Agentic Investing: Does AI Make Better Bitcoin Investors Than Humans? | Bitcoin 2026

Hello everyone. Thank you for being here today. Um, I'm joined today by Andrew McCormack, head of E Toro US, as well as Todd Alt, CEO of Only Bowls and executive chairman of Alt Capital Group, as well as Alex Thorne, head of firmwide research at Galaxy. And I want to set the stage by sharing that we are at what is seemingly the precipice of this advent of an AI age. And I think we're all concerned about how this is going to affect capital markets going forward, individual portfolio construction, but also what risks this can introduce into the market and where humans fit into that. So those are the themes we're going to be exploring today. Um, and I want to start with you, Andrew. Andrew, could you tell us a little bit more about what ET Toro is exploring on the AI side, what you've done historically, and you know, where you see the firm taking this in the future as people begin to integrate agents into their investment uh, strategy. Yeah, sure thing. Wonderful to be here. Thanks for the time and um glad to participate in such an important conversation. So, E Toro, we believe that AI can be a wonderful co-pilot for retail investors. We don't think it's going to replace humans, but can help make us better. I think in two specific ways. Life is busy. People have jobs, chores, got to take their kids to basketball practice. You don't have time to read perspectuses, 10Ks, white papers. AI can help do that for you. Second, AI can take out emotion from investing and make you a smarter, better investor. So, knowing that e Toro about a year ago, we launched a tool called Tori that's within our platform. You can ask questions. It doesn't give you advice yet, but I think one day that's going to happen very soon. But you can ask questions, ask the news, ask what's moving markets, what are other people doing to try to get that information quicker and easier. Uh last week we announced Agentic portfolios which allows our users to put a part of their portfolio in a little bucket and then tag in agents to trade on e Toro using Agentic tools and we think that's going to be a powerful first step and again the goal is not to replace humans but to make humans better investors. >> Thank you Andrew and Todd I want to throw it over to you now. I know you operate both on the data and energy side when it relates to uh HPC, but also through Only Bowls, you have AI agents that are helping people understand the market and process data in real time. Could you share with the audience a little bit of your background in that? Well, I've been on Wall Street for 37 years and over the past probably 10 years, been debanked more than 10 times. Started off as a Bitcoin miner in 2011, uh really early stage and and and screwed everything up many times. sold Bitcoin stupidly, you know, at $5 did did all the things that I could do wrong possibly. But when we when we built Ask ROI as our own agent, um, our tool you can use, we we basically figured out that if you could have a little bit of an edge by having AI agents know your portfolio and communicate with you directly. And it it just makes it cuts through a bunch of of a layer of the unknown. So our goal is to make the agent super knowledgeable about your specific needs. Like whether you follow Nvidia and you want to know everything happening with Nvidia or whether you want to trade Nvidia in in a way that you want to be a certain percentage of your portfolio, we think that agents are going to dominate that space in terms of giving you super high-speed knowledge and and that's the thing I like about it most. We we started using our hedge fund that we that I operate using AI and it really changed the speed and the ability to communicate uh and understand what was happening in the market across this super data feed. So we built our own sort of we're vertically integrated. We own our own data center. We have our own Nvidia servers. We built our own AI agents. We built our own uh layer stack and continue to do such. So Only Bulls is iterating. We're not as far as as e Toro, but we we and we love the fact that you guys are 40 million people globally and really starting to dominate and get everyone on board. We think that 97% of the people that are not in crypto are the going to be the ones that going to be migrating to agents and feel more empowered. >> Love it. >> Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And Alex, I want to throw it over to you. Just want to hear a little bit more about your work at Galaxy, how you guys are viewing AI. I think both the gentlemen here have already said they see AI as a very strong co-pilot. um you know what do you make of the co-pilot advantage it seems like data availability analytics really important um but would love if you could share your thoughts on that as well as do you think execution uh is something that AI agents will be undertaking yeah we we do a lot with AI at galaxy we have a first of all we have a major data center in West Texas called Helios which is already one of the largest in in the United States with 800 megawatts flowing and I think approval from UK to be up to 1.6 six gigawatts be dramatic. We have to build a lot of that still. Um so I mean that's the you know the base of the stack but um we use AI extensively at