← Raoul Pal: The Journey Man
Raoul Pal: The Journey Man
The Universal Code: Crypto’s Next Big Move with Raoul Pal | Sui Live Miami 2026
00:35:43
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Join me, Raoul pal, as I go on a journey of discovery through the macro, crypto and exponential age landscapes. In the journeyman, I talk to the smartest people in the world so we can all become smarter together. So welcome everybody. Good to be here. Good to see you all. I'm going to do something a little bit different today. It's a whole different framework that none of you have seen before, that I've been developing over the last, well, 35 years of my journey through markets, but also in the last two years with my journey through AI. It's a operating system for the universe. Bizarrely, it's kind of understandable. It's provable. It's how all systems thrive and survive throughout every observable part of the universe itself, whether it's biology, whether it's ecology, whether it's cities, whether it's blockchains. It applies to everything. Technology, the human body. It's called the Everything code, the Universal Code. The Universal Code is much bigger body of work, but I'm going to show how, for the first time ever, it applies to blockchains. And I think it's going to be very different and hopefully interesting. There's a lot to get through. It's more dense than my usual few slides and a banana, but I think you'll enjoy it. So let's start with the Universal Code. What we have is we have this observable phenomena, which is that every network that exists ever maximizes intelligence per unit of energy. It's a fundamental law that I've found to be true everywhere. Whether that's the boss system of the solar system. That top left is actually a picture of the solar system. It's unbelievable. It's a neural network. Next to it is the Mycelium network, which is the largest network that we know of on planet Earth. And that's the fungi that runs under pretty much all land and connects all trees, all life forms. Then we've got a neuron, which forms into neural networks and all of that. And then we've got blockchain, that's Bitcoin. So they're all networks, and they're there specifically to maximize output of intelligence per unit of energy. And it's the same pattern you see at every observable scale. Galaxies, ledgers, that's all the same system optimized throughout all of recorded history. And it's networks at every single level, as I said, whether it's the cosmic networks, the Mycelium networks, there's also the same optimization happens at every level. So you can Observe it all mathematically, prove it all out. Every network does the same thing. So networks are the way of compressing intelligence in a coherent manner that is effective, and it's what the universe solves for. So things have changed. However, we have been using carbon as the main structure for all of these networks, and now we're running on silicon, and silicon runs six times faster than human biology. So not six times. Yeah, well, six times faster, six orders of magnitude faster. So it's a million times faster. So things have changed dramatically with what's happening with networks and why networks matter to us in this room today is because what we do in blockchain is all about networks. We're building the substrate for economic coordination in the new Internet age, and we'll talk about how it works in the new AI age. But the important thing to know is valuing blockchains is not how people think about valuing blockchains. And I'll come into that in a bit more detail. You see what people do at the moment, they start saying, how much money does that blockchain earn? How much cash does it earn? Fees? And that's completely the wrong way of understanding how networks are valued. So networks are valued as this substrate of programmable intelligence. It's all of the applications, the value that's built on top of the network, that derives the network value, not the fees it generates. So it's built for assets that then throw off cash. But the network itself doesn't need to throw off cash. When you find you use a discounted cash flow analysis, you start solving for the wrong things. Because if output of intelligence per unit of energy is the fundamental law, then it must be the cheapest, fastest. Eventually that starts to win the network effects. That is the only way it can work. So therefore, discounted cash flows always make you look the wrong way. So it's the fundamentals of, of what that chain does, the kind of intelligence density that makes it important. What can you do on that network? What's the programmability? How many unique features, how fast it is, how many applications are built, how many developers there are? This is what really matters in a network. It's this feature, this intelligence density that everything is trying to solve for. And then how do you think about, okay, so what is the value of this thing? I. I've used Metcalfe's Law mainly as the way of valuing this stuff. And Metcalfe's law is basically the network, kind of the square of the number of users of the network. The economic value of the network. But there's an easier way and Ethereum is the best way of talking through it. Ethereum is the densest intelligence network in blockchain world today. It coordinates more, it has more developers, more activity, more intelligence, it's been around longer, has Lindy effects. If you took away the layer one, what happens is all of defi goes, all real world assets are on chain goes, all of nfts goes, all of layer two's go, all of that economic value and future economic value has gone. That's the value of Ethereum. That's why when people try and discount cash flow Ethereum, they end up with something that doesn't make any sense because they say, oh, it looks wildly expensive, it's not expensive at all. The rate at which intelligence density is increasing on blockchains makes them actually very cheap and particularly where it's going now. So
