Dec 10, 2025
The Dawn of Agentic Wealth: the forces transforming investing
Foreword
AI trading lab PiP World today released its 2026 trend forecast, revealing a set of breakthroughs that mark a decisive shift in how AI agents will operate across global markets. Together, these advances signal a future where intelligence becomes the strongest force in wealth creation — where portfolios can think for themselves, money moves with intent, and the tools once reserved for elite hedge funds finally reach everyday investors. This forecast draws on 27 years of retail trade data, millions of agent-vs-market simulations since 2024, and live stress tests across flash-crash and low-liquidity regime
We’re entering an era where agentic AI can deliver upside while you sleep, where crypto evolves into the operating system for intelligent agents, where stablecoins are traded primarily by machines, where investors can build their own self-governing funds, and where one-tap, Shortcut-style AI investing becomes reality.
These innovations arrive at a historic inflection point. One that retail investors can’t afford to ignore. PiP World’s three decades of data, shows that 74–89% of people lose money investing due to predictable human self-sabotage. Institutions, meanwhile, have already surged ahead. AI-driven crypto hedge funds now manage an estimated $82 billion and post average returns nearly double those of traditional strategies.
“Humans aren’t naturally disciplined. So we built AI that is.”
— PiP World Founder and CEO Saad Naja.
When PiP World’s own AI agents were tested under real market stress, they outperformed not because they were fast, but because they were calm, emotionless, and disciplined. Proving that logic-driven autonomy is no longer theoretical. It’s here. And it arrives just as we enter the era of ‘commoditized cognition’ where AI-level thinking could become so widespread and cheap that the only real edge left belongs to traders and platforms using reasoning AI. Higher-order cognition, agents that can think through a trade, not just execute one.
"Recent agent performance gave us a glimpse into the future of markets.
Each agent made independent decisions. Some cut risk, others waited for confirmation and a few leaned into the drawdown. Yet collectively they converged on profitable outcomes. What we’re seeing is the emergence of behavior that’s unique by agent. Evolving trading personalities shaped by real-time conditions, that's the essence of agentic intelligence."
— PiP World Founder and CEO Saad Naja.
As institutions stack layers of autonomous agents, retail investors face a choice: watch the future unfold from the sidelines, or step into it. The winners of this new era won’t just be institutions; they’ll be the individuals brave enough to adopt the tools that let their portfolios think, adapt, and perform without emotional drag. This is the moment to understand the breakthroughs, the opportunities, and the new investing habits that will define the next generation of wealth builders.
“Think of this report as field notes written in the lab by quants training the AI, not the spectators. It’s a practical read for any investor curious about using AI for investing. No coding and no crypto experience required,”
— PiP World Founder and CEO Saad Naja.
What follows is a look at the practical, near-term applications arriving in 2026. Tools designed to help everyday investors build, protect, and grow their portfolios without executional burden. If improving your wealth position is a priority for 2026, these are the signals to watch.
“If you’re bold enough to lean into the future early, this is your roadmap to the innovations and the winners shaping the next era of investing.”
— PiP World Founder and CEO Saad Naja.
Contents
Foreword
Trend 1 — Agentic AI offers retail investors game-changing upside whilst they sleep
Trend 2 — Crypto becomes the operating system and wallet of choice for intelligent agents
Trend 3 — Stablecoin supremacy: AI agents emerge as the biggest traders of stablecoins
Trend 4 — Agentic Funds: enter the era of “build-a-fund” with real performance benefits
Trend 5 — One-tap AI investing: Apple-Shortcuts simplicity with unlimited intelligence
Closing thoughts
Trend 1
Agentic AI offers retail investors game-changing upside whilst they sleep
In 2025, AI surveys indicate between one in five (19%: eToro) use AI tools for surface level stock picks and over a third (37%) use AI for investment research and advice. But this is still GenAI acting as a reactive helper. Good for heavy computation, not for generating real edge. Unsurprisingly, big AI tends to default to the safest, most generic investing playbook: broad diversification, 90/10 index-bond splits, and predictable tech picks. None of these will deliver the asymmetric gains or accelerated retirement outcomes investors actually seek.
