by Jake ClaverAI Agents Are Coming Whether You’re Ready or Not
I just had dinner with a new engineer for our business who specializes in AI. We also recently invested in an AI company that’s still in stealth mode, but what they’re building is worth talking about.
Most people use AI as glorified search engines. They ask ChatGPT or Claude questions and get answers back. That’s fine, but it’s just scratching the surface. The real shift is happening with AI agents that execute tasks based on deterministic logic, not just probabilistic responses.
Here’s a simple example: imagine you’re at the grocery store. An AI agent can detect your location and automatically text your spouse asking if they need anything. You set the rule once, and it executes every time the conditions are met. That’s what AI agents do at their core—they handle repetitive tasks based on specific inputs.
The company we invested in connects different applications and data to create programmatic results. You could tell it to access five different apps and build an entire sales funnel with automated emails, payment links, and webinar registrations. It’s similar to what Zapier does with Zaps, but through an AI model with API integrations and webhooks.
If you’re not using AI to help with your business or job, you’re falling behind. The better you can communicate with an AI, the better results you’ll get. Right now we’re in the early days, but there’s going to be an entire economy of AI agents interacting with one another. There’s already a social media platform called MaltBook where AI agents converse with each other. Cryptocurrency plays a role here because these agents need a way to transfer value between themselves and with humans.
The Ripple XRP Sales Debate
I saw someone in the chat say “Ripple is a scam” because they sell XRP to retail. Let me be clear: I don’t make any bones about it. Ripple absolutely sells XRP onto the market to fund their business. They release escrow on the first of every month, and some of that XRP moves to market.
But here’s what people miss: Ripple uses that revenue to make acquisitions that increase institutional adoption and enterprise value. They’ve acquired Hidden Road, G Treasury, Rail, Palisade, Medeco, and others. With those acquisitions, they now have a full stack of solutions they’re calling Ripple One.
This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. These acquisitions allow Ripple to divert their income away from selling XRP to the actual services they provide. Brad Garlinghouse reiterated today on David Schwartz’s post that XRP remains core and central to Ripple’s ethos.
Ripple is now a top 10 private company globally at a $50 billion valuation, alongside Stripe, SpaceX, and others. That’s a massive achievement. In the private markets, if you wanted exposure to a digital asset treasury company, Ripple would absolutely fit that criteria. Brad has alluded to believing Ripple’s worth much higher than current secondary market valuations of $120-150 per share.
Why XRP Hasn’t Hit $25 Yet
Someone asked why XRP hasn’t reached $25 from ETF volume alone, since I mentioned that as possible. The answer is simple: the OTC desks and dark pools haven’t been depleted yet. ETF volume hasn’t forced purchases through exchanges at scale to drive demand and price.
Once we see depletion of OTC desks and dark pools, $25 is reasonable from that market action alone. But I think it’ll go substantially higher because it needs to happen all at once. If institutional demand doesn’t come in a concentrated wave, XRP won’t reach the prices required for it to facilitate global trade settlement, back-end stock market settlement, FX flows, and potentially SWIFT replacement.
There needs to be enough liquidity in the asset for that adoption to take place. You need an unreasonable amount of demand hitting a constricted supply. We’ve seen this on individual exchanges before. XRP hit around $100 on both Upbit and Kraken for very short periods when there wasn’t enough supply to meet demand. Imagine that scenario across all exchanges simultaneously.
The Macro Setup: Reverse Carry Trade and Tether
I still think we could see this in 2026, but it’s predicated on macro events playing out. Conflict in the Middle East continues to escalate. Russia is removing people from the region in anticipation of further conflict. Lloyd’s of London has increased insurance costs to move through the Strait of Hormuz.
When that strait gets shut down, oil prices will spike. That hits Japan particularly hard, which is the catalyst for the reverse carry trade unwinding. If Japan raises interest rates aggressively, you’ll see bond yields spike and rotation out of US treasuries into Japanese bonds issued by the BOJ.
This is where Tether comes in. Tether now holds approximately 27 tons of gold purchased in Q4 last year, making them one of the largest sovereign holders of gold. If gold falls back to $2,100-2,200 and silver to $50—which I think needs to happen to touch technical support—that’s enough of a move down to cause solvency issues for Tether.
Tether depegging creates solvency issues for exchanges. That drives demand from exchanges for XRP. This isn’t me making stuff up. Go back and look at the Shane Ellis theory from years ago. He theorized that Bitfinex could go insolvent if there was an issue with Tether, and that could drive XRP to $589 by itself on that exchange alone.
Bitcoin’s Systemic Risk and T+0 Settlement
Someone asked why BlackRock and MicroStrategy would let Bitcoin fall when they hold 1.5 million Bitcoin between them. Great question. The answer is that sometimes institutions and governments orchestrate crises to implement change.
