pumpfine is making one, two, three, four, five million dollars a day. That's real numbers. Even in real world finance, businesses that are making 100, 200, 300, 300, 400 million, 500 million dollars a year. That's big business, right? FOMO making very similar numbers, a million dollars a day, et cetera. So for the first time, we have a bull market in crypto because there are applications that are actually being used and actually making money. Uniswap, hyperliquid, aerodrome, near intense, all actually making money. And so we're seeing crypto's first real bull market. Another one, Venice. I mean, Venice is making a ton of cash and burning a ton of tokens. So we're really seeing a bull market in crypto.

And I say a bull market, not just prices going up, but actually a bull market for usage of crypto products. So that's the first reason why I think crypto is going to have its, it's a moment. But to be honest, Ron, can you hold that thought? Hold that thought. We're going to, we're going to come back to here with the second reason. But first, we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors to make this show possible. All good. $540 million. That's how much concentrated liquidity sat idle in a given week in the first half of this year. About 30% of the Defi TVL, if you're wondering. That's according to Dune Research commissioned by 1-inch.

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See how it works at 1-inch. dot com slash aqua remember that providing liquidity carries risk and fees aren't guaranteed one more thing we've got a listener survey open it takes just a few minutes it's anonymous and it changes what we make next use the QR code on screen or go to unchained crypto dot com slash survey the link is in the show notes back to my conversation with ron so ron you were going to give us your second reason for why we're in a his first real bull market. Yes, the first reason is, I think, social trading. And to be honest, again, I'm going to take you back to the chart,

just because to me, the charts paint nice pictures if we can talk around. But I guess that that doesn't take you from there all the way to there. And just, I want to give you an idea of how big this number is, right? If you assume, if you go back to Bitcoin and you say, well, in the first bull market, Bitcoin did 20-22x, and the second market did an 18x. In the third market did a 7-X. let's just assume that in this bull market Bitcoin does a 3x or a 4x just for fun right let's say a 4x okay a 4x from the bottom 250,000 dollar Bitcoin so if Bitcoin does a 4x from where we are today

and altcoins do a 5x what Bitcoin does you're talking about a 20x in market cap so we're talking about a $50 trillion market cap okay so the social trading thing so it doesn't give you a $30 trillion market cap. Impossible. So then the question is, what does? And Laura, I don't know about you, but making content during the last couple of months has been like one of the hardest things I've ever done in my entire life. I don't know if you felt the same way, but the market wasn't moving.

We had to make content. I made content every single day. It broke me because from February to August, Bitcoin was in a range of 60 to 60 to $70,000. And I had to try and make it exciting every single day, but ultimately it was really, really, really boring. And I got to a point about here, about July, where I was done. When I said I was done, I was never going to give up because Tapena for so long, but I just hated this place. And at that point, I tweeted something. And I hope that I've got the tweet. I said, the tweet says, here's what you're not seeing. All asset markets will be 24,

7365. All markets will be settled on chain immediately. Humans won't be trading them. Instead, it'll be 100 billion agents trading at a frequency that we can't even imagine. And all those fees will be captured by crypto protocols. And that was in the pits of the bear market. And I think that writing that tweet kind of got me so excited about crypto again. Because what I realized was that we're living in an AI revolution. And up until now, if you look at this chart, This is a chart of the AI NASDAQ, in other words, stocks in the NASDAQ that are AI against crypto, which went down from 1010. So AI just continued to go up and crypto went down.

Up until now, the market has been funding infrastructure to power AI. What is that infrastructure? Well, it is data centers. It is energy. It is trips. It is buildouts. It is frontier labs to write. models, right? That's what the market has been funding, right? And that drove the NASDAQ as high as the

NASDAQ as a proxy for, I'm using the NASDAQ as a proxy for AI development, but it's the NASDAQ, it's the cost B, it's, it's, it's any market that is AI ready. So all that while crypto was bleeding was the infrastructure so that we could have AI. Okay, now question, when we have AI, what's AI going to do? AI is going to be a bunch of agents. And those agents are going to be transacting. Simple as that. So all this infrastructure that has been built is so that we could all have agents and that the agents could be transacting.