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But what we're getting to is a whole new phase, a state shift in everything that we understand. And I've called this the economic singularity. You guys might have heard me talk about this before. The economic singularity is that moment when we don't understand anymore how things work. Because things are now working on digital speed and not biological speed. So the infrastructure we built for the world around us just doesn't stand up. The economics, the politics, the entire system begins not to work here anymore because we can't absorb the speed of what's happening. So by 2030, most workers won't be humans. They won't transact most of the volumes. It'll all be agents. Humans will also no longer be the apex intelligence of the planet, which is the most ridiculous change that humanity has ever gone through, and we're about to live through it, has huge implications. Everybody's talking about it. That's huge implications for this industry too, because this whole change towards intelligence, escaping the human substrate and going to the silicon substrate at the speed at which it's happening is unprecedented. Generally, most networks and most observable things will work with, let's say, log regression. That's the network adoption model. Metcalfe's Law. What we're seeing observable for the first time at any scale, the first observable time in history, is Reed's Law, which is Metcalfe's law squared. So we've got double exponentials going everywhere. We've seen it with the output of words written by humanity every year since. The Gutenberg Press has now been overtaken in the last three years by AI. AI now produces more words than all of humans added together. By 2028, they'll produce more words than all of humanity has ever written. And that's how fast it's moving. Every chart is vertical. We've never seen anything like it. You can't even put these on log charts anymore because they're moving so fast. And we're not ready for this. So we just have basically broken how the economy is going to work. This move from carbon to silicon neurons to chips. So we're not the mind that's running this. The whole world is built around our minds running this thing and how fast we work and how we think. But that's not going to be the main thought process. I'm not saying, and I'll come on later, doesn't mean humans are kind of taken out of the process. But all of the things that we don't need to do that it can do more efficiently. Remember units of energy, output of intelligence. If the machine can do it more efficiently, they will do it. And we'll find different things to do. And it's that speed again. Six orders of magnitude faster is not something any system is prepared to deal with, whether it's the banking system, whether it's politics. Politics can't deal with AI, they can't deal with blockchain. They're just not fast enough to deal with how fast this is developing. And it's developing at the fastest rate of any technology we've ever seen. Election cycles are four years. How can anybody vote on this stuff? By four years we'll have superintelligence. It's insane. In four years time, the Largest workers in the economy are going to be agents, not us. So we're just not set up for this. And it changes kind of how everything around us is. The other amazing thing is people say a simple thing is humans are the most efficient computer ever invented. You know, we use 20 watts of energy to run our brains. Yes and no. Yes. We have this multifactor model that we run. We've got sense and sight and sound and all of this stuff. But generally at intelligence level, when you actually look at people say, well, look how expensive AI is. Well, last thing I checked, I'm paying 200 bucks a month on my Claude Pro, Max, whatever one it is, and I get PhD level intelligence on every single subject known to humanity. That's cheaper than feeding the human. Yes. They're making a loss. So call it so. Feed a human. Right? Think of those terms. That's the energy input for humans. Energy input for humans. Let's say on a globalized average basis, maybe you spend $10,000 on food. So $10,000 to get human level computer. That's the energy output of intelligence. What we're talking about here is we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars to train these things. But One model gives 900 million unique instances. So it's very, very cheap to produce this intelligence. This is why it's scaling so fast, because it's so much more optimal than any human could ever be. So that's happening. The other thing that's happening that people may have missed is that the Meme Coin explosion was really us via speculation, speed testing. A very, very big idea, which is for years, the whole financial system has been built around the infrastructure of raising capital and investment of that capital. And what happened with Meme Coins is we saw instant capital formation. In fact, we fought instant capital formation by anonymous people. And reaching into the billions, we saw it. One of the amazing ones where the nexus of AI comes in was the token that launched by suggestion by the Terminal of Truths, who was on Real Vision talking about this. Andy Ailey. And the Terminal of Truths wanted to raise money. Mark Andreessen gave him $50,000. And then it suggested on Twitter that it should have a token called Goatsee. And somebody launched it. Nobody knows who launched it. It got to $1.5 billion. It then mentioned another one, Fart Coin, and it went to three and a half billion. One agent created five billion dollars of economic value. Now, when it comes to business models, this is where it's going. Agents can instantly raise capital, take advantage of an opportunity, instantly destroy Capital and the economic system. Velocity is beyond what we can comprehend. It's not made for us anymore. And this whole economic singularity thing is no longer a prediction. When I started talking about this about four years ago, people thought it started to sound kind of extreme. And now it's looking like it's the reality we're facing. I don't think in 