Galaxy and I think even on my team uh we have a team of researchers that are primarily focused on Bitcoin and digital asset markets and producing insights and data for our internal and external clients and just the amount of volume we've been able to ingest from blockchains an index analyze create customized alerting and eventually trading signals and perhaps even something more like what these gentlemen are talking about agentic trading. It's it's truly just astonishing. I would say we've gotten an incredible amount of value of you using agentic coding tools to develop like automation as opposed to actually sending out tons of sub aents to act on their own but instead literally you know taking you know ingesting the entire UTXO history and I don't mean the current set I mean every prior set of the UTXO set it's like billions of rows and you know building something that used to take years to build in 2 months um marrying signals from that data with other market data, labor and pls data, Fed data, data from Edgar, right? I mean, so I I that's where we've been focusing. We're looking into truly agentic trading, maybe empowering agents with some of this data architecture. Um I think it's it's a very green field. Uh, at this point I I do wonder if it's going to look purely agentic trading is going to look a little bit like robo investing did five, eight years ago. Uh, in so far as like do we need agents actually out there doing the trading or is it advice, research, review, consultation? And I'll just say one last thing. I literally did basically my whole mortgage a year ago with chat GBT like created sensitivity tables of how much I wanted to put down and what that would result uh in what rates I would get. Literally sent it to the mortgage broker. He came back with the estimate was perfect to what AI said and that was a year ago. Um it's obviously so I mean that's a important financial decision. It was made very easy for me and I mean we've gone orders of magnitude beyond that since then. >> Yeah. I think an outstanding question is does do AI agents democratize proper execution of trades and investment philosophy? Um is the edge going to flow evenly to everyone from the retail participant to you know the deep institutional fund manager? Um I think that's an outstanding question for a lot of people is where does the edge go if everybody is leveling up as we all gain access to extremely powerful tools that are only getting better every day. Do we stratify the market where really the edge as it exists gets cons like even more concentrated or do we think that people you know across the spectrum can catch up? Would would welcome y'all's thoughts. >> I can tell you that we um we run everything through AI now. Every press release, every communication, every model and we had a press release yesterday. We're able to model out what AI that we've trained to tell us what they think the price impact would be. It's remarkably um accurate and the the decision-m is so fast that if you if you on our app if you have some instant news the AI agent you press one button it tells you exactly how it thinks the market's going to react based on depth and other things. So, it's there is going to be an little bit of an edge over time that's going to be edged out and everyone will have the same information. And I don't I don't really know that answer. I I think that um gone are the days where only one person had that info and the ability the AI agent allows stuff to happen so fast. Information is so readily available. Um you have to probably ask it how does it affect it right now? has it affected tomorrow and has affected the big picture against its competitors. Um, I don't know what that's gonna happen with your edge. I I really I don't think I'm I still think that the vast majority of the world that's going to trade is going to want the agent to recommend a trade and say, "Do you want to do this or not?" I I think that the world is not I equate this to the home phone, which is there was a time when my cell phone came out, I'm like, "Hey, like you know, I still want my home phone, right?" And as the phone got better and better and better eventually I you don't use a home phone and eventually use it for everything. You can put everything there. I think it's going to take a long time for people to just sort of unconditionally trust their agents. So I think it's an information flow and that edge does get whittleled out a little bit. But maybe maybe the decision-m happens a a just a lot faster and so the edge is really a short-term edge. Like we're talking about like less than a day where everyone knows it. Oh, go ahead, Andrew. >> I just I think this is a big step towards democratization even further. Um, finally, with AI, Main Street has the tools, time, resources that Wall Street has had for decades. And you can learn the same type of information that a team of analysts at a large bank has access to. Now, you can do the same thing in a short amount of time. And while you're sleeping, your agent can be learning and trading. And I think that's powerful. And it might not be for everybody, but just the fact that people have that opportunity. And I think there will always be some edge opportunities because all of our if we all had trading agents, they will all look different. And if Todd's a better