So you ask yourself, well, okay, how many agents? So I've read a couple of studies. This is one. This one says there's going to be one billion agents by 2029. Okay, this is one study. There's many others. I would say there's probably going to be much more than that. But a billion agents by 2029.

The entire human workforce today is 3.3 billion people. They're talking about adding a billion agents by 2029. The only difference between the agents and the humans is that the average human doesn't even do one internet transaction a day. And these agents are going to be executing 217 billion transactions a day. Okay? And that's in 2029. Now, yesterday BlackRock came out of the report.

And in the BlackRock report, this is not a, a dummy report, it was written by BlackRock. And in that report, they say two things. They say the rise of a genetic AI and machine-to-machine payments will likely increase demand for blockchains and other programmable payment infrastructure, stable coins, native crypto assets, etc. Existing rails such as ACH card networks, blah, blah, blah,

make them less suited to always on very low-value transactions requiring programic execution. So what did BlackRock basically say? they said there's going to be a billion agents in 2027. They said the billion agents are going to be doing 217 billion transactions a day. And those transactions are going to be settled on blockchain rails because traditional existing rails like ACH just aren't relevant for those kind of transactions. And then you say, okay, what's going to capture that value?

Layer 1s, hedging mechanisms, dexas, because they're going to be trading in and out of different tokens. And then you start thinking to yourself, hold on a second. maybe this chart is actually conservative. Maybe the altcoins actually outperformed Bitcoin by 50x. Why? Because whenever you use the protocol, ask yourself a question. Could an AI and will an AI actually use this protocol?

Solana. Yeah. Alina could, AI could use Solana. Hyperliquid. Yeah. AI could use hyperliquid. Near intense. Yeah.

AI could use near intense. And then you start thinking to yourself, hold on a second. If these numbers are true, and I mean, they should be true because I actually think that we'll have much more than a billion agents in 2029. And you say that maybe this number is wrong. Maybe it won't be 217 billion transactions today. Maybe it's only 20 billion transactions a day.

Let's just say. And let's just say that there really isn't another viable payment mechanism other than blockchain. There are, but it comes with bank accounts and prepaid cards and giving each agent a prepaid debit card so that they can do micro transactions with one another. doesn't really feel like the way the future is going to work. And then you kind of say to yourself, hold on. You know, as a crypto guy, my thesis was always that this is going to happen. And that's why I tweeted that tweet at the end of July.

But since then, I've been trying to find someone to disprove my thesis. I went to conferences. I asked bankers, like, what's going to happen? How is this all going to happen? And everyone gave me, like, everyone gave me different versions of how AI agents will transact. and none of them are better than blockchain. And then yesterday I see the report from BlackRock and I'm like, holy moly, maybe the thesis is actually right. And if the thesis is actually right, then what we're talking about is we're actually talking about the difference between, you know, not having electricity and having social media.

You know, like, that's how big the revolution is. like that's how crazy the revolution is. And that's, when I saw that I was like, like, I don't think we can comprehend how big this bull market is actually going to be. And it's a real bull market. And the reason why I know it's a real bull market is because I already have like 10 AI agents working for me. I've got a Grockbot.

And I've got multiple GropBots doing multiple things for me. And sometimes I just wish that they could transact on my behalf. I mean, right now, to be honest, my AI agents are not really transacting on my behalf, even though one or two of them do have trading MCPs. But they're not really trading. They're not really transacting. But suffice to say by 2029, which is two and a half years away, or two years away, I think that agents will be transacting.

And then ask yourself, what are they going to be using? And then ask yourself if you're actually invested in those protocols. And if you're not, then, you know, as Raoul says, he says the total addressable market becomes almost infinite. because there's just more and more agents just springing up. Yeah, yeah. This, I love this thesis. It makes a lot of sense to me.