2032 anymore. I think that's too far away. I think by 2030, the entire economic system has changed. And I'll come into why it changed. And it's down to this. The magic formula. The magic formula is how economies work, how GDP works. And it's basically population growth is the main input, plus how productive those people are. That's generally the intelligence output of the units, which are humans. And then debt growth. Debt growth has papered up the cracks when population growth slows down. And I've shown that that's the everything code that I've spent so long talking to everybody about in the past. So that's the system that it's working. But what's happening is if you apply it to GDP now, everything changes. So what happens is suddenly you change. Humans will not change humans into the human population of 9 billion people. You add in AI and robots again, people haven't got the head around robots. People are thinking of C3PO being a nice little robot that makes a cup of coffee for you or whatever, or helps you. We're going to put AGI brains into humanoid robots that are more dexterous, faster, stronger, fitter than us, with smarter brains. That's an E as a new species. That's where we're going here. And they're going to come into the workforce very soon. We've seen the production lines ramping up already. So it's coming, and we're going to put these super brains into them, and we're going to compete with them in jobs. No, we're going to acquiesce those jobs because we don't want to do them. We'll find other stuff to do, which I'll come on to in a sec. So what happens is you start to get weird outcomes because you're going to suddenly go from a restricted population of 9 billion people to an infinite population of economic actors. So we all start to see GDP growth doing crazy shit. One minute's 10%, next minute's 30%, depending how fast it scales, how far up Reed's Law we go. The robots are not Reed's Law because they're very difficult to manufacture. But the AI is Infinitely fast and getting faster. So we're going to see that then also we're seeing the energy density compute efficiency formula, which is the universal code law number one, operating at scale. Because what we're seeing is the collapse of the cost of creating energy. Now, whether that's solar, which we're seeing at scale, we're now going to space with solar at scale. We're seeing renewables at scale. Most people don't realize China added more solar power last year than the entire world's standing stock of solar because they realized how efficiently cheap it is to produce. And we had the breakthroughs in shale, but it's not fossil fuels. Fossil fuels is the backdrop to this. But really the rights law efficiencies of cost plummeting are coming from the renewable side. That will come from nuclear as well. And then we're seeing compute costs collapsing as well. We're seeing the per token cost of energy coming down as well. So we're seeing a double exponential of rights law happening both at the same time, both in the output of productivity and the input and energy costs. So what does that do? Drives the firewall even faster, which is scary Thinking how fast it is now. We haven't seen nothing yet. It's only going to get faster and faster and faster. And the last part of this equation was debt. This is the world we've been living in. That's the everything code. Debase the currency, debase the currency by 8% a year so you can manage the debt growth. But over time, debt as a percentage to GDP will go, it'll be close to zero. And the reason being is because GDP is going to go up so fast. And this is what even the US administration has been talking about is about once you start driving up productivity growth by AI and you start bringing in robots and AI into the workforce, you basically erode the debt away to nothing as a percentage of gdp. And that's the plan because you can't get rid of the debt any other way. So let's get into SUI and how it fits in and why this all matters. For blockchains, this framework, and I've only shown you one of the four universal laws, the whole thing applies to almost every system that we can observe, from politics to economics to financial markets to blockchains to technology. Once you see the world through this lens, and I'll do some more presentations on this over time as I start kind of unveiling this huge thing that I've been body of work I've been working on for this but for blockchains, it's pretty straightforward. So let's look at sui, which is I think of as the intelligence applied to the coordination layer. So we talk about speed a lot bloody fast, but really we need a lot more things to compete for the agentic economy. So what SUI has, or what it is, is the most intelligent substrate ever built for coordination. This is what we're dealing with and this is what people don't understand, and I didn't understand until recently, because it's not really built for the world that we are in today, it's built for the world we're coming into right now. And we saw Arpan talking about agents. We've heard a lot of talk about agents. This is happening right this very moment. So the same law that you apply the output of intelligence per unit of energy, you can apply to chain architecture too. And it truly matters it what decides what system thrives and survives and which dies. It's this lens makes you understand which blockchains are going to do well and which ones won't. And it makes it observable and understandable. It doesn't become such speculation. So on sui, there's kind of three special features that give it this more intelligence density than any other blockchain. One of it is the object centric model. So each asset has own thread of computation. Nothing wastes energy looking things up. So it's not doing the endless loop. The chain knows where intelligence is before it has to find it. So that's efficiency, it's fast, it's quick in doing that. Then parallel execution, well, that supercharges it all. Most chains process one transaction at a time, but SUI does this magical