Raoul Pal says crypto tokens are humanity’s pension plan. Here’s why he thinks Universal Basic Equity beats UBI in the post-AGI economy.
Macro investor and Real Vision CEO Raoul Pal has a bold take on AI’s economic disruption.
He argues that Universal Basic Income is already a failed concept.
His alternative is what he calls Universal Basic Equity. Pal shared his framework in a detailed post on X, sparking wide discussion across crypto and finance circles.
He believes the coming “Economic Singularity” demands a 21st-century answer, not a recycled one.
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Why Raoul Pal Thinks UBI Falls Short in an AI-Driven Economy
Pal argues that UBI relies on states taxing an AI economy that they cannot effectively monitor.
Nation-states, he says, are already struggling to keep pace with how fast this economy moves. Transfer payments funded by taxing invisible AI-driven revenue streams are, in his view, structurally broken from the start.
He points out that AI agents are fast becoming the dominant users of the internet. Human clicks are declining outside areas like travel, culture, luxury, and lived experiences.
The old advertising and clicks economy is losing ground. What replaces it runs on entirely different infrastructure.
According to Pal, agents need crypto rails to operate.
The dollar cannot split below a cent. Settlements are not instant. Jurisdictions complicate everything. Stablecoins handle the dollar side, while native tokens handle the rest.
He predicts the biggest DeFi users in five years will not be humans farming yield but AI agents managing treasuries at machine speed.
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…
— Raoul Pal (@RaoulGMI) April 27, 2026
Blockchain as the Coordination Layer for Agents, Robots, and Capital
Pal paints a broad picture of what he sees settling on blockchain infrastructure. It is not just financial transactions.
He describes L1 blockchains as the coordination layer for the entire new economy. That includes agents, robots, open-source code, capital formation, identity, and trust systems.
He brings up memecoins as an unlikely prototype.
Capital formed instantly around ideas. Entities without legal personhood raised funds. Settlement happened in seconds.
Pal suggests this is the template agent economies will use to fund themselves going forward.
Robots, he adds, will run on the same rails. Zero-knowledge permissions issued from personal wallets will replace biometrics as the trust layer.
Open-source code will also tokenize, finally capturing the value it produces instead of relying on subscriptions bolted on afterward. Proof of humanhood becomes the filter keeping synthetic noise from overwhelming real human interaction online.
Read also:
CZ: AI Agents Will Make 1M× More Payments Than Humans Using Crypto
Universal Basic Equity and the Four Pillars Pal Describes
Pal outlines Universal Basic Equity as a structural fact, not a policy slogan.
Anyone with a phone and internet access can buy a stake in the substrate running the new economy. No KYC walls. No accreditation. Besides, no jurisdiction barriers. It is, he argues, the first globally fractionalisable, permissionless claim on productive infrastructure in history.
He frames the post-singularity world around four supports.
Owning blockchain substrate creates wealth. Being human generates income through attention, culture, and community.
AI-driven abundance brings down the cost of goods and services. Taxing data center electricity use handles the tax revenue problem.
Pal’s investment advice follows directly from his thesis. He recommends putting ten percent of earnings monthly into Bitcoin for store-of-value exposure.
A basket of major L1s covers the coordination layer.
He projects crypto reaching $100 trillion in market cap within six to eight years. His conclusion is simple: people can either invest in the disruption coming their way or get left behind by it.