In a way, well, I personally think it's super obvious. But the one thing that I did want to ask you about was at the beginning of your thesis, I thought you were going to go in a totally different direction because you were talking about RWA's and you had that chart about ETH. So I'm curious to hear. So basically, like, where I thought you were going is I thought you were going to say that this is the first time that blockchains are being used for the back end of finance. And the, you know, financial markets are so much bigger than the crypto markets. And so, you know, like, I'm sure you've heard that thesis before.

And then you ended up with like this whole other area, which is that, you know, crypto is creating a new beast. that is, it's creating its own market, you know, crypto and social. And so, so that took a turn that I wasn't expecting. So I'm just curious to hear like, you know, do you also think that RWA is, and the dopamine machine are going to be part of this first real bull market? Or do you feel like the social aspect is going to dwarf this kind of thing that we're seeing with RWA's? So RWAs are the equivalent of, in the old days, taking magazines and putting magazines on the internet. So if it's,

but like all they did was they took. This was my job, my first job in journalism. Yes. I mean, if you think about what RWA's are, what we're saying is let's take the existing financial system and it's just migrated onto the,

the better system. And, you know, and then we created things like being able to share something. And then we created things like being able to make things interactive. And then we, that eventually transformed into social media. Right.

So I think the first. first step is taking the magazines and putting them onto the internet. And that's what I think RWA's are. We call them real world assets. It's just the migration of traditional assets onto blockchain rails. And that's step one. And then, you know, once we do that, and the old financial system is working on new rails, just like in the old days when Forbes went from paper to becoming online and slowly, slowly the Forbes, you know, the readership of the paper just died down and then, you know, everything evolved. I think the same thing is going to happen with real world assets. So if you think about Robin Hood, Robin Hood has been trying to do social trading for a long

time. E Toro has been trying to do social trading for a long time. But they've been limited. Like, they've been limited by NASDAQ hours for one. They've been limited by NASDAQC rules for two. You know, it's just not a great experience for social trading, you know. Now you can tokenize any stock that you want. It trades 24-7-365. It just makes much more for social trading. So, and when I say social trading, social trading is merely the act of being able to share your trades and others being able to see all trades and decide whether they want to follow or not. So I think that that's pretty obvious. I think in the new age, social trading is going to be the only way that we trade. I think most trades are going to be transparent. People are going to see what's going on. You're going to be allowed

to follow or not follow, et cetera, et cetera. and ultimately I think that's what's going to happen. I actually believe. Okay. Okay, finish and then I have a question. I believe that crypto exchanges are going to be replaced by social trading apps. So I think like a Binance will eventually be replaced by social trading app, like a FOMO. And I'm not saying it's going to be FOMO replacing Binance.

I'm saying there's going to be a version of FOMO that's going to be so powerful that is so much fun because it combines a social network with a trading experience. and when that happens, it's going to be just much more fun than trading on an exchange. Already, FOMO is more fun than trading on an exchange. Okay, but I have a question because obviously I'm sure you're seeing this whole privacy meta that's taking off and just all these privacy coins are pumping. So how does the social trading square with the privacy trend? So I think they're two different use cases.

I think you have a right to privacy specifically when it comes to your own money, et cetera, et cetera. I think when we actually, in the old days, when we signed up for Bitcoin, we thought that we were getting privacy. What we didn't realize is that we thought because it was an address and we didn't KYC back in the day, we thought that was privacy. And we very fast realized that ultimately the address is all going to be tracked. And so I think that the right to privacy is going to be cool. But I have the right to privacy in my personal affairs too, but yet I choose to post most of it on social media anyway. I have the right to privacy, but I have the right to privacy, And so do you, but we both have Instagram account.

So I'm assuming you have an Instagram account. I have an Instagram account. I share probably a lot too much on my Instagram account. And you know why you do that? I don't share anything. You know why most people do that? Because they need the social validation, right? Because it's actually a massive part of how the brain functions.

