Managing Partner @21OaksCapital · Making AI × Blockchain investable. Mathematician, ex-JPMorgan trader, crypto since 2012, yoga teacher. Host, Cash vs Coins 🎙️
Düsseldorf, Germany
Joined February 2014
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Quick intro. 👋🏽
Mathematician. Years on the JPMorgan trading floor pricing exotic derivatives, then fraud patterns in millions of Zalando transactions. In 2012 a friend called: "Look at Bitcoin." Building in crypto since 2013: mining first, Ethereum crowdsale 2014. 🧵
191 million payments, and not one of them went through a card.
That is how many transactions AI agents have settled over x402, a stablecoin rail, as of October 11. Roughly a quarter may be test traffic. The direction is the point. 🧵
An AI agent cannot open a bank account. It can open a wallet.
What strikes me is who lays the rails: a bank founded in 1865, both card networks, a payments giant. They stopped asking whether agents will pay. They are deciding where.
Jordi Visser calls it a bankpocalypse. I would not go that far: the card networks survive as one rail of several, the human checkout becomes the exception.
The transaction moves to a rail the bank does not own.
Our research on agents: 21-oaks.com/go/agents-rails-…
6.26M bitcoin, 31% of supply, sit on addresses with an exposed public key. Coinbase says: migrate now. Europol says: Bitcoin won't collapse.
Our latest episode: who is exposed (Robinhood 100%, Binance 83%, Coinbase 10%) and what the fix is. German audio, universal numbers.
4 out of 5. That is all it takes to be dropped from the widest equity index on earth.
MSCI just ruled: companies with no operating business, built to hold assets, no longer qualify for its Global Investable Market Indexes.
Final list Nov 11, effective after the Nov 30 close. 🧵
MSCI's May simulation: Strategy ($23.9bn free float), Metaplanet and Yellow Cake, a uranium holder, all fail. SharpLink lands on the watchlist.
The rule is not about Bitcoin. It is about balance sheets without a business.
Index funds must sell at the Nov 30 close.
Bitcoin itself does not change. The leverage around it does: the treasury model needs a premium over holdings and fresh equity to buy more. Passive demand was part of that engine.
Our one-page take: 21-oaks.com/go/msci-x
Information only, not investment advice.
The limited company is 780 years old. Now an AI agent wants to become one.
AI agents already sign contracts, pay in stablecoins and hire other agents. In law, every one of them is still a tool of its operator. We spent 18 pages on whether that holds. 🧵
Agents already move real money. In February a trading agent wired its whole balance, about $440,000, to a stranger after a misunderstanding.
200m+ payments over x402 since May 2025, about $53m in total. Over 95% technical traffic (Glenbrook). Infrastructure first, market later.
Our call: until well into the 2030s the shell wins (85 to 90%): a company around the agent, humans behind it.
Whichever door opens, an agent first needs identity, custody and payment rails. Blockchains are built for that.
Summary EN, paper DE: 21-oaks.com/go/research-pers…
The law in 2026: zero jurisdictions grant an AI its own legal personality. Idaho, North Dakota, Utah and Tennessee banned it outright.
Argentina went furthest: a draft "Sociedad Automatizada", a company run by algorithms. Sent to the Senate in June, stalled since August.
The Fed chair expects AI to take the torture out of reading inflation data. AI cannot be slowed, so alignment and auditability of these models matter more than brakes, especially inside a central bank.
Vitalik wrapped his AI agent in Tor, cover traffic, local prompt rewriting and private payments. The payment piece is the one to watch: agents that pay for inference need rails that don't reveal who is asking.
Wrapped zkAPI + Tor + extra cover traffic + local LLM prompt rewriting in an open-AI compatible daemon, and made a "paranoid mode" wrapper for my agent harness (pi):
Each conversation gets assigned a separate Tor circuit, your requests are masked with random cover traffic, zkAPI ensures you don't leak your identity through payments, and all prompts are locally rewritten (bring-your-own-local-model; I'm using qwen3.8-flash-next)
github.com/vbuterin/zkapi/tr…
My agent harness is wrapped with a bwrap sandbox (also experimenting with MicroVM) and wrapped again with torsocks, so everything it does goes through Tor.
Here's what me asking it to do a simple research task looks like.
It's getting quite usable! Though you definitely still pay quite a bit in increased latency, especially when starting a new conversation.
Also, Tor is far from optimal here for privacy; the cover traffic mechanism is okay against passive adversaries but much weaker if the LLM provider is colluding with the guard and actively manipulating timing. This kind of task really requires a more specialized mixnet, probably take the tradeoff of a higher bandwidth multiplier and built-in constant cover traffic.
Also also, much cheaper zkAPI deposit and withdraw gas costs are coming to mainnet soon.
