Raoul Pal The Journey Man · Oct 1, 2026 · recorded Sep 23, 2026 · 1h 17m · 64m saved
With Ran Neuner, Co-Founder of OnChain Capital and Crypto Banter
Ran Neuner says his crypto portfolio is worth more today than at the peak of the last bull market, at the end of 2024. He says the reason is that crypto has finally found uses people pay for.
Most investors date crypto's bull markets to 2017 and 2021. Neuner says those were promises, like internet stocks in 1999, and that the real one is starting now: protocols earn millions of dollars a day, and AI agents will need blockchains to pay each other.
"It's the world's biggest casino having a baby with the world's biggest social network." — Ran Neuner
Neuner spent his early career in advertising studying why people buy, came into crypto in 2014, and now hosts a daily show five or six days a week, backed by about 10 researchers.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 1 hour 17 minutes of audio, 13 minutes of reading.
Here are the 13 arguments that matter.
Key Takeaways
Neuner says 2017 and 2021 were not real bull markets, because nobody used the products
The Ethereum-to-Bitcoin price ratio has broken out for the first time in 9 years, which he reads as product-market fit
Trading on blockchains combines a casino with a social network, and he expects most human trading to end up there
AI agents need payments that need no trust between strangers and settle immediately, which he says only blockchains provide
A BlackRock report published that morning made the same argument
Pump Fun earns $1–5M a day and Hyperliquid $3–5M, which is why he calls this a real bull market
Protocols that earn revenue but don't yet return it to token holders are the most undervalued tokens
Fully diluted valuation misprices tokens; what counts is buying pressure against a small free float
Robinhood's chain earned $50M in 2 weeks, and Ethereum captured about $50K of it
A Zcash position bought at $100 is up 17-fold, and he held it through a scare over a possible hack
AI cut about 20 staff roles to 2 or 3 at his media business
1. Still Early, by His Numbers
Neuner's team had cut about 40 clips from Pal's appearance on Neuner's own show the day before, and Pal asked whether they would get him into trouble.
"We're not late enough in the bull market to get into trouble. It's still early." — Ran Neuner
Neuner measures his edge by one number: the net asset value of his crypto portfolio, which he says is the highest it has ever been
He said he learned in his first cycle to qualify his calls in public and then to stop apologizing for opinions he had researched. His team of about 10 researchers works with Claude and ChatGPT, and he said AI has made their learning exponential. When Robinhood launched its own blockchain, the team used AI models to ask who would gain and who would lose. The answer was Arbitrum, the technology Robinhood's chain is built on, which he said gets 10% of Robinhood's revenue from it. The team turned the expected revenue into a buyback estimate and a price.
"Now, without AI, to be honest, I think there's probably a 10% chance we would have picked up that trade." — Ran Neuner
