By Muyao Shen | Updated on Oct 08, 2026 at 07:57 PM
Citrini Research is making the case that a “new paradigm of ‘fundamental crypto investing’” has arrived because agentic finance will be built on top of blockchains.
“The blockchain industry has spent fifteen years building something that looks surprisingly useful in an agentic world: always-on, programmable financial infrastructure where assets, ownership and settlement can co-exist” in an already converging world, the independent investment research firm wrote in a report Thursday.
Robinhood Markets Inc., Coinbase Global Inc., Bullish and Securitize Corp. are among the public companies seen benefitting, Citrini said. Crypto tokens such as Ether and Solana and stablecoins issuers Circle Internet Group Inc. and Ethena were also cited.
A friendlier regulatory environment has also encouraged the adoption of tokenization, according to Citrini. A few days after the failure of a landmark crypto legislation in Congress last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission granted a five-year exemption allowing qualifying venues to trade tokenized US stocks onchain.
Tokenization of real-world assets has been promoted heavily as one of the most viable use cases for blockchain, the distributed ledger technology that underpins most cryptocurrencies. Wall Street giants including BlackRock Inc. have announced efforts to tokenize certain assets. A pivotal moment, according to Citrini, was when Hyperliquid — a blockchain-based crypto exchange — became one of the few venues for around-the-clock derivatives trading tied to prices of crude oil during the Iran conflict over a weekend.
“Since then, RWA adoption has really shifted into higher gear,” the report said. “We’ve seen massive moves starting to happen across crypto in the past month, marking what appears to be an inflection point.”
Citrini, whose research has some 260,000 Substack subscribers, made a name for itself earlier this year after its founder James van Geelen posted a note titled “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” in which he imagined a future in which AI wipes out white-collar jobs so quickly that the economy isn’t able to absorb the blow. The report sent shockwaves through equity markets.
In September, Bloomberg reported that van Geelen had sold the New York-based firm to semiconductor and AI researcher SemiAnalysis.
Prices of a few of the cryptocurrencies mentioned in the blog spiked after the report was released. DRV, the native token of onchain options and futures exchange Derive, was up by more than 20% before falling back, according to CoinGecko.