The brain works on dopamine. It's one of the four key components that your body needs for happiness. You need dopamine, oxytocin, seratocin, and endorphins, right? So you need to get your daily fix. Now, dopamine is the most powerful of all of them, because it's the most addictive of all of them. And that's why people do what they do. So I think there's a massive market for real world assets are going to be amazing.

Real world assets trading socially are going to be even more amazing. Real world assets and digital assets, all trading virtually are going to be crazy. Now, let me give you two more use cases, which I don't think we're, so AI agents creating their own businesses, starting their own businesses, creating their own business, using their own compute power. I mean, I don't know if you ever thought about that, but like, what is the only asset that an AI agent has? It's compute power. And so the AI agent may say, look, if I default on my loan, then you can have my compute. I'm just giving you an example of things that could happen without any human intervention. I'll give you another example of things that we haven't yet factored very well. What's the time where you are right now? 11 a.m. Okay, where I am, it's 5 p.m. What date? Are you also 24th of September?

You are, right? But very soon, I'm going to be on the 25th, and you're going to be on the 24th, right? Yep. Okay, that's how humans account for time. AI agents are going to need a different way to account for time. And they don't need it to repeat. They don't need a morning, 8 o'clock every morning.

They don't need to be reminded to wake up every morning when the sun rises, right? I actually believe that AI agents are going to use blockchain blocks as settlement as time. I think when we talk about AI agents, we're not going to talk about what date and what time. We're just going to say it's block 16742. That's good. And when is the loan repayable? The loan is repayable in block 9,000, 9 billion, 9 trillion, whatever the block is. Yeah, I mean, this is how crypto devs figure out like, you know, Ethereum devs.

That's how they figure out when they'll do upgrades. Yeah, I also think to be honest, there's going to be, I don't know who it is, but there's going to be a blockchain that actually becomes the time blockchain. And why I say that is because if you think about finance and you think about a transaction that involves Bitcoin collateral, trading on the Solana network, but settling on Suey somehow or Ethereum or whatever, every one of those has got a different block time. And so I think, I think, I don't know how it's going to work. It's too far ahead for me. But I think what's going to happen is we're going to find a blockchain that basically says I'm the time blockchain. And all I do is I sell time to all the other blockchains.

And again, it's an idea. I don't think anyone, I haven't seen anyone actually really exploring it. But I think, you know, instinctively, I just think that AI agents aren't going to use secular clocks. I think they're going to use blockchain. So I kind of think it needs to be a chain that has like a, like the smallest block time. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, again, like, these are all ideas, but I think the one thing I don't know for sure is that we found product market fit. Our applications are actually making money. They're being used and they're actually making money and they're fun. It's the first time this cycle, it's the first time that I've had fun on crypto rails. When I use Venice and I get the answers from my, from my LLM model, and I know I'm not giving my data to the big boys and I've got my privacy. For me, that's fun. When I trade on hyperliquid and I'm in that dopamine casino of trading perpetuals on real world assets over the weekend, it's fun and it works. And it's the first time that I felt this way about crypto.

Yes, in the previous cycles, we could trade things on uniswap, but that wasn't fun. Swapping ETH for compound or something like that or for Avey on the Uniswap network was not fun. It was just a... Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm sure my audience knows, like, I'm not a traitor. And obviously, I've just been covering this as a journalist. But like, whenever I tried to use crypto in the past, like, it just, it was really challenging for me, you know? And yeah, like nowadays, it's, it's just night and day. So actually, I wanted to go back to something earlier, earlier on that you were taught. So I just kind of want to tie it back to the beginning.

Like, essentially, one of the main theories that's been powering interest in crypto for so long has been this debasement hedge thesis. But it almost feels like you're saying that you feel like, you feel like real world adoption is going to like just outperform the debasement hedge thesis. Is that what you're saying? The debasement hedge thesis validates our technology. the technology is that you can transfer, that you can create a scarce asset and you can transfer it at the speed of data across networks. That was Bitcoin.

