Citrini Research Says Tokenized Assets and AI Agents Make Crypto a Fundamentals Trade

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.

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?"