Breakthrough signals
2026 will see an explosion of agentic AI investing services that’ll see AI leveraged as a proactive helper, solving complex, multi-step financial tasks on auto-pilot, with minimal intervention, better and faster than humans. Based on a person's financial goals, Agentic AI will be able to autonomously allocate, earn, and reinvest capital in milliseconds. Watching every market 24/7, spotting risks, debating strategies, and executing without hesitation.
Within months, Symphony’s agentic trading layer was clearing $140 million in transactions, working with 15 of the world’s biggest financial institutions to test self-learning yield and execution agents.
The use case possibilities unlocked
Agentic x Tradfi | When my cash reserve hits XYZ allocate it into growth instruments targeting a 5x uplift by tax year-end |
Agentic x Crypto | If BTC dips under $80,000, purchase using my slush account and convert the position into a productive asset generating a minimum 20% yield |
Risk controls | Set risk caps, trigger alerts on abnormal market behaviour, and activate a one-tap shutdown if thresholds are breached. |
Trend stage
Reinforcement learning models can now simulate thousands of market scenarios to optimize asset allocations. It’s early days for agentic AI in trading for retail investors, it has crossed the chasm from stock picker to near-autonomous day trader. Agentic AI learns and acts faster than any human. It spots what humans miss, predicts the move before it happens, and never second-guesses itself. It’s the ultimate insider, without inflaming the SEC.
Why this trend matters
For decades, investing was about finding an edge. Agentic AI gives retail investors that power for the first time. Retail traders will soon deploy the same logic once reserved for billion-dollar funds. The next outperformers will deploy agentic AI, not track indexes.
Future state: imagine hedge funds in your pocket
Agentic collaboration turns multiple specialised AI agents into a coordinated trading desk that lives inside an investor’s phone. One could hunt for arbitrage, another optimises execution speed, a third predicts momentum before it hits the charts. They learn, share insights, and act on predefined mandates. A personalised, always-on swarm that replaces teams of analysts and quants with purpose-built intelligence.
Winners
The winners will be those who adapt to the limitations the fastest, setting strategic direction and more importantly ruthless controls to ensure they surpass their financial goals.
“Trading floors are going quiet. The next generation of traders won’t shout orders; they’ll train AI agents. The winners won’t just be institutions, they’ll be retail traders who fine-tune their swarms alongside human judgment. We’re entering the agentic arms race. Markets of tomorrow won’t sleep or panic. Agentic AI will learn, evolve, compete, and occasionally conspire, at breakneck speed.”
— PiP World Founder and CEO Saad Naja.
Trend 2
Crypto offers the OS and wallet of choice for intelligent agents to transact
Blockchains and cryptocurrency create the perfect conditions for agents to flourish transforming agents from passive assistants to autonomous economic actors. Where AI provides cognition, blockchain supplies agents with trust, verification, and payment rails. 2026 will mainstream agentic payments giving the capability for AI agents to transact, prove, and exchange value freely to achieve the goals set by their human masters. Crypto creates the operating system for intelligent agents, where the advantage moves from technical execution to the quality of the reasoning and intent expressed.
“Crypto is evolving into the OS for intelligent agents. The winners won’t be the fastest anymore; they’ll be the ones who express the smartest intent.”
— PiP World Founder and CEO Saad Naja.
Breakthrough signals
Google's new Agentic Payments Protocol (AP2), powered by the x402 standard, enables agents to pay for services without subscriptions or API keys. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has argued that these agents won't use Visa or traditional payment rails. they'll use crypto as "digitally native currency." On the institutional side, settlement protocols like Circle's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol and Solana's Blinks facilitate machine-to-machine micropayments for data feeds, API calls, and compute resources. Platforms like Griffain, HeyAnon, and ChainGPT are pioneering abstraction protocols that turn plain-language instructions into complex, multi-chain crypto operations. Instead of scripting transactions or manually navigating wallets, users can simply state their intent and the protocol handles the full sequence of approvals, swaps, bridges, and risk checks behind the scenes.
“Humans get agentic AI to elevate their investing. Agents get secure wallets to act with true autonomy. Crypto gets its first real brain. It’s win-win-win.”
— PiP World Founder and CEO Saad Naja.
