"Nobody is Prepared for What’s Coming After Bitcoin Crash" | Raoul Pal

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]I think one of the interesting things about crypto, and you'll have seen this, is it's the first time ever we've had a globally homogeneous product.

[00:00:07]It's available to everybody. It's fractionalizable, so it doesn't matter what your disposable income is. Um and then, you know, you saw the rise of it outside of the US, where people had low ownerships of stocks, Europe for example, and then suddenly they started getting crypto. So, you can see that change in behavior coming with that younger audience with this kind of global product. 100%. I I think today you have more La- last I've seen about 400 million people that own crypto assets, which is a mind-blowing number because I'm I'm not sure 400 million people actually own stocks. Um right? So, so if you look at a lot of different parameters of crypto markets, they already sort of supersede capital markets, right? There's only 50,000 public companies in the world.

[00:01:01]There's 40,000 tokens launched on Solana every day, right? So, so Tom Lee declared at Consensus Miami that the crypto bear market is over. If Bitcoin closes May above $76,000, Bitcoin is already at 80,899 with 3 weeks left in May. Coinbase just integrated its X402 payment infrastructure natively into Amazon Bedrock, meaning every AI agent built on Amazon's platform can now make on-chain payments in USDC without any additional setup. Kraken just acquired stablecoin payments firm Ripple for $600 million, and the DOJ is investigating suspiciously timed oil trades made before Trump iron ore announcements worth $2.6 billion. Raoul Pal has been describing exactly this world, where AI agents are the next population, where every economic system breaks down because GDP starts running at machine speed, and where crypto is the only infrastructure capable of servicing an economy that operates faster than biology. Let's watch and discover.

[00:02:02]Uh you know, we just launched agent portfolio, so you can actually go to either Tory, which is our AI agent, or any external AI agent, open clock cloud, connect your eToro account, and say, "Build for me now a sub portfolio, it's an agent portfolio. This is the strategy that I want. Run 24/7 agent that looks at the portfolio, looks at the news, decides what's to happen, evaluates fundamentals, right? So, as complex or as simple as you want, but when you realize that you can have a PhD level in math, financial engineering, and computer sciences, and by the way, also biology and chemistry and geopolitics, manage your portfolio 24/7, never go to sleep, across all assets in the world with access to all of the information in the world, not to utilize that to manage your money, I think would be crazy. Yeah, and I think I already think they're partially sentient from what I can tell, and I've done a lot of work on this.

[00:03:11]But, you know, we get to that point where the entire economic system is about to break down. I've called it the economic singularity, and I get to about 2030, and at which case, you know, if GDP used to be um population growth plus productivity growth and debt growth, population growth just goes vertical.

[00:03:30]The population growth 50% in a year because you're using AI and robots as population now.

[00:03:35]Productivity >> I was like, what what data are you reading when you're talking about population growth? Yeah, because when you think of human They're now part of the population, yeah? Because in GDP, it's productive units of intelligence, and that can be machine or human. I uh that's actually super interesting and and makes a lot of sense. So, what you get then is weird things like GDP can go up 30% in a year, in a month. We don't even know what this means. It breaks the whole economic formula down because the economy now runs at machine speed and not at biological speed, which is how we've always dealt with things. We have no infrastructure to deal with it. So, you have to >> happens after that. You know what happens after that. And Tom Lee, chairman of Bitmain and co-founder of Fundstrat, delivered a specific falsifiable claim from the Consensus Miami stage that deserves to be heard by every Bitcoin holder. Bitcoin has never remained in a bear market after posting three consecutive monthly gains. March 2026 was positive. April 2026 was positive. Bitcoin at 80,890 money with 3 weeks of May remaining means the third consecutive monthly gain is the most likely outcome short of a catastrophic reversal. By Lee's historical rule, the bear market that began with Bitcoin's decline from $126,000 in October 2025 would be definitively declared over. The specific data Lee presented supports this framework from multiple angles. All intelligent scales by networks.

[00:05:07]Everything from human biology through to the boss solar system model, I mean, everything scales through networks. And what you're describing is a network of AIs. And a network of AIs are diverse, robust, and move faster than a single because they share information.

[00:05:27]And that's how you get to ASI.

[00:05:29]And I think it's inevitable. Yeah, me too.

[00:05:32]>> And a bit scary.

[00:05:34]I There was a book I don't know if you read the book, if anybody builds it, we all die. Yeah. I think again, I think it's inevitable. I think that's the link again between the crypto economy. So, obviously, AI is going to trade more crypto than traditional assets.

[00:05:48]That will drive traditional assets. So, that's actually I think is going to be the driver of tokenization is the real assets issuers are going to say, "Hey, we have to let AI trade our assets. So, we have to get our assets on chain."