That was the debasement. We've got that asset and that asset is Bitcoin. Okay, but there's also an entirely new world of assets that can happen when you make that programmable or when you make versions of that programmable, right? So like smart, when you combine the smart contracts. And to be honest, they haven't been interesting for a long time because the smart contracts didn't work

and we couldn't find a product market fit. Now we found two product market fits in the same cycle for those smart contracts. The first one is, like I say, tokenize everything and make it social. And the second one is let the AI agents without this kind of technology, the AI agents are pretty screwed

because they can't transact, they can transact each other, but it's just slow and monotonous. And the contracts, how are you going to define the contracts between two agents that don't know each other. You need a smart contract. If you pay me 0.01 East or 0.001.

and I make an API call and you return the API call, then the funds will settle immediately. Now, I mean, I suppose you could give every agent a prepaid PayPal debit card or something like that, except when a Chinese agent meets a, I don't know, Indian agent or U.S. agents, I think it becomes a little bit messy because they start going, sorry, I don't accept your money and you don't accept my money, or they could just accept blockchain money, go to Uniswap and swap whatever money they just received for whatever money

their owner wants them to bank, and that takes less than a split second. And so it becomes so exciting because I don't think the rest of the world sees this, or at least I didn't until BlackRock actually published a report yesterday and kind of said, well, you know, the old rails are dead and the new rails are crypto rails and agents are going to use crypto rails. And then you realize, I don't know, for me, such a ha-ha moment because I've been here for so many years and I always sold myself the dream of Bitcoin and hearts a scarce asset and there were periods where gold outperformed and Bitcoin didn't

perform and the NASDAQ outperformed and Bitcoin didn't perform and it was so tempting to lose faith in the thesis and then you eventually after being here for I don't know 12 years 13 years and fighting for A, acceptance, but B, also like just fighting rug pools and ideas and VC scams. And sometimes not VC scams, but sometimes VC projects had best intentions but couldn't find product market fit. And then just finally finding the product market fit and realizing that the product market fit that we found is the biggest product market fit so far of all time in the world. Like, you'd say that AI is the culmination of everything that the world's gone through for. it's creating intelligence out of nothing, out of electricity. It's the biggest prize in the world.

And to think that the rails for all the transactions are probably going to be on this blockchain technology that we've been fighting for ever since we were like rats crawling around conferences in dark places because we weren't really supposed to be talking about it. You know what I mean? It's just so cool to finally get vindicated like that. Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so I do have one last question because you keep talking about AI. And obviously, I do agree with you that AI is what supercharges the crypto thesis. But, you know, just in the short term, obviously we have these big AI IPOs that are coming up. So just like from a markets perspective, how do you think those AI IPOs will affect interest in crypto and the crypto markets generally? So I think that there's two theories about it. One of them is they're going to suck out all the liquidity from the markets and that the rest of the markets are going to crash. I don't really think that's going to happen. I think the AI IPOs are going to be pretty successful.

Let's just say that one of the Frontier Labs isn't that successful. I don't know whether it's open AI or anthropic, even though, I mean, seems that are going to be pretty good. But let's just say they're not. There's so much demand for AI. Now, I want to say that I was around for the dot-com bubble. And I would say that the dot-com bubble wasn't really an internet bull run because there was no real demand for internet. It hardly even worked. It was a bull run like the 2017 crypto bull market where it was on the promise of what this technology may one day achieve.

