Written by: Billy Bambrough, Forbes
Compiled by: AididiaoJP, Foresight News
Editor's note: Citrini Research analysts published a 79-page research report titled "Breaking The Wall: Has Blockchain Finally Reached Its Moment?" on October 8, 2026. Forbes subsequently wrote a briefing based on the report. This article is compiled on the basis of the Forbes briefing and further supplements some viewpoints from the original report.
BlackRock says the crypto "floodgates" have opened, while Citrini Research recommends exiting mainstream coins and rotating into DeFi protocols and infrastructure stocks
In 2026, AI trading continues to dominate the market, while Bitcoin and crypto assets as a whole remain under pressure. However, the price of Bitcoin has rebounded from below $60,000 in July to above $80,000. At the same time, BlackRock revealed that the "floodgates" for Bitcoin and crypto assets have suddenly opened; one of Wall Street's most feared and influential institutions also said that the crypto market is at an "inflection point." But this inflection point may leave Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP out. Even so, a massive crash could also become a game changer for Bitcoin's price.
Wall Street report: Agentic finance will be built on blockchain
In a 79-page report titled "Breaking the Wall," Citrini Research analysts proposed that AI agents and crypto-based tokenized assets are opening a new paradigm for fundamental crypto investing. They believe that the coming wave of agentic finance will be built on blockchain. Earlier this year, the firm shook the stock market by warning of a global intelligence crisis in 2028.
The report writes that the blockchain industry spent 15 years building something unexpectedly useful in an agentic world: around-the-clock, programmable financial infrastructure that allows assets, ownership, and settlement to coexist in a world that has already converged. AI agents will operate programmatically across applications 24/7, and money and financial assets will eventually do the same. This brings people back to the crypto industry—for most of the past decade, it has looked like an industry with a solution in search of a problem.
Don't just focus on mainstream coins: capital may rotate into DeFi and infrastructure stocks
To bet on agentic finance, the report recommends moving funds away from assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP and into fee-generating DeFi protocols, as well as publicly listed companies focused on infrastructure. The report writes that financial assets are being tokenized and moved on-chain, and traditional finance and the crypto world are converging; at the same time, agents bring a new type of user who does not care about the poor user experience of block explorers.
In Citrini's proposed portfolio, Derive, Lighter, and ether.fi have the highest weights, alongside a basket of stocks including real-world asset tokenization company Securitize, stablecoin issuer Circle, and Bitcoin and crypto exchange Coinbase. The authors state plainly that one cannot assume major coins—especially Bitcoin and Ethereum—will hit all-time highs because of this; even if they do, there are better bets.
The rest of the portfolio includes smaller but well-known tokens such as Ethereum competitor Solana, Hyperliquid's HYPE, lending protocol Aave, and synthetic dollar protocol Ethena; lesser-known tokens tied to platforms such as Aerodrome, Maple, Pendle, and Ondo Finance are also on the list.
Who has been leading gains over the past year
Price performance also supports this judgment. Over the past year, Derive has surged 1,300%, while most other tokens on the list posted double-digit gains, leaving Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP behind.
The researchers also mentioned that an improved regulatory environment for technology, finance, and crypto, as well as the Iran oil crisis, drove the rapid takeoff of Hyperliquid's 24/7 derivatives trading linked to crude oil prices. The report's authors wrote that since then, the adoption of real-world assets (RWA) has clearly accelerated; over the past month, large-scale changes have begun to appear in crypto, which seems to mark an inflection point.
Additional viewpoints from Citrini's original report
Systemic risk of an agentic bank run
The report opens with a "disturbing" scenario exercise: what happens when millions of AI agents continuously and programmatically move idle funds to the institutions or protocols offering the highest yields? Will the source of cheap deposits that traditional banks rely on be continuously drained as a result? Will there be an "agentic bank run"?