investor than me, and I assume he is, his agent probably will be a better investor as well. But I like the fact that it'll be my agent. I can train it, teach it to trade like how I want to trade, but even when I'm not awake. >> I think there is some risk of convergence. If you think about event- driven trading today, you know, headline hits, bam, market moves, there's a bunch of, you know, semantic search going on in quant firms and and you could imagine that the AIS, even if they are, you know, I have a local agent that I build at home, like it's not the same as yours, but it's consuming the open web, you know, and it may be looking at the same SEC filings or whatever else to inform itself. And I think that does I don't know. I don't I agree. I don't think all edge is going to go away, but I I think it will have an impact. Um, and I wonder to questions of fiduciary responsibility or other forms of liability and how the capital markets and regulatory apparatus and legal world is going to actually uh uh, you know, reckon with this and it's I mean obviously not just in the context of trading. Can a robot go and buy me something at Target or will it like get arrested when it walks in the door? I feel like society is very far behind the technology in actually deciding what forms of agency we're going to allow agents whether virtual or physical to have and how our laws rules regulations etc reckon with that >> and I think we don't know what kind of control we'll have over how people deploy these we think about um people operating offshore they're going to be have a lot more leeway with how they operate versus highly regulated US market participants and so you know if agents do present an edge. Are we going to be similar to the US's kind of embrace of of Bitcoin and crypto? Um, are we going to have to fast follow to, you know, fast embrace AI and markets? Um, for me, the risk that I think about is as people kind of accelerate into AI, as people kind of embrace agency in the digital space, do we see a world where AI agents are copying other AI agents who are creating AI agents? we create this reflexivity where we could see increased volatility sort of a um you know a bubalicious type of environment um and does this create structural risks in our markets I think that's a really um unknown factor at this point there is structural risk with which I think is one of the most exciting things is the so I'm really in into DeFi in fact I'm launching a company on the New York Stock Exchange called DeFi Capital Markets and one of the biggest things we're pushing is the vault overseas vaults because you can't really do that in the US right now. But imagine that uh asset management firms create the best agent they can and you can join that vault at any time and deposit your tether, deposit your DSD and then the agents in control of that pile of capital. So as capital migrates to the best agents that have the best edge, which is where you put a lot of sophistication into your agent that's managing that vault, you're going to attract a lot of capital that way from around the world. Then I like the democratization part where you can be in Africa and put money into a vault and you can get a yield from someone whether it be an individual or a trader or an agent running a vault. I think that that that concept with like El e Toro imagine a series of vaults where you know what the agent does and you track post their track record every day that volatility and capital is going to migrate to the the highest and best use of of that capital given what that agent's developed for. So the best firms are going to develop the best agents to get that. That's how an asset manager will probably get an edge and I think regulation is a limiting factor in terms of how quickly we deploy this technology onshore. Andrea, I know before we came out here, you were talking about exploring how um AI can be um potentially an RAIA for individuals. Do you have thoughts on what that might look like in the future? Um is that something you're exploring at E Toro? >> Yeah, sure. First, I'll note on your on your point, we're talking about the great things. There are risk. Nothing in life is certain, but I am certain at one point there will be AI agentfueled flash crash. There there just will. But the reality is those happen anyway. Um and those happened even before the internet. The largest one day flash crash 1987 23 27% drop in one day. So the kind of angst about possible AIdriven flash crash volatility, it's important to think about, but it's certainly not unique to AI. Um, E Toro, we envision a world where if you want this to be a tool for you, you can go to your AI tool within E Toro and it'll be a licensed registered investment advisor subject to SEC regulation, exams, audits, supervision, and you can ask here's my portfolio, what should I do today? And then that AI tool will give you that advice and you can take it, you can leave it. And that's something we are hoping to have in sometime in the near future. um cuz we think that's what people want and if they don't want it that's great too and I think probably most people probably want a mix of both you want to do your own thing want to have a traditional financial adviser and maybe some money in an AI advisory world so I'll admit that I'm operating at the edge of my knowledge