Crypto could outperform AI stocks: Wall Street veteran Jordi Visser

Cryptocurrencies could deliver a better payoff from the artificial intelligence boom than AI stocks themselves, according to Visser Labs founder Jordi Visser.

Explosive gains in AI stocks are becoming harder to repeat, Visser tells Cointelegraph’s Trade Secrets. At the same time, AI agents are creating demand for crypto payments and tokenized assets.

“Without AI, I don’t think crypto would be going through this bull market,” he says.

Hyperscaler capital spending and free cash flow (left), and forward valuations compared with the S&P 500 (right). Source: JPMorgan Asset Management

As a result of his thesis, he has expanded his own holdings beyond Bitcoin, Ether and Solana into a broader basket of tokens.

Visser’s three-decade career includes stints as managing director at Morgan Stanley and chief investment officer at Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers. He now heads 22V’s AI Macro Nexus Research.

The Wall Street veteran’s broader bet is that AI agents will allow people to instruct software to execute trades and other financial transactions on their behalf.

“AI agents are effectively the same as the App Store or the smartphone for crypto,” he says.

In that scenario, users would direct their agents while the software handles execution. The growing use of those agents will drive more activity in tokenized assets and crypto payments, extending the investment opportunity beyond the companies supplying computing power.

Related: AI potential to drive crypto demand remains ‘underappreciated’: BlackRock

But Visser’s crypto outlook still carries exposure to the AI trade he has grown more cautious about. He identifies a severe AI downturn that drags down equity markets as one threat to his bullish case.

“I don’t think that would end the bull market, but I definitely think it would retest the lows that we just saw,” he says.

Visser says he began reducing his exposure to memory chipmaker Micron in mid-May after concluding that hedge funds and retail investors had crowded into the AI trade.

“One of the reasons that Bitcoin and Ethereum were having such a hard time is because the focus was completely on AI,” he says.

AI offered investors potentially greener pastures backed by rising business revenue. Microsoft’s quarterly report on April 29 claimed that its AI business was generating revenue at an annualized rate of $37 billion, more than double a year earlier. Meanwhile, Micron reported in March that its fiscal second-quarter revenue had nearly tripled to $23.86 billion.

But AI investors now face a less forgiving market, according to Visser. The 100-stock AI portfolio he tracks is up about 40% this year, but has become more volatile than Bitcoin on a rolling 126-day measure.