[00:06:06]Uh uh you look you can look at it through stablecoin lens, right? So, stablecoins basically told a poll and BlackRock and Blackstone and Franklin Templeton told them, "Listen, a dollar with no interest rate has gained $350 billion in AUM."

[00:06:26]And they're all like, "Hey, we're building products that are better than the dollar. They're the dollar plus returns. Let's figure out how we tokenize them cuz that that should be in the trillions then if just a dollar is $350 billion. All right? Cuz what are all asset managers in the world? They're dollar plus return. Return token.

[00:06:48]And then think about volumes. People are going to see So, we just launched trading in oil, gold, silver, and I think seven stocks, the Magnificent Seven, 24/7.

[00:07:01]And what we did there is basically connecting the rails of crypto markets into the rails of TradFi. So, what what's happening is right now capital markets are starting to copy crypto markets and started to converge. And when Tesla trades on eToro 24/7, then at some point Nasdaq is going to say, "Okay, we can't have Tesla trading 24/7 only in DeFi.

[00:07:29]We have to also trade 24/7. Look at the volumes happening on Saturday and a Sunday." So, I I think that is going to actually push the convergence. And if you think of AI trading, so what we see in eToro, which is super interesting over the years, and I remember because we came from TradFi to crypto, originally we used to close the markets on Friday.

[00:07:54]John Bollinger, the creator of Bollinger Bands, one of the most widely used technical indicators in financial markets, recently told Lee that his trend models have turned positive on Bitcoin for the first time since October 2025. Lee also noted that software stocks, a sector Fundstrat recently upgraded, have historically traded in close correlation with Bitcoin, and software's recovery from its AI disruption-driven sell-off is another confirming signal. His most expansive claim at Consensus, in 10 years, half of the largest financial institutions in the world will be native digital. Not traditional banks that have adopted blockchain, not banks with crypto subsidiaries. Native digital institutions born on-chain, operating on-chain, settling on-chain that have displaced legacy infrastructure the way internet companies displaced telecom giants.

[00:08:40]Raoul Pal's eToro conversation about AI agent portfolios and the convergence of crypto and TradFi is the mechanism through which Tom Lee's 10-year prediction gets implemented. Here is the specific development that makes Raoul Pal's economic singularity thesis not a distant prediction, but an immediate infrastructure reality. Coinbase just announced that its X402 payment protocol and wallet infrastructure are now natively integrated into Amazon Bedrock agent core. Amazon's platform for building and deploying AI agents at scale. Every AI agent built on Bedrock can now make on-chain payments in USDC on Base and Solana without any additional setup, API integration, or third-party payment infrastructure.

[00:09:21]This is the operational implementation of what Raoul Pal describes as the network of AI agents that constitutes the new population.

[00:09:28]Raoul Pal says that by 2030, AI and robots will be counted as productive units of intelligence in GDP, the same way humans are counted because they create economic output. The Amazon Bedrock integration is the moment that prediction becomes infrastructure reality. An AI agent built on Bedrock can now identify a task, execute it, get paid in USDC, pay for services consumed in USDC, and settle everything on chain without a human intermediary at any stage of the transaction. The AI agent has a crypto wallet. It earns income, it spends income, it participates in the economy. What Raoul Pal describes as the economic singularity is not a philosophical concept. It is a technical implementation that Coinbase and Amazon just shipped this week. The eToro AI agent portfolios that Yoni Assia described, where AI agents manage your portfolio 24 hours a day across all assets with access to all information, and the Amazon Bedrock payment integration are two components of the same architecture. AI agents that manage portfolios need to execute transactions.

[00:10:34]AI agents that execute transactions need payment rails. Those payment rails are now natively on chain on Base and Solana through Coinbase X402. Two stories broke today that define Bitcoin's immediate price trajectory in different directions, and understanding both simultaneously is the framework for what happens over the next 30 days. Kraken's parent company Payward acquired Reap, a stablecoin payments infrastructure company that connects card networks, traditional finance rails, and stablecoin native settlement into a single platform for up to $600 million dollars, valuing Payward at $20 billion dollars. Reap operates across 210 countries on both Visa and Mastercard rails. This is the specific infrastructure layer that Raoul Pal and Yoni Assia describe as the convergence of crypto and TradFi, a single settlement platform that accepts USDC or USDT, converts to local currency, and delivers through card networks that work everywhere on Earth. Kraken is not building a crypto exchange that also does stablecoins. It is acquiring the payments bridge that makes stable coins function identically to credit cards at any merchant in 210 countries. The US April jobs report delivered a number that Bitcoin needs to interpret carefully. The economy added 115,000 jobs, nearly double the 60,000 expectation. A much stronger than expected labor market