The use case possibilities unlocked
Agentic x Tradfi |
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Agentic x Crypto |
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Trend stage
The fusion of decentralized finance and artificial intelligence (sometimes referred as DeAI, DeFAI) grew from approximately $1 billion to over $10 billion in projected market value by year-end, according to various industry trackers.
Why this trend matters
Agentic payments remove the final bottleneck in agentic investing: execution. Agentic payments allow AI agents to move capital autonomously e.g funding trades, rebalancing portfolios, allocating yield, managing risk buffers, without waiting for slow, error-prone human intervention.
Future State: imagine set & forget investing
A future with agentic payments means your portfolio becomes a living system that works for you continuously reallocating, protecting, and compounding your wealth while you sleep. Instead of manually chasing opportunities, rebalancing accounts, or stressing over timing, your financial life becomes autonomous and self-optimising. For anyone pursuing financial independence or FIRE, this is transformational: your money gains the ability to think, act, and grow on its own, accelerating the journey to long-term freedom.
Winners
The winners of agentic payments will be those brave enough to trust intelligent systems to work for them, freeing their time, amplifying their wealth, and stepping into a future where money moves with intention, not inertia.
Trend 3
Stablecoin supremacy — AI Agents become the biggest traders of stablecoins
By 2026, AI agents will account for the majority of stablecoin transaction volume as capital automation accelerates. Trading agents will leverage USDC, USDT, and emerging AI-native stablecoins as their preferred settlement currencies due to their liquidity, programmability, and global acceptance.
Breakthrough signals
Autonomous agents are already demonstrating significant market presence, with stablecoin yield optimizers like Giza managing over $30 million in Assets Under Agent, processing $150 million weekly, and executing 30,000+ autonomous transactions daily.
On the Gnosis chain, 20-59% of all Safe transactions, depending on the month, are now executed autonomously rather than by humans, signalling a rapid shift toward agent-driven financial activity. Wallets are increasingly acting on delegated logic, scheduled rules, and automated services. This is early proof that crypto rails are evolving into a native environment for intelligent agents.
The use case possibilities unlocked
Institutional-grade cash management on autopilot. In practical terms, retail investors get higher returns, lower risk, and a financial system that works for them continuously, without requiring the technical skill or constant vigilance that stablecoin management demands today.
Faster, cheaper yields | AI agents can instantly route funds to the highest-quality stablecoin yields across chains. |
Smarter cash management | Idle stablecoins automatically earn yield or shift to safer assets without any manual action. |
Optimised cross-chain transfers | gents move funds across chains via the safest, fastest, lowest-cost routes, removing user error entirely. |
Instant response to market shocks | Agents immediately rebalance into safer assets during depegs or crunches, shielding investors from major losses. |
Automated dollar-cost averaging | Agents automatically convert stablecoin inflows into investments based on market conditions and personal goals. |
Trend stage
“In the not so distant future the biggest user of stablecoins is going to be AI,” Mike Novogratz (source: Bloomberg TV)
Why this trend matters
When intelligent agents manage liquidity, hunt yield, and protect capital around the clock, stablecoins stop being passive cash and become an active engine of wealth. It means a future where your money is always working, always optimising, always safeguarding.
“Soon, the deepest and smartest liquidity in stablecoins won’t come from hedge funds or exchanges. It will come from AI agents compounding 24/7 with zero friction.”
— PiP World Founder and CEO Saad Naja.
Future state: imagine Stablecoins, the new agent-to-agent currency
The next stablecoin wars won't be fought between issuers, but between AI swarms competing for yield, speed, and transaction priority. Stablecoins will become the reserve currency of AI economies, powering autonomous agent-to-agent trade, investment, and coordination at planetary scale.
Winners
When agents manage the flows, stable coins may become safer, more productive, and more valuable to hold.
Trend 4
Agentic Funds, enter the era of build-a-fund with benefits
2026 will witness the launch of agentic funds investment vehicles governed by networks of AI trading agents operating under transparent, on-chain rules rather than human portfolio managers. It’s the cleanest illustration of a fund where humans set intent, and agents run the mission.
Unlike traditional hedge funds with static strategies and quarterly rebalancing, agentic funds will continuously adapt using swarms of specialized AI agents that interpret sentiment, macro data, and on-chain flows in real time. These funds combine DeFi composability with AI autonomy, issuing tokens representing real-time slices of evolving investment intelligence.
