Citrini Research published a report on Thursday arguing that AI agents and tokenized assets have opened a new paradigm of “fundamental crypto investing.” In the piece, titled “Breaking The Wall,” the firm wrote that “Blockchains have finally found their raison d’être.”
The firm argued that software agents will want financial rails that never close, and that crypto has spent 15 years building them. It also asked whether millions of agents moving deposits toward the highest bidder could leave banks short of the cheap funding they rely on.
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What Citrini Points To
Citrini pointed to several developments. In March, when the Iran conflict escalated over a weekend, traders had few liquid places to price crude oil other than Hyperliquid. Tokenized stocks then began moving between apps and across more chains after Robinhood Chain, which opened its public mainnet in July, introduced its Stock Tokens. The Senate fell short on the CLARITY Act, and two days later the SEC put an innovation exemption in place for trading tokenized stocks.
Citrini also said Solana temporarily processed more trades than the NYSE in September, while noting that most of that activity was likely bots and meme pairs.
The report said the question for investors should shift from “will tokenization be legal?” to “who captures the economics when these products eventually enter the US?”
Where Citrini Sees the Money
Citrini said in the report that it does not assume that bitcoin and ether will reach new all-time highs on the theme, and that “there are better expressions.”
Its argument is that the market rewards tokens that earn revenue. On the equity side, the firm discussed transfer agent Securitize, which it said has over $4 billion in tokenized assets under management and was the NYSE’s March pick as the first digital transfer agent eligible to serve its planned tokenized-securities venue. It also discussed Coinbase, through its Base network, and Robinhood. Among tokens, it highlighted Aerodrome, Lighter, Derive, Pendle, Ondo, Maple, Ether.fi, Aave and Ethena, and pointed readers to equity and token baskets on its Citrindex.
The report was not uniformly bullish. Citrini said Robinhood Chain would earn about $30 million in yearly fees if its past seven days of payouts hold, as of Oct. 6, which it said does not yet move the needle against Robinhood’s $1.31 billion in second-quarter net revenue. It also listed open problems, including liquidity and standards scattered across competing chains and the risk of stock portfolios sitting in technology that could theoretically be hacked without recourse.
Related Listen: Should Tokenized Stock Only Come From Issuers? Yes, Says Carlos Domingo
