The Market Minute: Raoul Pal AI SUPERCYCLE & NEAR Protocol Review

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]This is the market minutes, Wednesday, the 13th of May. In this one, we've got Raoul Pal's new thesis around the AI super cycle and NEAR Protocol as well.

[00:00:11]Going to do a bit of a TLDR on that one.

[00:00:13]We're going to start that with price action. BTC just under 81k. You would have seen a bit of a hot CPI print.

[00:00:21]Yesterday, markets digesting that at this moment, but Bitcoin holding pretty strong, to be honest with you. ETH 2,300 bucks. We've got SOL 95 and 15 cents.

[00:00:33]And we have Hyperliquid, which is looking quite weak at just $40 right about now. And Zcash, which we've been calling out quite a bit here at 550, which seems to be a bit of a favorite in the market. Some headlines for you, what has happened over the last 24 hours.

[00:00:49]We've seen 100 plus amendments filed on the Clarity Act. So, that draft going to mark up on Thursday.

[00:00:57]A lot of volume coming in for that with last-minute amendments, probably signaling just how contested this bill is.

[00:01:04]The Senate has officially confirmed Kevin Warsh as the new Federal Reserve governor.

[00:01:11]We know that Warsh holds over 30 crypto positions, DYDX, Polymarket, Solana, those kind of bags. JPMorgan launching a tokenized money market fund on ETH.

[00:01:22]Very interesting stuff. And apparently, it is designed to meet stablecoin reserve requirements under the GENESIS Act.

[00:01:28]Anthropic is in early talks to raise $30 billion at a $900 bill valuation. So, this will be the largest funding round in their history. And we're knocking on the door for that trillion-dollar valuation just to be the norm.

[00:01:44]Normalizing new one trillion plus companies in this new reality with the AI build-out. And Bermuda, that begins moving payments and financial services on chain via Stellar Lumens. So, a bit of an underdog story there, but Bermuda aiming to become the world's first fully on-chain national economy.

[00:02:02]ETF flows for yesterday, sell-off. So, Bitcoin outflows 233.2 million. ETH sell-off 130.6 million in outflows. Solana saw inflows again 19.1 million. Been pretty solid.

[00:02:18]Hype, its first ETF day of traded 1.8 million in volume. Unsure exactly on what inflow that relates to. As of now, we will update on that once we get some clarity. Real Vision has just dropped one of the most coherent macro frameworks of the cycle. And he's posted it as a falsifiable call. We're breaking down here just because if he's right, then the next 5 months are quite an important window for this bull run. So, this is all around his AI supercycle theory. So, his core argument that the global financial system is being reorganized around one objective, which is keeping the AI capex supercycle funded until the build completes.

[00:03:00]Weaker dollar, lower oil, diplomacy with China, stablecoin legislation, central bank coordination. All of these are downstream tools serving that one goal.

[00:03:10]Most people still think that AI is a tech story. Real Vision says it has become the gravitational field reorganizing macro and policy itself.

[00:03:20]So, why does this have to happen? Well, he points out here that the math leaves no other path.

[00:03:26]So, as he says, 9.7 trillion of debt rolling over in 2026 and the same again in 2027. The net interest is already 13.8% of federal outlays. And so, the Fed can't tighten and thus the rollover math breaks. Treasury can't sell them out either, no foreign demand at acceptable yields. Plus, politically, austerity is a no-go as it just deepens the spiral.

[00:03:53]So, what he says here is the only path left is financial repression. This means running nominal GDP hot, letting inflation burn the debt-to-GDP ratio.

[00:04:03]The historical analogy points to here is 1946 to 1955, when debt-to-GDP fell from 119% to 65% when the Fed held the curve through 6% to 14% CPI prints. Can you imagine?

[00:04:19]So, to execute Treasury Secretary Scott, besant is at hand. So, these are the moving parts that Raoul believes he has to bargain with. Energy, Iran needs to de-escalate, Venezuela needs to return. Brent towards $70 by August is the shouts. On foreign exchange, there needs to be cooperation.