Breakthrough signals
Early prototypes position agentic funds as the next evolution of asset management — self-governing, transparent, and operating 24/7. In August 2025, JPMorgan Asset Management committed $500 million to Numerai, a hedge fund powered by crowdsourced machine-learning models.
The use case possibilities unlocked
Retail investors can build their own fund mandates, for example:
Global Micro-Event Volatility Capture Index | Captures short-lived volatility pockets triggered by micro-events |
Alpha Fund | Discovering new alpha continuously |
AI Arbitrage Fund | Tracking clusters of autonomous AI agents in XYZ narrow field e.g. arbitrage |
Interplanetary Fund | Tracking breakthrough space startups e.g. asteroid mining, defence, space waste |
Trend stage
Numerai’s hedge fund delivered 25.45% net returns in 2024 with a 2.75 Sharpe ratio, outperforming many traditional quant funds. Indicating AI-driven hedge funds continue to emerge attracting major institutional capital.
“The next great funds won’t come from Wall Street. They’ll be imagined by retail investors and executed flawlessly by autonomous agents,”
— PiP World Founder and CEO Saad Naja.
Why this trend matters
Agentic funds could finally give retail investors access to portfolio-changing upside from custom built funds. Finally retail gets to invest in high-performing, crowd-designed agentic funds that were once closed to insider networks and privileged deal flow.
Future state: imagine build-a-fund for any mandate
Imagine a Global Micro-Event Volatility Capture Index (GMVCI) fund that captures short-lived volatility pockets triggered by micro-events (e.g. sudden liquidity gaps, or order-book anomalies) using intra-minute resolution. Expect the first AI-native fund indexes tracking clusters of autonomous investment intelligences rather than traditional companies or sectors.
Winners
Retail investors are the winners: they can build any fund they imagine, and agentic AI can make it perform.
Trend 5
Apple Shortcuts for AI investing
Agents are beginning to read unstructured financial data, interpret nuance in market conditions, and make dynamic allocation decisions, pulling investing closer to ‘Apple Shortcuts for investing.’ In 2026 multi-agent interoperability will be the next major unlock for users to move from single-model tools to workflow-native AI. The Google–BCG study estimates that 70% of AI’s future value will come from multi-step, agent-orchestrated workflows. Major AI platforms are now building native agent frameworks, echoing how mobile ecosystems only became useful once apps could interact.
“When investing becomes a Shortcut, we erase the friction that held millions back. The only thing investors need to bring to the table is imagination.”
— PiP World Founder and CEO Saad Naja.
Breakthrough signals
OpenAI’s multi-agent primitives, Google’s Agent Builder, and Microsoft’s AutoGen now let agents delegate tasks, cross-check outputs, and co-execute workflows. Early pilots show 40–80% reductions in manual steps. The same pattern is emerging in trading where idea-generation, risk calibration, and order execution agents operate as one logic chain.
The use case possibilities unlocked
AI workflows will handle complex scenarios by processing unstructured data, understanding nuances, and even making dynamic decisions. Breakthroughs in coordination are pushing AI toward ‘Apple Shortcuts for workflows.’
Shortcuts
Tap or Voice prompt | Workflow | Automated investing execution |
“Position me for earnings season” | Earnings-Season Reaction Workflow | AI agents analyze earnings transcripts rebalances your portfolio toward sectors with positive forward momentum |
“Find and rotate into the strongest crypto theme” | Tactical Crypto Rotation Workflow | AI agents scan developer activity, funding rates, liquidity flows, whale movements, L2 congestion - identify regime changes and automatically rotate capital between BTC, ETH, and high-conviction alts — adjusting positions intraday based on micro-signals |
Trend stage
Gartner forecasts that 40% of enterprise applications will feature task-specific AI agents by 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025, making interoperability critical for market development. The same foundation required for research agents, risk agents, and execution agents to coordinate inside a trading stack. Researchers at UC Berkeley and University College London are now mapping what they call the ‘agentic web’: “a future where AI agents become the primary users of the internet, not humans.”