The traditional financial system is designed for human users, and humans have brand loyalty, inertia, operational friction, and emotional factors; agents do not care about these things, only pursuing optimal returns, and they can execute around the clock, across institutions, and at extremely low cost. The report points out that once this behavior scales, it could create sustained pressure on banks' funding costs and liquidity, and the current system lacks a design to cope with it. This is not short-term trading advice, but a macro-level warning about the long-term impact of agentic finance.
Internet protocol analogy: blockchain may become "back-end infrastructure"
The report uses the development of the internet as an analogy: most people do not know exactly how HTTPS, TCP, and IP work, but they use them every day without noticing. The authors believe that blockchain may follow a similar path in the future—becoming back-end programmable financial infrastructure directly called by agents, with ordinary users not even needing to understand the underlying technology.
The blockchain industry spent about 15 years building a system that is "always online, programmable, and allows assets, ownership, and settlement to coexist." In the agentic era, these characteristics become highly relevant: agents need to operate 24/7 and move funds and assets across applications without being constrained by traditional finance's business hours or complex manual processes. The report argues that this is the key moment when blockchain truly finds its "reason for existing."
The author's personal on-chain experiment and observations on ecosystem maturity
The report's author mentions having put $1,000 into Coinbase Wallet, originally expecting to encounter a typical "rug-pull" or highly speculative environment, but instead finding that a mature financial application ecosystem far beyond meme coins had already formed on-chain. This includes tokenized Treasuries, equities, options, programmable debt, lending, payments, and yield protocols, with the overall shape increasingly resembling existing traditional finance (TradFi).
This observation supports the report's core judgment: on-chain financial applications have already been quietly developing, and when agentic users arrive, their usability may be further amplified, because agents do not care about poor user experience.
The shift in the core investment question: from "is it legal" to "who captures value"
The report explicitly shifts investors' focus from "is tokenization legal? Can it enter the U.S. market?" to a more substantive question: "When these products eventually enter regulated U.S. markets, who can capture the economic value?"
The focus is not on whether assets are on-chain, but on who can continuously collect fees from trading, lending, payments, yield generation, and clearing. The report argues that the market will ultimately reward protocols and infrastructure that can generate real revenue, rather than simply holding mainstream coins. This is also one of the main reasons it does not assume that Bitcoin and Ethereum will hit new highs because of this theme.
Publicly disclosed portfolio weights and structural characteristics
The crypto basket disclosed in the report (15 tokens) completely excludes Bitcoin and Ethereum, and assigns relatively high weights to emerging derivatives and yield-related protocols, such as Derive, Lighter, and ether.fi at about 10% each, and Aave and Ethena at about 9% each. Derivatives-related targets together account for a relatively high share (about 39%), yield/staking-related about 27%, and blue-chip infrastructure about 26%.
The equity basket is mainly composed of infrastructure and tokenization-related companies (such as Securitize with a relatively high weight, followed by Circle and Coinbase), and does not include MicroStrategy or mining stocks. This structure reflects the report's approach of "focusing on value capture links rather than market beta."
The "Hyperliquid moment" and the inflection point significance of composability of tokenized assets
The report specifically mentions the weekend during the Iran conflict, when on-chain exchanges became one of the few liquid venues able to provide the most accurate crude oil prices, known as the "Hyperliquid moment." Since then, the adoption of real-world assets (RWA) has clearly accelerated.At the same time, tokenized stocks have become composable, able to flow across different applications and chains rather than being confined to a single venue of the issuer (with Robinhood Chain and others leading the way). The report argues that these developments together mark a genuine inflection point, bringing on-chain assets closer to practical financial instruments rather than remaining merely experimental.
Risks and an explicit note that the outlook is not comprehensively bullish
The report is not comprehensively bullish on all crypto assets. It explicitly states that higher on-chain activity or tokenization scale does not automatically drive up the prices of all tokens; investors should focus on the segments that can genuinely capture economic value. The report also emphasizes that agentic finance and tokenization are long-term structural trends, but their transmission to prices takes time and is subject to uncertainties including execution, regulation, and competition.