[00:04:41]Bank of Japan to resume normalization with Treasury FX cover, and USD to JPY towards the 130 mark. He also says China appreciation. The Yuan will go towards 680, which solves China's deflationary problem. And the bond market responds, term premium on the 10-year compresses as foreign duration buyers do return.

[00:05:04]The Republicans need to win the midterms. Besant has 5 months to make the bargain visible before Labor Day.

[00:05:11]And here's what makes that thesis credible. Raoul publishes two specific invalidation conditions. He says DXY closing above its recent 4-month high for three consecutive weekly closes before September 7th, i.e. the white line on screen. Or the 10-year yields doing the same. If either of those breaks, the framework he's laid out here is wrong. But the crypto read he says, if the dollar weakens deliberately, capital roots to non-sovereign monetary assets, Bitcoin will catch the move cleanly. So, we need to be watching DXY and the 10-year. Those are the only two charts that matter between now and Labor Day is the message from Raoul. NEAR Protocol is one of the most undervalued plays in crypto right now and the timeline is just waking up to why.

[00:05:56]Market cap is around 2.1 billion dollars. NEAR fully circulating supply and quietly running the infrastructure that powers the privacy migration the whole industry is waking up to. So, a quick TLDR here.

[00:06:10]NEAR launched in 2020 founded by Illia Polosukhin, one of the original authors of the Transformer paper that started the AI revolution. It's a sharded layer one originally pitched as a faster Ethereum, but the real story is what NEAR became, not what it started out as.

[00:06:27]The product driving everything right now is NEAR Intent. Here's how it works. You tell the system what you want, say BTC for shielded ZEC, and a network of specialized routers handles the multi-step trade across blockchains in the background. You don't pick the path, you don't bridge manually, you state the outcome, and the protocol abstracts every chain into one execution layer.

[00:06:50]With this, Intent has now settled over 18 billion dollars in cumulative volume there. Of that, over 1.5 billion in ZEC specific volume has routed through Intent alone. Every swap into shielded ZEC, the entire privacy migration we've been talking about, runs through NEAR.

[00:07:07]Now, here's where it matters for the token. In February, NEAR activated the Intent fee switch. 100% of fees generated through the protocol are used to buy NEAR directly from the open market. So, every cross-chain swap pays a toll, and that toll buys the NEAR token. The switch has already directed buybacks to the tune of 2.1 million NEAR tokens. On supply, NEAR isn't a fixed cap story like Bitcoin. It has perpetual issuance funding validators. But, in October, governance permanently halved the rate from 5% to 2.5% annual issuance is now roughly 32 million near. The deflationary threshold, i.e. the daily intense volume at which buybacks exceed issuance, sits at 177 million dollars per day.

[00:07:55]Current 90-day average is 77 million.

[00:07:58]So, volume needs to roughly double, but the recent 30-day volume has already annualized to 25 billion. So, the trajectory looks pretty clear. Arthur Hayes laid out the thesis, quote from Laura Shin's podcast, if volume grows, that fee accumulates over time and flips near from inflationary to deflationary.

[00:08:17]That is what will cause the price to rocket higher. The mechanic is similar to that of Ethereum after EIP-1559, except near is doing it at a 2 billion valuation versus Ethereum's 300 billion when its burn first started. Then there's the AI angle. Near has repositioned itself as the execution layer for the AI agent economy. The thesis is that AI agents need to transact across chains, and intense is the chain abstraction infrastructure that lets them do this. A single near account can sign transactions on over 25 different blockchains. Whether AI agents actually become the dominant on-chain user is unproven, but if they do, near will capture the toll. As Raz Djen posted here, near unlocked Zec, it delivered confidential intense, it powered Venice's verifiable private AI, saying near is the ultimate privacy stack. The back case here, near is still inflationary today, not yet deflationary. Execution risk on the AI agent thesis is also very high, and the volumes here could plateau. But the structure is straightforward. Near is the toll booth on cross-chain liquidity and privacy plus AI are the two narratives that need that toll booth most. Hope you enjoyed this video. Make sure to do subscribe to our channel, follow us over on Twitter, repost the clips. We'll see you in the next one.

[00:09:37]Peace.