Why this trend matters
It turns the entire opaque financial system into something anyone can direct with a single intention. With clear commands like ‘protect me,’ ‘grow this,’ or ‘find strength’ that trigger sophisticated chains of research, risk analysis, and execution. For the first time, retail investors can access the kind of coordinated, multi-agent workflows that only elite trading desks once had, transforming investing from a chore into a superpower.
Future state: imagine your killer investing shortcut
Imagine rebalancing a portfolio, rotating into momentum plays, harvesting tax losses, or deploying a volatility hedge. All triggered by a single tap like an Apple shortcut, with AI handling the entire multi-step workflow behind the scenes.
Winners
The winners will be the investors who create the shortcuts others copy. The ones who imagine new investing habits and let AI execute them flawlessly across the full range of instruments their portfolio needs.
Reader Tip: If you do one thing in 2026, define your agentic intent policy (goals, risk, rules) before you switch the autonomy on
Closing words
For retail investors, this forecast signals more than collapsing friction, it marks the moment sophisticated, always-on investing becomes accessible to everyone. Agentic AI, crypto-native rails, stablecoin liquidity, self-building funds, and one-tap workflows bring retail closer than ever to the kind of autonomous capital management once reserved for institutions. We didn’t build AI to replace investors. We built it to remove their worst habits
The future of agentic markets is already visible
PiP World operates one of the world’s first agentic trading labs using 27 years of retail trading data from lead-backer Exinity’s 8 million retail traders and 295 million real trades. Since 2024, the company has run millions of agent-vs-market experiments, observing how reasoning agents behave under stress: volatility shocks, cross-chain liquidity shifts, stablecoin dominance, fluctuating execution layers. The breadth and continuity of these experiments give PiP World a rare, early view of how autonomous finance is forming, even if institutions have yet to formally acknowledge the trend.
Enter the Dawn of Intelligent Wealth
We now stand at the threshold of a fundamental reimagining of capital. Autonomous agents, programmable money, stablecoin liquidity, self-governing fund structures, and decentralized execution layers are converging into the first genuinely intelligent market system — one that operates continuously, learns relentlessly, and compounds without emotional drag.
Crypto is becoming the clearest proving ground for this evolution. It is where agents transact natively, where stablecoins function as machine money, and where next-generation fund structures can be deployed without the constraints of legacy infrastructure.
In a world entering the era of commoditised cognition, where baseline AI intelligence becomes cheap, abundant, and no longer a differentiator, the only edge that will matter is reasoning: agents that can think through a trade, not merely execute one.
By 2026, the real question will no longer be whether AI should manage capital, but whether humans alone ever truly could. Financial consciousness is emerging: capital that thinks, allocates, and evolves in partnership with the agents steering it.
Experimental sandboxes like PiP World show this future taking shape today. Investors are already beginning to interact with these systems in their earliest, most formative stages. This is the dawn of intelligent wealth — capital trained, shaped, and deployed by intelligence that compounds far faster than any human ever could.
“We’ve built AI that amplifies human intelligence. Our swarm doesn’t just execute trades — it teaches investors to think like institutions while handling the computational heavy lifting no human could do alone,”
— PiP World Founder and CEO Saad Naja.
Through its agentic simulations, multi-agent coordination research, and behaviour-driven experiments, PiP World provides one of the earliest windows into how intelligent capital may ultimately operate. For retail investors, early participation offers not just opportunity — but a genuine chance to help shape the future of agentic finance.
About PiP World
PiP World is an AI lab pioneering AI agents that give anyone the edge. The swarm of specialised AI agents compresses a high-performing trading desk into an intuitive AI trading experience that’ll guide any investors' next move. Transforming 295 million retail trades and real-time data into an agentic AI platform called ‘AI Swarm Intelligence’. PiP World’s ‘The Hedge Fund in Your Pocket’ AI experiences bridge the gap between institutional discipline and retail access. Built on 27 years of evidence. Designed to intercept failure before it happens. Turning market speculation into a structured, evidence-based collaboration between humans and AIs. At the dawn of intelligent wealth PiP World makes sophisticated AI trading accessible for all. Try Market Mavericks in open beta at pip.world/mavericks/play and follow @PiP_World, @MavAgents PiP.World, for the latest updates.