Raoul Pal@RaoulGMI
Forget UBI. The answer is Universal Basic Equity… and it’s humanity’s pension plan for the post-AGI world...
The Economic Singularity is coming faster than people think and the default question is how humans make money in a world that doesn’t really need them anymore.
The default answer is UBI, which is transfer payments from a state, funded by taxing an AI economy that nation states can neither see nor keep up with.
It’s a 20th century answer to a 21st century problem and it’s broken before it even starts.
Agents are becoming the dominant user of the internet, not humans. Your AI is becoming your entire front end UX. The clicks economy is dying everywhere except where humans pay to feel something - clothing, travel, luxury, experiences, culture.
Agents run on crypto rails because nothing else works. The dollar doesn’t fractionalise below a cent, settlement isn’t instant, permissions are required, jurisdictions matter. Stablecoins handle the dollar leg and native tokens handle the rest.
The biggest users of DeFi in five years won’t be humans farming yield… it’ll be agents managing treasuries, swapping, earning and spending at machine speed.
Capital formation has already shown its new shape and it came from the most unexpected place. Memecoins. Everyone wrote them off as a casino but they were a prototype. Instant capital formation around the attention of an idea, raised by entities without legal personhood, settled in seconds. That is the template agent economies will use to fund themselves.
And it’s not just agents...
Robots will run on the same rails, with zk permissions issued from our wallets as the source of truth, because biometrics are far too flawed for that role
Open source code itself gets tokenized and finally captures the value it creates, instead of being monetized through bolted-on services and subscriptions.
Proof of humanhood becomes the trust layer that lets us release agents into the world without society collapsing under synthetic noise. Identity, authentication, verification, permissioning, all of it migrates onto the same substrate.
So when you zoom out, the L1s aren’t just settling agent transactions but settling the entire coordination layer of the new economy… agents, robots, humans, code, capital, identity and trust.
Every contract, every treasury, every permission, every stake. Open source finally captures the value it creates, at scale, for the first time, and truly vast value accrues to the coordination layer because everything routes through it.
Which brings us to the actual answer to the Economic Singularity…
Universal Basic Equity.
Anyone on earth with a phone and an internet connection can buy a stake in the substrate that the new economy runs on. No KYC walls, no accreditation rules, no jurisdiction, no employer, no state, no permission. The first homogenous, permissionless, globally fractionalisable claim on the productive infrastructure of the world. It's not a slogan but a structural fact about how blockchains actually work. This is their purpose.
Wealth comes from owning the substrate. Income comes from being human, because attention and experience remain the irreducible currency of culture, community and love.
Abundance of goods and services from AI handles the cost of living.
Taxing data center electricity use solves the tax issue.
Four legs of a stool that holds up the post-singularity human world.
So… just buy the fucking tokens.
Bitcoin if you want pure store of value, a basket of the major L1s if you want the coordination layer. 10% of your earnings, every month, for a decade. You'll be wealthy and protected from the changes to come.
Crypto is going to $100trn in the next 6 to 8 years and well beyond that after.
You can choose to invest in your own economic disruption, or get left behind by it.
And if you’re worried about timing the cycle…
…adjust your time horizon.
This is humanity’s pension plan.
It's all so absurdly fucking obvious...