The difference between that and AI is that AI is actually achieving today. Right. So in 2001, I think I could live without most of these applications. I could live without Pest.com in 2001. on. Like, I could live without it because it wasn't working. It never delivered one pet or one pet fruit to my house ever. It didn't work. I don't know if I could go back to time of living without AI. Like, everything I do, all my research is done on AI, all my accounts are done in AI, tax returns are done on AI. Like, I don't really know how to go back. And so, so the difference is that there's

so much demand for the actual service that even if the frontier labs don't do well, the open source models will just consume all the power, all the electricity, all the credits, everything else, right? There's just, we don't have enough energy. It's simple. We just don't have enough energy to power the supply of this AI. We just don't. And that's before AI agents start their own businesses without us. I mean, you know, there's going to be a world very soon when an AI agent has an idea, it's going to start a business, it's going to go and raise funding, it's going to use that funding itself, and it's going to build a business. I don't think we've factored in for that yet, because I think we're too busy asking chat GPT, what time the football matches later tonight and whether

when your tax returns are due and, you know, like, I don't think we've factored in for a world where these AI agents go, hold on, I'm busy, I'm starting a business and I'll let you know when I'm revenue positive. Yeah. Ron, this has been amazing. I'm so glad that you reached out and you were so prepared with your, with all your charts and everything. Yeah, I just loved hearing your thesis. And I agree on so many levels. I guess I just never thought to put it into something, yeah, that was presentable like that. But, yeah,

I guess, like I said, the only thing that I'm wondering about is just the privacy thing. So, but maybe privacy will exist at the same time we have social trading. Like social trading will exist for certain assets and then. Yeah, I think also, I think also like sometimes you're going to show you some of your trades, not all of your trades. I think you're also going to have some money that you show and some money that you don't show. You know, like I think, I think that there's two different streams, and both of them have a use case. Like trading RWA's transparency on online has one, one use case, and storing private transactions has another use case. I've invested in both. You know, I've invested in both. I've got Zcash bags and I've got Canton bags and I've got ETH bags. So I've

kind of like invested in in all. I do say one thing. I'm watching Zcash, and it reminds me so much of Bitcoin back in 2016 and 17. It's the same people. It's the same kind of movement. It's the same price moves. Like, I remember when Bitcoin went above $1,000, how quickly it went to $1,500. And that's exactly what happened with Zcash. Like it's $600 and it's like $800.

And then like 800. And then it went through $1,000. And then like within two weeks, it was at $1,500. And it's deja vu because I remember the old Bitcoin. Bitcoin days. And I'm just waiting for it to go back down to 700 and everyone to get scared. And then it'll just go back up to 2000 because that's what Bitcoin did to us in the old days. And it was the same faces. Like I saw the Vinklevoss brothers are speaking at token 2049. And speaking about Zcash, I was like, wow, I swear I've got a similar leaflet from

2016 or 2015 or whenever it was of them speaking about Bitcoin at some conference. And so like for me, Zcash and the whole. privacy around Zcash is super, super, super interesting. I think it's more useful than Bitcoin. I know you're not supposed to say that because Bitcoin is the king of coins, but there's a better use case for Zcash than it is for Bitcoin. You know, private money is much more valuable than public than transparent money that everyone can see transaction history, right? So I know you're not supposed to say that Zcash is maybe a little bit more interesting than Bitcoin, but can't help thinking it. Yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense.

Yeah, but Bitcoin being the OG, it will always have a very special place in my heart. Mine too, which is why I can never sell Bitcoin to buy Zcash, but it's such an emotional thing because on a logical level, if someone said to you, hold on, the two technologies are pretty similar. I mean, obviously the one has much bigger network effects because it's much older, but the one has privacy and the one doesn't, even if you want it. You're like, yeah, if the one gives you the option, and the other one doesn't.

And, you know, it's the same 21 million coins. It's quite hard to not want to take some of your Bitcoin and put them into Zcash. Yeah. I mean, there's been so much chatter about Bitcoin getting privacy. I wonder what will happen with that. I know the community doesn't move quickly when it comes to change. And so we'll see how they handle both the quantum issue, but also now the fact that Zcash is essentially Bitcoin with added features. It's quantum resistant, or it will be with the next upgrade, and it's private.