thing of parallel processing. A lot of transactions in one go. So it's the same amount of compute, but it's exponentially more efficient and more intelligence comes out of it. And that's very, very important for the world we're coming into. And if the universe selects for this at every observable level, then this is an important metric. The other one is the move language. So it's specific, it's programmability is one of the key features, the density of features without the surface area for failure. Just the cleverness of the new language allows a lot more to be done on it. So we've got three component parts here that are very important. That creates more intelligence than any other chain. Now, Solana is a chain I love, use all the time. And this is not a dis on Solana. And none of the comparisons are a dis on People or all part of an ecosystem here. But on capital density per user, and this is a really important metric, basically what is each user worth to a chain? If you give a new user to solana, it's worth 1600 bucks per year. And if you go to sui, it's worth 2,000. And that's TVL per active address is how you calculate it. There's a number of different ways of calculating it. But what's interesting here is sui's a lot younger than Solana, yet it's already accumulating economic density above pretty much every other chain apart from obviously Ethereum. And it's quite remarkable how it's done it in such a short period of time. And it's done it because it solves for output of intelligence per unit of energy. It's faster, cheaper to produce more intelligence. So over the same period, when I measured some of these, I looked at a lot of chains using AI, obviously to help me do this. And what we found was that as these markets had fallen 80% in the newer tokens, what we found is all of them lost coherence, which means that they suddenly didn't hold together in economic density and it fell apart. So economic density changed when the market fell. There are only three chains that exist outside of Bitcoin because it's not a smart contract platform. Only three chains held economic density. There's real signal in that, and that was sui, Solana and eth. And it's a structural sign that there is something going beneath the surface with SUI that is not apparently obvious because it's early stage, it's difficult to see. So each SUI transaction does more than Solana on each transaction itself. And I've got sui, Solana and ETH here, so we've got full finality. I shouldn't say less than 300 milliseconds, but it will be over time. We work on it. Solana at 12.8. Obviously they've got alpenglow coming out. They will get down to sub second. ETH is look slow, but they're working on changing that. Operations per transaction, this is the killer one, right? People don't really understand that we can do 1024 in one transaction. Solana, it says one, but it's not really one. You can actually do more, but it's limited by compute. And then you've got ETHER one transaction costs. SUI is obviously extremely cheap, the cheapest and effective cost per operation. When you take into account the the number of operations per transaction, you get to an absurdly low price. Which is why we're able to offer stablecoins for zero. So that's a very efficient way of scaling economic density. So an agent, when we go back to AI world, will do lots of transactions and on any other chain those transactions all have to be sequential and so we can all be one. So that makes it hyper efficient for AI. So if AI is solving for the universal code, then AI will route over time to the most cost efficient, most effective way where it gets the most output of intelligence. It's not a one winner takes all. There'll be certain things that don't need that others need. The ultra security of ETH layer one of which there is no comparison. It'll do that and so we'll see different chains developing. But what my working hypothesis is, is if we look at every observable network platform architecture and look at who wins, how many players win, in almost every scenario it's three to five, there's only ever three to five and everything else is a tail. And those tails can be not good projects to specialists. Smaller niche. I think there's only room for three or four layer ones we don't need anymore. And the race is who's going to be the third? With Solana and eth, that's it, that's the whole game. And from everything that I looked at, and I did a lot of work on this, I don't see any other ecosystem that comes close to what SUI is able to do and it's provably getting there. So I think it's very, very interesting to use this lens. So when we look at direction, speed, this is the acceleration phase that you see over time. What we've got is obviously the more mature chain ETH showing lower rates of growth. Why? Because it's massive. Solana still saying good rates of growth, but Swiss showing extraordinary rates of growth. And that's a good sign. We're early stage, we're doing what we're supposed to be doing, which is as a startup, we're growing faster, we're producing more economic value per user than Solana. So we're doing some good things. We're nowhere near economic value of eth, but that's okay. But it's not about price targets, it's about how to watch the substrate, how to see the universal code working in reality, and to see it. I found this three metrics that basically signal when you get to the point where you've now become fully coherent as a network and your place is not questioned any longer and it becomes observable. And I went back, tested this over Ethereum, backtested it over Solana. And what you get is three main metrics that really matter. And they are, you want to see 2 times stablecoins versus your TVL. It's the dry powder, the potential energy in your network, right? Think of stablecoins as stored energy in your network. You want to see a lot of it. We're not there yet. We're about one times, we're about equal to tvl. But what I know and what you guys will have heard, there are enormous amounts of initiatives coming