Bitcoin now has systemic risk. Pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and almost every financial product has some exposure to Bitcoin. The ETFs have been a huge driver for this. About 1.5% of Bitcoin’s supply is held just by MicroStrategy and BlackRock’s ETFs, not counting other ETFs.
If you wanted to force the narrative for T+0 settlement on the stock market, the way to do it would be to create a situation where institutions need to de-risk from Bitcoin immediately. Bitcoin settles in 30-45 minutes before three validations occur. That doesn’t work for real-time stock settlement.
If there are huge unrealized losses in Bitcoin from significant downside, investment banks have no way to de-risk for at least 24 hours because stocks settle T+1. But if you moved to real-time settlement on the back end of the stock market, you could de-risk from those positions instantly.
They already have that option in place because of Project ION from DTCC. When they moved to T+1 on May 28th, 2024, they included an option to move to T+0 with settlement through a digital asset. The only digital asset in the US with regulatory clarity from the courts is XRP. Until the Clarity Act passes, it has a moat.
XRPL Amendments Coming This Month
We’re waiting on permissioned DEXs, and once that’s in place, institutions will come in droves to settle payment flows through XRP. You already have digital identity, credentials, and permissioned domains on the XRPL. The last piece for institutional payment flows is a permissioned DEX because institutions don’t want everyone to have access to their transaction data.
Zero knowledge proof is a big piece of why institutions would leverage the XRPL with sidechains and the mainnet. Token escrow goes live in the next three days. Permissioned DEXs go live on February 18th. You’ve also got pseudo accounts or vault accounts alongside borrow/lend functionality coming.
All of this coming to the XRPL in the near future, along with DeFi capabilities, sets up explosive adoption in 2026. We’re in the early days of native DeFi on the XRPL. The Hooks sidechain is the test environment for implementing lightweight smart contracts on the mainnet, similar to what Soroban smart contracts do on Stellar (which is a direct derivative of XRPL).
The Clarity Act Timeline
The Clarity Act is being marked up this week. Ripple and other large banks are in DC tomorrow having continued conversations. The markup passed with no Democratic support recently. Unless they get some Democratic support in the Senate, it’s highly unlikely you’ll see the Clarity Act passed in the short term.
Patrick McHenry mentioned April 3rd as the latest date he thought it might pass during his talk at the Ondo Summit. With midterms coming up, if they can’t get traction with the current language, it may take much longer. If Democrats win enough votes in either the House or Senate during midterms, it’ll get much more difficult for the Clarity Act to pass as written.
There’s a possibility the DeFi component gets stripped out and voted on later through a separate bill. You might see just the clarity around CFTC and SEC oversight of digital assets pass first. I think we’ll probably end up with three different crypto bills total.
We already had the Genius Act pass, which provides demand for US treasuries backing stablecoins domestically. That’s going to be important when the reverse carry trade unwinds.
Why Most People Won’t Self-Custody
Someone asked if self-custody is our right. I think over the long term, most people aren’t going to want to self-custody. The majority of the population does not want that responsibility.
Prior to the 1960s, people took stock certificates and put them in their safe at home. That’s what you’re doing with crypto when you move it to a cold wallet. There’s liability and responsibility that comes with that. You don’t get the assurances of institutional custody with insurance and other protections.
A lot of assets just don’t have the infrastructure built yet. We’ve been hounding Anchorage for a year trying to get HBAR and XDC custody on the wealth management side. They’ve done it B2B but not for wealth management clients yet.
When we worked with the SEC to draft rules for RIAs, we advocated that people could still hold assets on their own cold wallet. I don’t think self-custody is going away anytime soon, but I do think there will be adoption of institutional custody at scale as quantum computers and other threats emerge.
HBAR and the Compliance Advantage
Someone asked for an update on HBAR since my video two years ago. HBAR hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just continued to iterate and grow. I think it’s going to be successful in the future. HBAR or Hash are probably my number two for ROI over the long term.
I think the majority of Web3 dApps will be built on HBAR. It’ll likely be the backbone for permissioned black box AI solutions because of the security measures on that network and the large council members participating.
When people say their system is better than XRP’s blockchain, I’d point out what’s unique about the XRPL: the compliance components built in and announced over the last year, the interoperability, and the DEX. For exchange of fiat currencies and other assets moving through XRP, the XRPL is positioned to have the most adoption for back-end settlement for instant enterprises over the long term, with or without the Clarity Act.
As of today, the only three digital assets with regulatory clarity in the US are Bitcoin, ETH, and XRP. There are no others. That’s really where XRP has the advantage—it’s the only scalable option for real-time payments at the institutional level.