Citrini Research has dumped BTC from its latest crypto investment play, and the reason is more interesting than another argument over whether the world’s largest cryptocurrency is overpriced. What Citrini is banking on is the idea that AI can revolutionize the flow of money and thus needs exposure to companies that process these transactions.
Citrini believes this future is approaching, and the banks are going to hate it. They will no longer have customers depositing their money with them, because machines would be programmed to seek out greater returns. “Our financial system was not designed for this future. It’s slow, fragmented and gate-kept by layers of intermediaries, legal authorities and KYC processes. It was built by humans, for humans,” the company said. In its concern, Citrini noted that financial institutions could struggle when millions of automated assistants start moving customer money continuously, potentially draining deposits from banks offering uncompetitive rates.
Citrini highlighted reasons why it left out BTC
According to Citrini, two things may happen in this situation. One is that the current banks will innovate to allow for more fluid movement of software money. Or, there will emerge new finance networks for this task. Blockchain technology has had around 15 years of being able to make payments without having a closing time. The issue was making sure there were enough good reasons for people to use them. “Both of those things are now changing. Financial assets are being tokenized and brought onchain.”
The company also noted that the worlds of traditional finance and crypto are merging. The arrival of AI agents adds another dimension because machines can operate financial applications without struggling through the confusing interfaces that frustrate human customers. Now, consider the internet when it was first developed. One did not need to know how to operate TCP, IP, or HTTPS when viewing web pages; the browsers dealt with all that on their own.
This is what Citrini hopes future blockchain technology will be like, but according to it: “We felt the urge that strikes any thematic investor on the cusp of a big idea: to investigate. So I downloaded Coinbase Wallet, loaded up $1,000 and went where very few investors return from with a positive ROI: the onchain trenches. Expecting to get rug-pulled, we were surprised by my findings.”
A likely turning point?
According to Citrini, it realized that while investors (and Citrini Research itself) were engaged in an ongoing debate about GPUs and memory constraints, a system of financial applications was quietly emerging, which is, in many aspects, comparable to TradFi. A completely different world, one that goes way beyond standard get-rich-quick scams, ranging from tokenized treasuries, equities, and options to programmable loans, payments, yield farms, and even entire applications that simply did not exist a few years back.
The turning point referred to by Citrini came in March during the Iran crisis, when the traders required somewhere to respond to the developments on the oil market during the weekend. In addition, Hyperliquid offered the ability to trade futures contracts based on oil when the regular exchanges were not operating. On the other hand, Robinhood (HOOD) launched its Stock Tokens product, contributing to the maturation of tokenized stocks away from stand-alone trading platforms. What makes this interesting is that these assets can now be transferred between applications.
Citrini said: “To grasp the scale… In September, Solana temporarily processed more trades than the NYSE…and while most of this activity is surely bots, meme pairs and other nonsense, that still says quite a lot about the traction this is getting.” While the number of transactions in itself does not determine economic value, it does show the extent of busyness of decentralized networks. Also, Washington cannot be ignored anymore. Following the failure of the CLARITY Act in the Senate, the SEC introduced a five-year exemption from regulation of some stock-token trading operations.
