AI-driven hyperdeflation will fundamentally alter economic structures, leading to a post-scarcity future where the primary challenge shifts from production to distribution and the integration of human and machine economies.
Invest in infrastructure that bridges human and AI economies, or prepare for a future where AI agents become a significant, crypto-native economic force.
The next 6-12 months will see continued acceleration of AI capabilities, pushing us closer to a future where traditional labor and intelligence are nearly free. Understanding this change is crucial for navigating the emerging economic landscape and identifying new value creation opportunities.
The era of opaque, black-box AI is ending; the future demands intentionally designed models with human understanding and control. This shift is driven by reliability in high-stakes applications and extracting novel insights.
Investigate interpretability tools (like Goodfire's platform) to gain granular control over model behavior, moving beyond basic fine-tuning for critical applications.
Interpretability is not a niche; it's the missing piece for scaling AI safely into mission-critical domains. Mastering model understanding and intentional design will yield unprecedented capabilities and competitive advantage.
Robotics is moving from bespoke, data-hungry behavior cloning to generalized, human-informed learning via world models. This shift, mirroring the success of LLMs, means robots can use the vast, unstructured data of human experience to acquire new skills.
Invest in platforms and data pipelines that facilitate multi-modal, multi-stage training for humanoid robots. Prioritize systems that can generate synthetic data and use world models for high-throughput, targeted policy evaluation.
World models are the engine for scalable robot intelligence. They promise a future where robots learn faster, generalize wider, and self-improve through iterative simulation, making widespread humanoid deployment a near-term reality.
The Macro Shift: AI is collapsing the time horizon for technological deployment and market dominance, shifting the competitive advantage from pure innovation to a combination of innovation, capital, and rapid infrastructure deployment.
The Tactical Edge: Invest in companies that are not just building AI, but are fundamentally rethinking existing industries with AI-first principles, recognizing that traditional software moats are eroding.
The Bottom Line: The next 12-24 months will see AI's broad impact kick in, creating unprecedented opportunities for those who understand its new "laws of physics" and the critical role of policy in shaping its trajectory.
The healthcare system is moving from reactive, acute care to proactive, preventative interventions, driven by the unsustainable costs of chronic disease and a growing understanding of environmental health.
Build infrastructure that financially incentivizes lifestyle interventions, such as TrueMed's HSA/FSA payment rails for health-promoting products and services.
The next decade will see hundreds of billions of dollars redirected towards preventative health. Companies that bridge the gap between lifestyle choices and healthcare financing will capture significant market share.
The Macro Shift: Global energy demand, driven by AI, forces a strategic re-evaluation of nuclear power. This creates a window for nations to re-shore critical energy infrastructure, moving from reliance on adversaries to domestic, cost-competitive solutions.
The Tactical Edge: Investigate companies addressing foundational supply chain gaps in critical industries like energy. Look for teams with a "first principles" engineering approach and a track record of commercializing hard tech.
The Bottom Line: America's energy independence and its ability to power future technological growth, like AI, hinge on rebuilding domestic nuclear fuel enrichment. This is not just an industrial opportunity; it is a national security imperative.
The Macro Shift: AI-driven hyperdeflation is colliding with the technical reality of autonomous AI agents creating their own crypto-backed economies, threatening a decoupling from human fiat systems.
The Tactical Edge: Investigate and build infrastructure that bridges human and AI economies, focusing on fiat-to-crypto rails that can accommodate agent-driven transactions to prevent a complete split.
The Bottom Line: The next 5-10 years will see an unprecedented economic transformation. Understanding AI's deflationary power and the emerging AI agent economy is critical for navigating a world where traditional economic models may no longer apply.
The time of practical AI agents is here, moving compute demand beyond pure GPU inference to a significant reliance on CPUs for coordination, data handling, and security.
Evaluate your agent deployment strategy now, prioritizing sandboxed environments (VPS, dedicated local servers) and exploring cost-optimized model routing to manage API expenses.
Prepare for a future where AI agents become integral to workflows, but recognize the hidden infrastructure costs and security implications, particularly the growing importance of CPU capacity and robust access controls.
