Macro investor and Real Vision founder Raoul Pal argues that tokenization is being viewed too narrowly when it is framed simply as a technology that allows stocks to trade 24/7. In his view, the long-term impact could be far greater: moving assets, money and core capital-market functions onto blockchain infrastructure, potentially changing how the broader economy operates.

Pal’s comments come as tokenized equities expand across a growing number of platforms. One of the most visible benefits today is the ability to trade assets outside traditional NYSE and Nasdaq market hours. But Pal sees this as only the first layer of adoption.

Once assets exist as programmable instruments on blockchains, they can potentially be transferred, collateralized, lent, borrowed, traded and settled almost continuously, without being fully constrained by the operating hours of traditional financial infrastructure.

This view is consistent with Pal’s broader thesis on the future of DeFi. He has argued that many financial functions — including treasury management, lending, borrowing, asset swaps and hedging — could eventually be rebuilt on-chain. In that scenario, blockchain would no longer serve primarily as infrastructure for crypto trading, but as a financial layer that software can interact with directly.

AI agents are a central part of that thesis. Pal expects the future economy to include a large number of autonomous software agents capable of holding money, allocating capital and transacting with one another at machine speed.

Unlike humans, these agents do not need weekends, banking hours or manual approval processes. That makes tokenized assets and always-on on-chain markets a potentially natural financial infrastructure for a machine-driven economy.

Pal and eToro CEO Yoni Assia have previously argued that the rise of AI-driven trading could also push traditional asset issuers toward blockchain infrastructure. If equities, bonds, commodities and investment funds can trade continuously on crypto rails, traditional exchanges may face growing pressure to extend trading hours and modernize settlement systems.

From Pal’s perspective, the bigger tokenization story is therefore not simply the ability to “buy Tesla on a Sunday.”

The more significant shift is the possibility of turning much of the world’s financial assets into programmable instruments that can move across always-on networks — creating the foundation for 24/7 capital markets and, eventually, an economy increasingly operated by software and AI.