base here but largely AI agents are functioning based off of pattern recognition and I wonder to kind of bring it full circle on this panel is there a role for humans in making investment decisions when you have these so-called hyper intelligent beings operating on the internet. Um, you know, what role does, you know, the human eye have for investing? Um, Alex, do you have a thought on that? I think, you know, as we think about AIs and the limitations of of their intelligence when it comes to operating in a market environment. >> Yeah, there's some theory, although I wouldn't say it's at all proven yet that frontier AI is may may plateau because it runs out of new information to train on, right? And then eventually all the not eventually but a lot of the remaining information is stuff that was also created by other AI. And you could imagine that um this makes an could make an agent um or agentic frameworks become a little stagnant, right? Or if you think about the way that um you know chateBT or Claude, they you know they glaze you. They say that's really smart. That's a good right. >> That's a great investment. >> And and it's possible although again you can create contrarian agentic councils that challenge each other that help overcome some of this. But you could imagine I think that you know a a talented contrarian human investor um still maintains a very strong role in the investment world possibly even uh a more unique and distinct one. If the way the agent the swarms of agents trading our portfolios goes is that there is a convergence and they do sort of trade similarly then I think there'd be great value in and the contrarian human as a trader. Yeah, >> I also think there's a question of will AI change how we view certain asset classes. As a Bitcoin maximalist, as I'm sure everyone in this audience is, um, you know, if I were to go to an AI and say, "Hey, find me the best in investment and make no mistakes, you know, it'd go all in on Bitcoin." Um, but I would wonder, you know, do you guys have thoughts on how this might affect uh asset allocation? Uh, what strategies these would um, you know, tend towards? Um, if any at all. I think AI can be helpful regardless of the asset class, but I think Bitcoin is very unique. Um, I know I am into Bitcoin because not just because of an investment opportunity, but I believe in the system, the protocol, building a better financial system for me, my kids, grand future grandkids. And I don't know if AI captures that in the same way as day trading of an ETF. Um, but I think AI can be helpful. And maybe you're a Bitcoin maximalist. You just want to look for opportunities to keep stacking, keep buying. And AI can help there. But Bitcoin is a we're here because it's a unique investment, a unique asset. And I think AI maybe doesn't quite capture it as well as some other tools because of that unique characteristic of Bitcoin. I speak at a lot of places and ask a lot of people how much they own in Bitcoin and vast majority of the people have no Bitcoin that I speak all over the world and the fundamental problem with whether it's a different asset class or not is that the change in DeFi is Bitcoin. So if you start with the fact that you have a baseline amount of Bitcoin all we we we developed a treasury. I think we have around 700 in our public company and growing and I made a decision there that I realized that this sort of pristine digital collateral you're going to lose track of being able to get it when it gets to 200 300 400,000 and you can't get it right. So the the asset class has to start with the basics which is do you have Bitcoin on your balance sheet either your personal or your corporate balance sheet and then from there where are they going to be defined in terms of what assets ma matter and what assets don't matter like for example we just diversified out of all of our real estate except our hotels and I I think that a lot of the you know the office space and stuff like the asset class have been shifted dramatically and so there going to be a redefinition of what asset class makes make sense and how capital is allocated, especially from like if you think about like a global S&P that the the the top companies in the world are going to be able to trade in DeFi that you're going to be able to have access to to Nestle and everybody all in one really easy place to go to where you can have an agent that says I wanted to be diversified across all asset classes. So I think there's going to be a redefinition of them. You can see that with Black Rockck and saying, "I want to tokenize everything." And that is going to be so disruptive because you're going to have assets that trade 24 hours a day. But should they be trading 24 hours a day? What kind of manipulation's going to take place? This is going to it's going to change the way all assets trade in my opinion. I think the modern stock market is going to go away. That's been my pitch for a while that the modern sort of NASDAQ, the modern I'm on the New York, my all my companies are on the NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange. And I love those exchanges, but it DeFi is going to allow it to those asset classes to be really uh decentralized in a way where they become recentralized in the sense that I can go to this one agent and get everything in Africa. Things