The shift from "how" to "why" in AI agent capabilities creates a new, multi-trillion-dollar market for companies that can capture institutional decision logic.
Invest in or build agentic systems that are in the "right path" of business processes, actively capturing decision traces from unstructured data.
Hundreds of context graphs will be in production at scale within a year, defining a new "context graph stack." The winning companies will be those that master this flywheel, extracting value to accelerate automation and build deep, defensible moats.
Funding Rates Are a UX Bottleneck. For RWAs to succeed on-chain, derivative models must offer predictable costs. The volatile funding rates of crypto-native perps are a major barrier to mainstream adoption, pushing innovation toward CFD-like structures.
The Airdrop Is Dead; Long Live the Curated ICO. Capital formation is shifting from broad, farmed airdrops to sophisticated, curated token sales. Projects now act like luxury brands, hand-picking investors to ensure long-term alignment, killing the "spray and pray" distribution model.
Political Wins Can Backfire. The CZ pardon highlights the double-edged sword of crypto's political maneuvering. The perceived corruption and mainstream backlash create a massive reputational headache that undermines the industry’s push for legitimacy.
Banks Can't Ignore the Genie: Jamie Dimon's reversal and JPMorgan's new crypto services signal that institutional resistance is crumbling. The catalyst is the disruptive threat of stablecoins to core banking models.
Consolidation is the Game: Mature sectors like exchanges and L1s are consolidating. The strategic play is to identify the dominant platforms (e.g., ETH, Solana, major exchanges) poised to compound value as moats widen.
Regulation is the Kingmaker: Political moves, such as Trump pardoning CZ, are reshaping the competitive map. Access to the U.S. market will be a critical battleground, making regulatory strategy more important than ever.
**The "Bloomberg for Crypto" is the Endgame.** The most valuable companies will provide institutional-grade data and software. Blockworks' pivot is a bet on this future, moving from a crowded news business to a high-growth data platform with clear product-market fit.
**Tokenization is Now a Publicly Traded Thesis.** With Securitize’s IPO, investors can make a direct, public-market bet on the tokenization of real-world assets. It will likely be valued as a high-growth proxy for the entire sector.
**Adoption is Bought, Not Begged.** Layer 1s are aggressively paying for partnerships with brands like Western Union. For investors, the question is whether these deals create a sustainable flywheel or just a temporary boost.
The Q4 Pump is a Trap. The widespread belief in a year-end alt season has become a crowded exit strategy. When everyone plans to sell into the same pump, there’s no one left to buy.
ETH's Fundamentals are Hollow. Ethereum's valuation is propped up by narratives, not reality. Weak on-chain activity and a value-accrual model that benefits apps over the base layer make its current price unsustainable.
The Sellers Are Here. From VCs with token unlocks to treasury companies turning into paper hands, identifiable sellers now outweigh the speculative buyers, signaling the cycle has turned.
Survive, Then Thrive. After massive liquidations, the strongest assets and narratives (e.g., privacy plays like Zcash) recover first. Focus capital on names showing relative strength post-wipeout, as they are the first to capture returning liquidity.
Revenue is the New Narrative. The game has changed. The market now demands clear revenue streams and legal structures that align token holders with protocol success. Valueless governance tokens are out; tokens tied to real business operations are in.
On-Chain TradFi is Here. Platforms like Hyperliquid are successfully bringing assets like the NASDAQ on-chain, proving crypto-native demand for traditional markets. This represents a major new frontier for DeFi protocols looking to capture volume.
**Fiscal is the new Fed.** Government spending, not central bank policy, is the dominant force in the economy. Stop looking for a traditional recession; the deficit is the stimulus that won’t quit.
**The Fed is re-opening the liquidity spigot.** The era of Quantitative Tightening is over. A gradual but persistent expansion of the Fed's balance sheet is coming, which will provide a tailwind for assets.
**Own scarce assets.** The long-term debasement of fiat currency is the default path. Alden remains constructive on Bitcoin, viewing its current phase as a prelude to a significant move higher in the coming years.
