Raoul Pal argues DeFi will become agent treasury infrastructure as autonomous agents conduct financial transactions onchain.
AI & Agents ·
An autonomous agent economy will operate onchain rather than through traditional banking infrastructure, according to analysis by a crypto analyst. The reasoning centers on the emergence of billions of AI agents conducting financial transactions continuously and at machine speed—a scale incompatible with legacy financial systems. The prospect is presented not as speculative but as inevitable, driven by the existential race between superpowers to advance AI capacity and by demographic and debt pressures in developed economies that necessitate agent-driven economic productivity.
DeFi protocols, which have historically struggled to attract retail users due to operational complexity and friction, may find their true purpose as treasury infrastructure for these autonomous agents. The argument notes that managing collateral, monitoring positions across protocols, rebalancing instantly, and executing multi-step operations across lending and hedging venues around the clock describes a job specification no human can reasonably fulfill—but one perfectly suited to agents. Financial markets already host non-human trading identities at a 96-to-1 ratio over humans, and the scale is expected to expand dramatically.
What remains unclear is the timeline for this transition, the regulatory pathway for agents holding and transacting with assets onchain, and which specific DeFi protocols or infrastructure will become dominant in agent-to-agent settlement. The analysis assumes technological maturity and adoption but does not detail technical, legal, or economic obstacles.