out of SUI on stablecoins, also on tvl. But I think that that will be the next one to go. In the middle is active protocols. You guys, builders, everybody building on this, you matter. Now, some of the projects work, some don't work. But to have a number of projects all trying to solve problems, finding product market fit, developing new ideas, that's active intelligence density on the network. You're bringing smart people onto the network to use the technology available and usually it's about over 300 that starts to matter. We're over 500. And from what I see speaking to people over these last few days, there's plenty more activity coming. So that's great. We're seeing more developers coming and we're seeing people building on the platform. And I know that's a big focus for SWE right now. The other is daily active users. Daily active users. I've cleaned the number as far as I can because there's so much crap in all of these numbers. We're about 300,000 today. We need to be over half a million. We've been over that in the past. Obviously the market's subdued. I take a long smooth average over time as well to smooth out the volatility. Obviously all we really need for that is a better market. But also if the guys in the middle tier, the builders, get more traction, this thing will explode. If the stable coins get more traction, this will explode. These kind of multiply the value. So we've got one green light, two orange lights, and I think they're ready to go. These are the things to watch. Just measure these things and you'll know. And we should see acceleration in adoption of sui, adoption of its price, when those things happen. So we talk about price and network value and AI and the agents we're building for agents, it feels a very non humanistic world. It's not what this is. And I wrote a piece about this recently. What we're building with these big layer Ones is the infrastructure for the coordination layer of the digital world. That's what this is. And unlike the Internet. Well, yeah, unlike the Internet, we actually get to participate in it. Everybody in every country in the world, anybody with an interconnection can put 10% of their wages into this. So if you think you're going to be replaced by the AI and the AI is going to do all the economic activity on chain and it's going to make the chain really valuable, then you want to own a basket of layer one's tokens and that's basically your pension plan that solves for what is about to come. It's the way of economically participating on an equal footing with the agents. They're not taking your jobs, they're giving you an opportunity. This is humanity's pension plan in the post AGI world. This is how it's going to work. And so there's no other way of funding it. What are you supposed to do? Tax an invisible economy of agents? Yes, yes. I think they can tax energy use at data center level and hyperscaler level, but it's not easy. But this is the way to do it. This is the way for us to participate. And people have to focus on it. This is why price does matter in this. It's not just about speculation, it's actually about something bigger. If we're building the infrastructure layer for the entire digital world, we need to participate. So the wealth comes from owning the substrate. That fractionalizable, permissionless, incredible thing that we built within blockchain allows us to do that. Anybody with a phone and Internet, we can move anything through it. All of the economy routes through it. The financial system's about to root through it. The agents will root through it, the robots will root through it. It's all coming, it's all coming on this coordination layer. And in the end we get to be humans and humans drive huge value from each other. This is where we'll get our income from is by being humans. Getting together is a human experience. I've talked about this with things like chess. Chess is a. No human has beaten a computer at chess for 35 years yet. The chess industry is the biggest it's ever been. Why? Because we like watching humans compete with humans. Why? Sports events, sports teams, cost of sports teams, all going to the moon, cost of holidays, the amount of travel, all of these human experiences things. There's plenty of money to be made from human attention and experience and blockchain will help us do that too. So to sum it all up the universal code is the law by which everything operates. And I showed you just part of it. Law number one. Networks are the substrate from which it all happens. It always has been and always will be. It's the most efficient structure the universe has ever developed. And the whole universe is structured around the network itself. The agentic economy is that law going exponential. And again, this will not operate at Metcalfe's law speed. This will be Reid's law speed. You have no understanding of what is about to come because our brains can't even get around exponentials. Not double exponentials, but that's where we are. SUI is the intelligence applied to the coordination layer. It is provably the most intelligence dense, efficient architecture of any blockchain that exists today. Which is fantastic. There'll be a world of multiple blockchains. There has to be. We will be one of them because of this. And if we focus on that and build accordingly and build great products and great experiences, this is where we win. That dashboard I gave you, the stablecoins versus tvl, active addresses, number of protocols being built, that's the dashboard in real time. And the universal basic equity which is owning the token, this token and others, is the way you don't get left behind. So anyway, that in a nutshell, is why it all matters for us. You obviously enjoyed the episode because you're here with me at the end. But listen, don't forget to go to realvision. Com, join and grab a free membership. It's an incredible community packed with alpha great investment ideas and the research that you need to help you unfuck your future. So get started now, go to realvision.com join.