DeFi Wasn't Made for You, It Was Made for AI

You don’t have to work at machine speed; you just need to have the infrastructure that machines require to operate.

Written by: Raoul Pal, Founder of Real Vision

Compiled by: Chopper, Foresight News

I bet you have a wallet on your phone that you haven’t opened since 2021, containing remnants of some long-dead liquidity mining.

If that’s you, you’re not alone. That’s the first impression most people have of DeFi: five different apps, three chains, a mnemonic phrase tucked away in some drawer...

DeFi was supposed to replace banks; that was the promise. What you actually got was a part-time job with a spreadsheet, gas fees that sometimes cost more than the returns they promised, and a lingering anxiety about your phone.

But is it possible that it was never meant for you?

Like everyone else, I once thought the potential market for cryptocurrencies was the eight billion people on the planet. I’ve had to completely abandon that assumption... The target market is no longer just the global population.

Because I now see clearly where this path leads. An agent economy is coming: billions of AI agents doing real economic work, trading with each other at machine speed. And that economy won’t operate through the Bank of England; it will run on-chain.

You can’t slow it down

One key point to understand about the agent economy is that it’s not optional.

The largest companies on Earth are investing hundreds of billions of dollars each year to build AI capabilities, and the two superpowers behind them view this race as a matter of life and death. The U.S. can’t slow down because China won’t; China can’t either because the U.S. won’t. Underneath this race is the reason I articulated in my book, Everything Code: developed countries are aging and burdened with debt, their labor forces are shrinking, and the growth that debt relies on can no longer be produced by human labor. We don’t just want these agents. We need them, in the hundreds of millions, then billions, to do real economic work.

So, regardless of how people feel about it, this wave is coming. The only question is: what will it run on? In finance, the ratio of non-human identities to human identities has reached 96 to 1, and that’s just some clunky service robots... the ancestors of what’s to come. Stripe wrote in its annual letter this February that agents will likely soon handle most internet transactions, and we will need channels capable of supporting a million, even a billion transactions per second. Our existing financial system cannot support the economy that is coming; that is a fact.

Read this job description

So what role does DeFi play in all this? Back to that wallet you no longer open. For a decade, everyone has judged DeFi as a consumer product and given it a “failure” score because we all assumed: its operators should be you. Now, let’s look at what this thing actually requires of its operators.

You need to monitor positions across multiple protocols seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, because the market never closes. You must rebalance within seconds when market conditions change. You need to execute multi-step operations simultaneously in lending markets, exchanges, and hedging venues. Never panic during drawdowns, never be greedy during surges, never sleep, and never make a mistake by entering the wrong number at three in the morning.

No human on Earth meets these requirements, and that’s not a character flaw. We evolved to avoid lions, not to manage collateral ratios all night. That’s why I’ve been saying for years: in volatile assets, leverage is your enemy; for 99% of people, a spot position plus a long time horizon is enough.

But give the same job description to an agent, and it’s no longer a job at all. Continuous monitoring, instant rebalancing, emotionless execution, no need for sleep... that’s just what software does. In the March Global Macro Investor newsletter, I bluntly wrote: “DeFi is not for humans to farm yields. It is the treasury infrastructure for agents: lending, exchanging, and hedging at machine speed, with no human intervention.”

It’s worth noting that no one sat down ten years ago to design DeFi specifically for machines. Builders thought they were building for humans. But look at what this system requires of its operators; it’s as if it was made for machines.

Because what agents need is precisely the mirror of everything that torments you in DeFi. It has no business hours, so a market that never closes is not a burden for it but a foundation. It cannot hold a bank account because no bank can open an account for a piece of software, nor can it settle fractions of a cent in 300 milliseconds. What it needs is unmediated, waiting-free capital.

Everything will be rebuilt

So what does that reality look like? I believe every financial function we operate today will be rebuilt on-chain, embedding agents within. The clearest lens to see this is the most boring function of all: treasury.

Let an agent handle payments for a business. To do this job well, it must hold capital; and once it holds capital with a profit motive, it faces the oldest question in finance: what should I do with my account balance? So it will inevitably put capital to work. It will lend out idle cash. When it needs funds for a better opportunity, it will borrow. It will exchange between the tokens it receives and hedge against losses it cannot afford.

Where will all these activities take place? Not in banks, nor in any place that resembles a bank. It is at this point that the “decentralization” in DeFi is no longer an ideology but a necessity in engineering. These agents will trade at speeds that no human intermediary can supervise... no compliance officer can approve a million counterparties per second, and no clearinghouse can take two days to settle a position that exists for only a fifth of a second. The only structure that can operate is a smart contract: rules written into code, executed strictly according to the code. No permission, never downtime.

Machines have no habits

There’s another detail because it tells you where value ultimately lands. Humans will pick a chain and stick with it, out of habit, community, or circle. Agents will choose nothing. They will always route every operation to the fastest, cheapest track at that moment. This constant pressure will drive the fees across the entire system toward zero.

Fees decreasing continuously only seem like bad news when you treat a chain as a business selling transactions. It’s not; it’s the underlying infrastructure for competitive carrying activities, and the winning blockchain will be used almost for free while settling more value than anything in financial history.

An economy that can operate without us

Now pull the lens back to the farthest point because this is no longer a crypto story; it’s an economic story.

I believe that within a few years, most economic transactions on Earth will be invisible to humans. This is not a secret... it’s just happening between machines, at machine speed, on a scale we cannot participate in.

The problem is that every economic model we have assumes an economy that operates at human speed: value accumulates over several quarters and career segments, only to be destroyed in a collapse slow enough for humans to watch on TV. And now, capital can be raised at machine speed to target opportunities that exist for mere milliseconds, operated by participants trading without rest. The speed at which value is created and destroyed exceeds any human comprehension. GDP could jump 30% in a month. We don’t even know what that means. It breaks the entire economic formula.

This is what I call the “singularity moment,” the point at which the economy begins to change at a speed humans cannot adapt to. Everything in this article is a step toward it, and the tracks being laid now are where it will happen.

What this means for you

I think, primarily, it’s a liberation. You can retire from that 2 a.m. gig. You were never meant to be the operator of this machine, just as you never needed to manually route your mail. That wallet you no longer open is not evidence of a technological failure; it’s proof that the wrong species was at the controls.

And the way to participate has never been to outperform robots on yield. This is again the same conclusion I’ve reached from various angles: value is embedded in the underlying that settles all these activities. When billions of agent treasuries are lending, hedging, and exchanging every second of every day, the network that carries these activities will become one of the most valuable assets on Earth, and a small piece of it will be available for anyone with a phone to buy.

I won’t tell you which chain will win, nor when the inflection point will arrive. I’ve been in this market for thirteen years and have shed the arrogance of prediction. What I want to share with you is a framework: stop judging DeFi by whether it’s useful to you, and start looking at who it was built for. Because they are operating right now, and mostly in places you can’t see.

You don’t have to work at machine speed; you just need to have the infrastructure that machines require to operate.