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Jordi Visser, a veteran macro investor with more than 30 years of Wall Street experience and head of AI Macro Nexus Research at 22V, has made one of his most direct public cases yet for owning Bitcoin and Ethereum, arguing that the rapid buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure is creating a structural tailwind for digital assets that most market participants have not yet priced in.
Speaking on Anthony Pompliano’s podcast on May 9, Visser said the AI and crypto industries are converging at an inflection point and that tokenization will shift from a theoretical narrative to a market reality by the summer of 2026.
The core of Visser’s thesis rests on a simple but consequential observation about the next phase of AI development. The industry is moving from chatbots and inference tools into fully agentic systems: autonomous software that executes transactions, manages workflows, and makes decisions without human input.
Those systems, Visser argues, cannot operate through traditional banking infrastructure. They have no bank accounts, no credit lines, and no tolerance for two-to-three day settlement windows. Their native payment layer is the blockchain, and their currency is tokens.
Autonomous online payments are already accelerating. Transaction volume on the Coinbase x402 standard has recorded more than $24 million over the past month alone, a figure that Visser sees as an early signal of what happens when AI agents begin transacting at industrial scale.
He bought Ethereum (ETH) specifically because its smart contract layer sits at the centre of this infrastructure, positioning it as the settlement layer for a wave of tokenized real-world assets. Estimates suggest AI could drive $10 billion in on-chain transactions by the end of 2026, a level that would represent blockchain-native economic activity driven by utility demand rather than speculation.
On Bitcoin specifically, Visser pointed to institutional accumulation data that he said cuts against the prevailing bear market narrative. Shares outstanding in BlackRock’s spot Bitcoin ETF reached an all-time high, surpassing levels seen when Bitcoin traded at $126,000, indicating that wealth managers are accumulating on weakness. He cited Morgan Stanley purchasing approximately $200 million worth of Bitcoin over two weeks as further evidence that traditional finance is building positions quietly rather than waiting for price confirmation.
Visser believes Bitcoin could reach 3% to 5% allocations in client portfolios as the asset demonstrates utility beyond price appreciation. He frames the current period as a silent IPO phase, where early holders are distributing coins into a broader institutional base, suppressing volatility in the short term but laying the groundwork for a much larger addressable market over the next decade.
Current asset price parabolas in the technology sector are linked to real demand for AI inference, not speculative froth. Visser argued that the hyperscalers, the large cloud and data centre operators, are not overbuilding. They are worried about obsolescence and racing to avoid being left behind in a compute arms race where the penalty for falling short is existential. That demand imbalance, where orders are running at multiples of what even the most optimistic forecasters projected, is what justifies elevated valuations in AI infrastructure stocks.
The connection to Bitcoin is structural rather than speculative. Rising energy demand from AI could increase the value of energy-linked digital assets, persistent AI-driven inflation pressures may strengthen demand for hard assets, and institutional capital continues rotating into Bitcoin through ETFs. Visser holds gold, silver, Bitcoin, and Ethereum together as a portfolio hedged against the inflation he believes the tokenization wave will itself partially cause, as supply and demand imbalances in tokenized assets create price pressures that traditional monetary policy cannot easily address.
Visser’s summary of the moment is direct. The market is underestimating how quickly tokenization becomes real infrastructure, and those who wait for the headlines to confirm the thesis will be buying assets that have already moved.
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