The forecast hinges on tokenized assets going mainstream and AI agents that trade autonomously on-chain
Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan thinks the crypto market is about to get a lot busier. His prediction: blockchain transaction volumes could grow by a factor of 10 to 100 in the coming years, driven by two forces that are already picking up speed.
The first is the tokenization of real-world assets, which is turning everything from US Treasuries to equities into on-chain instruments. The second is the rise of AI agents that can execute trades, manage capital, and make financial decisions without a human clicking “confirm.” Together, Hougan argues, these trends mean investors are badly underestimating the future activity, addressable market, and staying power of crypto-native platforms.
Tokenization is no longer a whitepaper fantasy #
The numbers backing up the tokenization thesis have moved well past the “promising pilot” stage. Tokenized US Treasuries alone have reached $12.88 billion, a figure that would have seemed absurd just a few years ago when the entire concept was largely theoretical.
Ethereum remains the center of gravity for this market, hosting roughly 61.4% of all tokenized assets globally. That slice of the pie represents approximately $206.2 billion in value, making Ethereum the de facto settlement layer for institutions looking to bring traditional finance on-chain.
BlackRock’s BUIDL tokenized money market fund has grown to a supply of around $3 billion. For context, that’s a single product from a single asset manager reaching a scale that rivals many mid-cap crypto protocols. When the world’s largest money manager builds something that big on a blockchain, it’s a signal worth paying attention to.
Ondo Finance, which has emerged as a leading player in the tokenized asset space, has surpassed $2.5 billion in total value locked across its products. The platform specializes in bringing yield-generating instruments on-chain, a category that represents a meaningful shift from the purely speculative trading that dominated earlier crypto cycles.
Even legacy banks are getting involved. JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform has processed over $3 trillion in cumulative transactions, averaging about $7 billion per day. That’s not a crypto startup experimenting with settlement. That’s one of the world’s largest banks routing serious money through blockchain infrastructure.
AI agents as the new market participants #
The second pillar of Hougan’s thesis might be even more transformative. Autonomous AI agents, software programs that can independently analyze markets, execute trades, and manage portfolios, are expected to handle at least 15% of daily financial decisions by 2030.
Think of it like algorithmic trading, but with a much broader mandate and far less human oversight. These agents don’t just follow pre-programmed rules. They can adapt, learn, and interact with DeFi protocols directly. And crucially, they need blockchain rails to operate, because traditional financial infrastructure wasn’t built for machine-to-machine transactions at scale.
The projected scale of this shift is staggering. The broader “agentic economy,” where AI agents handle tasks ranging from trading to governance to capital allocation, could reach $30 trillion. Even if blockchain captures a fraction of that activity, the transaction volume implications are enormous.
This creates a feedback loop that Hougan’s prediction implicitly relies on. More tokenized assets create more things for AI agents to trade. More AI agents trading creates more demand for on-chain infrastructure. More infrastructure makes it easier to tokenize new assets. Rinse, repeat.
The valuation gap #
Hougan’s core message to investors is that current crypto valuations don’t reflect this coming wave of activity. If transaction volumes genuinely increase by 10 to 100 times, the fee revenue flowing to blockchain protocols, particularly Layer 1 networks that serve as settlement layers, would grow proportionally.
The current DeFi ecosystem has a total value locked of approximately $76.06 billion. Stablecoins, which serve as the primary medium of exchange for on-chain transactions, have reached a market cap of around $300.5 billion, with Tether’s USDT accounting for about 61% of that total.
These are the pipes through which Hougan’s predicted transaction surge would flow. If volumes multiply by even the lower end of his estimate, protocols that earn fees on each transaction could see revenue growth that makes current valuations look like bargains.
But there’s a nuance worth noting. Higher transaction volumes don’t automatically translate to higher token prices. Networks need to capture value from that activity, and fee structures across different blockchains vary significantly. Ethereum’s recent struggles with fee revenue despite growing Layer 2 activity illustrate this tension. Volume alone isn’t the whole story.
The competitive landscape matters too. Ethereum’s dominance in tokenized assets gives it a structural advantage, but alternative networks are aggressively courting institutional users with lower costs and faster settlement. If transaction volumes grow 100x, the question of which chains capture that growth becomes the most consequential bet in crypto.
For traditional finance participants, the convergence of TradFi and DeFi creates a different set of calculations. Institutions that have already built on-chain infrastructure, like BlackRock and JPMorgan, are positioned to benefit from the transition. Those still on the sidelines face a decision that gets more expensive to defer with each passing quarter. The AI agent dimension adds another layer of complexity. If machines become significant market participants, the strategies that work for human traders may need to evolve. Competing against software that can analyze thousands of tokenized assets simultaneously, execute trades in milliseconds, and operate around the clock is a different game entirely.
Whether Hougan’s 10-100x range proves accurate remains to be seen. But the underlying forces he’s pointing to, institutional tokenization and AI-native finance, are already reshaping how value moves through the global financial system. The question isn’t really whether blockchain transactions will grow. It’s whether the market is pricing in just how much.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Estefano Gomez. For more information on how we create and review content, see our