Ran Neuner and Raoul Pal Outline Bull Case for Crypto's 'First Real' Cycle Driven by AI and Protocol Revenue

Crypto Banter founder Ran Neuner joined Real Vision host Raoul Pal on "The Journey Man" to detail his macro thesis that the cryptocurrency market is entering its first genuine bull market backed by functional adoption and sustainable protocol revenue. Unlike previous market cycles in 2017 and 2021, which relied heavily on speculation and future promises, Neuner argued that the market is now characterized by protocols generating millions of dollars in daily fees across decentralized finance, tokenized real-world assets, and social trading platforms.

A central focus of the conversation was the rapid convergence of digital assets and agentic artificial intelligence. Pointing to institutional research from firms like BlackRock, Neuner and Pal emphasized that millions of autonomous AI agents will soon execute billions of daily micro-transactions. Because these machine agents require immediate, trustless, always-on settlement without traditional banking friction, programmable smart-contract blockchains are uniquely positioned to serve as the underlying rails for machine-to-machine commerce.

Neuner also shared his analytical framework for evaluating altcoins, moving away from standard fully diluted valuation metrics to examine what he calls "pipe pressure"—the balance between actual available circulating supply, staking lockups, and programmatic buyback-and-burn mechanisms driven by real yield. Beyond market analysis, Neuner detailed how his research team employs custom AI swarms in their daily workflow to scrape data, track real-time wallet movements, and identify mispriced protocol revenue models.