Catenaa, Thursday, August 27, 2026-Blockchain transaction activity could increase as much as 100-fold as tokenized financial markets expand and artificial intelligence agents begin trading autonomously, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan said.
Hougan outlined the forecast in an August18 investor memo examining what he considers three areas where crypto markets may be underestimating future growth.
His most aggressive projection concerns transaction counts.
Hougan said investors often value blockchains using current transaction levels from traditional markets. That approach may fail to account for two structural changes: assets moving onchain and software agents operating continuously.
US stocks currently trade during regular market hours from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern time on weekdays.
That creates roughly 33 trading hours each week.
Tokenized equities operating continuously on blockchain infrastructure could instead remain available for 168 hours a week, more than five times the current trading window.
Hougan cautioned that five times more trading hours would not automatically produce five times greater trading volume.
AI could change that calculation.
Autonomous agents could continuously monitor investment portfolios, respond to market movements and execute transactions without waiting for human investors to log in or markets to reopen.
Combining round-the-clock markets with automated trading could increase stock transaction counts tenfold relatively easily, Hougan argued.
He said scenarios involving increases of 50 or even 100 times were conceivable.
The argument goes beyond equities.
AI agents could eventually initiate payments, rebalance portfolios, move collateral and interact with decentralized applications on behalf of individuals or businesses.
That creates the possibility of economic activity increasingly occurring machine-to-machine.
Blockchain networks could benefit because many generate revenue from transaction fees.
Even if individual transaction fees decline as networks become more efficient, Hougan argued that much larger transaction volumes could outweigh falling fees.
Payments may experience a similar effect if AI-controlled software begins initiating routine transactions automatically.
The thesis therefore connects two technology trends that have largely developed separately: asset tokenization and autonomous AI.
Tokenization moves financial instruments onto programmable blockchain rails.
AI agents could supply a new category of users able to interact with those rails continuously.
Hougan also argued that investors are underestimating the markets blockchain applications could eventually address.
Crypto applications are commonly valued according to the digital assets they serve today.
But platforms originally designed for cryptocurrencies could eventually handle tokenized stocks, bonds, real estate and other traditional assets.
Hougan used decentralized exchange Uniswap as an example.
He estimated the crypto market at roughly $2 trillion, compared with about $150 trillion in global equities and $350 trillion in bonds.
If those traditional assets increasingly become tokenized, the potential market available to blockchain applications could become far larger than the crypto sector that created them.
Hougan said the same logic could apply to platforms including Hyperliquid, lending protocol Aave and oracle infrastructure provider Chainlink.
His argument does not assume those platforms will capture traditional financial markets.
Instead, he contends current valuations may not fully reflect the possibility that blockchain infrastructure will eventually process assets far beyond cryptocurrencies.
Hougan’s second argument challenges another long-standing expectation: that established financial companies will automatically dominate digital assets once they enter the sector.
He pointed to stablecoins as evidence that this has not always happened.
Tether and Circle together control about 88% of the stablecoin market, according to figures cited by Hougan, while PayPal holds roughly 1%.
He also cited Coinbase’s position in US cryptocurrency custody and the scale of offshore perpetual futures markets relative to CME’s crypto derivatives business.
Traditional finance has succeeded in areas closer to its established business.
Hougan cited BlackRock’s position in spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds as an example.
But he argued that crypto-native companies often retain advantages in products built specifically around blockchain users because they move faster and already possess established customer bases.
The transaction-growth forecast builds on Hougan’s broader argument about how crypto networks may eventually be valued.
In an earlier August memo, he argued that protocols were increasingly generating revenue and returning economic value to token holders, potentially making conventional financial measures more relevant to crypto valuations.
The latest thesis adds transaction scale to that equation.
If tokenization brings trillions of dollars in traditional assets onchain, and AI agents dramatically increase how frequently those assets move, blockchain networks could process far more economic activity than today’s transaction figures imply.
Bitwise’s own third-quarter market review said tokenized asset value had already increased 45% this year to about $33 billion. It also reported Ethereum transaction activity at roughly 13 times its level during the second quarter of 2022.
Hougan’s 10-to-100-fold projection remains a scenario rather than a forecast with a timetable.
Whether it materializes depends on tokenization adoption, regulation, AI-agent deployment and whether investors actually use continuous markets more frequently.
But the argument points toward a potentially different blockchain economy.
Instead of humans occasionally submitting trades and payments, software could become one of the largest generators of onchain transactions.