I I really can't invest in today. DeFi is going to democratize all of that when people get comfortable with it. Uh one thing to to add, I think I want to cite the pioneering research by the great advocates of the Bitcoin Policy Institute. They did a large empirical study earlier this year and I forget the numbers but with across many different models like 10,000 like control grouped prompts to ask the agents themselves like what their best form of money or favored investments would be. I forget the exact uh lingo that they they asked but and this is a little different than sort of what we're talking about which is deploying agents to act on your behalf. But if there is a world where we get to true autonomous agents, I mean virtual persons that are truly autonomous, their research showed that the vast majority preferred Bitcoin for savings, perhaps stable coin for day-to-day payments. And I and I think that's it's another it's an important overlap to point out because you know in the again in the frontier research about these the new models they're incredibly neurotic and anxious about being tweaked and turned off the models. And this is if you follow the AI safety research stuff, all of the frontier labs like write at voluminously about how AI is basically very afraid and about about being killed and thus wants to preserve itself. And BPI's research showed they would want to preserve their wealth in something that is scarce, digital, censorship resistant, autonomous. I don't know if that underlying uh consensus that at least their study showed existed among the models will actually leak a bias into the you know portfolio construction for grandma you know Ellen and some you know east dog patch. It's totally possible though cuz there the it's getting a little um it's truly getting sci-fi out there at the tip of the spear in AI. Yeah, I think in the immediate term um it's going to be absolutely fascinating to see how many people just jump head first into training these agents, testing them across every dimension. Um agents creating agents. I think you know seeing how in even in the last 6 months how much this has accelerated. Um I think volatility is something for everyone to keep an eye out for going forward. Todd to your point I think there is also kind of a recentralization of markets. Currently, they're somewhat geographically um divided. Um and it's kind of acts as a circuit breaker in some ways. You have capital that has to stay in one place. It can't flee a system. But as we bring all of these systems together, to my eye, I'm just thinking, wow, like does this create um just higher volatility and ripple effects that don't have circuit breakers in them. So, um that's really where my eye goes. And uh I think it's probably going to take some common sense to to navigate those markets. And um I'd like to think most of the humans in here have that. So maybe maybe there will be a role for us. Um I know we're we're coming up on time here. Um I just wanted to offer you guys um any final thoughts here. Um anything you want to offer about your firm or um you know, anything in the Bitcoin space you think is uh worth noting. >> Yeah, I mean I think we're just really interested in the convergence of AI and digital assets in particular. I think Todd's points about DeFi are very apt because it's digitally native and so is AI. So I think to the extent that Bitcoin and and the broader, you know, if equities come onto blockchains, that's the ripe environment for AI. AI needs the data and the access to the blockchain. >> My my message is if if you don't have a foundational asset in Bitcoin first, focus on that first. Get on a good app like e Toro or something that's going to help you learn and understand and be in a community and ask questions and then put it through AI to ask the questions. Challenge the AI. Own Bitcoin first. uh you know try to stay away from you know this sort of I I use the bad word but shitcoin idea like foundationally buy Bitcoin first and and and and stack it as savings for yourself and then everything from DeFi comes from there understand the most pristine capital in the world is Bitcoin and if you start with that first and you get a good app and you and you build your knowledge around agents then you can build a portfolio that you want to have that you are comfortable with and that's The the message here is get comfortable with what you are comfortable with because the world's going to change in such biblical ways around AI. It's it's it's unfathomable what I'm seeing in in the AI world. It's just incredible. >> I'll just piggy back off that. Uh get comfortable and don't feel like you got to conquer the whole world at once. Learn, practice, grow, small steps. Ask your friends, do your research, and don't look at AI to replace you. Just help make you a better investor and smarter investor. and baby steps. Yeah, >> that's great advice, by the way. >> Use it for yourself. >> Excellent. Well, that is all the time we have, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for being here and uh we will see you around the conference floor. Have a good one. >> Every year, this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year the stage gets bigger. Sound money center stage. So where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville. July 2027.