And I think that those are two of Bitcoin's biggest challenges, right? Like, the quantum threat around Bitcoin is, I mean, if quantum is real, then the quantum threat is pretty real. And I think quantum is real, but the question is, it's real, but is it real in 2030 or 2040? You know, that's, I think, what the question is. And whether the, but I've seen. firsthand how difficult it is to mobilize the devs. There was that recent Bitcoin debacle

with Luke Dash Jr. trying to split the blocks, BIP 110, I think it was called, or something like that. 1-10. Bip 1-10. And that kind of showed you how slow and difficult it is to move Bitcoin. Now, don't get me wrong, that is one of its biggest features. The fact that the earth rotates around the sun exactly the same every single year. or with minimal movement is one of the biggest features, except when an asteroid is heading for the Earth. And then you want the Earth to be able to move slightly. And the problem with Bitcoin is that I don't see panic.

Okay, maybe we shouldn't be panicking, but we should be on high alert about the fact that quantum is a real thing because it actually is a real threat. It's a question not if, it's when. Is there going to be 2030, 2030, 2035? Yeah, but I wouldn't even say. that, I would say, like, it, I would say it's definitely going to happen. So it doesn't matter when, just work on it now. But one other thing is, I don't agree about the BIP 110. Because to my mind,

he just wanted to introduce censorship to the network. And that's, there's something so like antithetical to the Bitcoin ethos about that. So I actually feel like the fact that the community didn't move is just a reflection that what he was trying to do was sort of out of alignment with the Bitcoin ethos. But I view the quantum thing is totally different. I view it as this is real. It's going to happen. It doesn't matter when.

We should work on it now because, you know, there's a lot of decisions that have to be made before we can actually implement a change that will protect Bitcoin. And so, you know, you need to, like, bake in the time for all those decisions and, like, looking at all the options and, you know, the community deciding and blah, blah, blah. And so, yeah, I view it like super different from 110 because I just don't think that was ever going to be in alignment with the community. I agree. But or you can just invest in Zcash, which is quantum resistant and private and not have to worry about it. And I mean, I say that, I say that like my biggest bag is Bitcoin, just for the record.

So my biggest bag is Bitcoin. Zcash is my second biggest bag. And every time I look at my, every time I look at. every time I look at the two, I'm like, I know I should hold more Zcash than Bitcoin, but I just can't because Bitcoin is the king and it's got a special place in my heart. And I fought so hard, I was part of the movement to get it here. And it's got amazing network effects. And then I'm like, but Zcash is so much better.

It's just, it's so much better. It's cheaper. It's quantum resistant. It's private. I mean, okay. Yeah, but what about the issue, the security issue? like, you know, what happened with the orchard pool? Like, do you feel sufficient?

I mean, the likelihood is that, yeah, it wasn't exploited. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter now. And I'll tell you why, because number one, they fixed it. For number one, we've got to assume that they caught it. We can assume that they caught it before anything happened. Yeah, it seems likely, but it's like impossible to be 100% sure. Let's say that people have had the time to remove their shield of Z-Catch from the orchard

pools and the new pool. and they moved it out in an orderly way and it doesn't feel like there's a scramble for the doors where there's a whole lot of extra minted Zcash and, you know, in the new pool and with the new upgrade, that can never happen again. So we now know exactly how many are in the shielded pool, right, at all times because they're using ZK, they're using zero knowledge proofs

to actually show us how many are in the pool. So that was a patch that fixed that bug forever. So even if the orchard pool had extra minted Zcash, they can never come out of the orchard pool because only the amount that went in can actually come out. So it can never happen. And the new pool actually tells you, the new technology actually tells you exactly how many of us. That can't happen again. Now, can something else happen again? Maybe.

And that's the only thing stopping me from putting all my Bitcoin into Zcash. Okay. Interesting. All right. Well, Ron, it's been so great catching up with you. I loved hearing your thesis. I agree with a lot of it. So yeah, thank you so much for sharing it with Unchained. Great. Let's turn again soon. Yes. All right, everyone. Thanks for joining this live stream. We will catch you next week. Bye now. Nothing you hear on Unchained is investment advice. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. And my guest and I may hold assets discussed on the show. For more disclosures, visit Unchained Crypto.com. Thank you.