Fed holds rates, Bitcoin ticks up; Rob discusses XRP, payment rails, and Near Protocol's AI agent economy
Solo presenter Rob from Digital Asset News covers the Fed's rate hold decision, Ripple's Moody's rating, and the growing adoption of tokenized payments and AI agent infrastructure.
Summary
Rob from Digital Asset News opens with the Federal Reserve's decision to hold rates at a target range of 4.75–5%, noting a 10-2 dissent from Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack, who favored a 25 basis point hike. He argues that Fed rate movements have historically had an inconsistent relationship with Bitcoin's price, and that market cycles matter more than rate decisions. He then covers Moody's assigning Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin an A2 long-term and P1 short-term deposit rating, offering a measured read on what those ratings actually mean. Rob also briefly mentions a Coinbase data breach in which customer personal information was exposed via a third-party integration. The bulk of the episode focuses on the growing adoption of tokenized cash payments among large enterprises — Rob cites a DBS-commissioned EY survey finding that roughly 90% of surveyed large businesses were using or piloting tokenized cash in some form — and on Near Protocol's "Near Intents" infrastructure as a potential payment layer for AI agents, a narrative Rob believes will drive the next major market cycle.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Fed Holds Rates — What It Means for Markets
Just like everybody's been talking about, looks like the Fed is going to hold rates. I think everybody across the board knew this was going to happen. But it's important to take a look at what this all means for the broader spectrum of the different markets.
So first of all, if you haven't opened up any websites or gone on X or listened to anybody on CNBC or NBC — which a lot of people don't do, they just have their lives, they have to work, they've got the family, and they're just like, "I don't really care too much what's going on" — here's a little recap for the next ten minutes or so.
The Fed came out and they had the option to do a rate hike, stay the same, or cut rates — which that wasn't going to happen — and they decided to stay the rates exactly as they are. The target range is 4.75 to 5%. So nothing has changed as of today, October 28th. What this means is that we have a midterm election coming up next week, and there was no way rates were going to get hiked or cut. It was always going to stay the same.
However, across the board, we see a little bit of an uptick for Bitcoin and altcoins, which is quite interesting to me that people weren't pricing that in. That is what it is. And during this time — I don't know if this is just posturing — but you had a 10-2 split. Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack dissented and said they would like to have a 25 basis point rate hike right now. So the next meeting, I believe, is in December. That will probably be a hike. We'll see where it all goes.
Bitcoin Price vs. Fed Rate Cycles
As a quick reminder, it's not about the Fed and the Federal Reserve and the rates — because I know a lot of people put a lot of stock into that, which makes sense, because usually when you get rates hiking, that's not good for risk assets. And it's a funny thing, because in my opinion, I don't see Bitcoin as a majorly risky asset. I know people will look at that and say, "Yeah, it's very, very risky, it's very volatile." But I still see it as a store of value and also for peer-to-peer transactions.
Regardless, we can see here the effective federal funds rate in red and in blue the Bitcoin price level. Usually what we do is overlay the M2 money supply, but with this you can just see that when I got into crypto in 2017, we were hiking rates. Back then I didn't care about rate hikes — I just didn't. Once you get into this market, all of a sudden it becomes like the most important thing. But back then, as you can see, 2017 was just great. Bitcoin price was $966. The federal funds rate was 0.56. This is when Bitcoin was super volatile. Yet here we go — we raise the rates almost to 1%, 100 basis points. Bitcoin price: $934. Not too bad. And it just went up to $2,000, doubled in no time whatsoever, in roughly 30 days. Pretty nice, as we were raising rates.
We did it again in July. 1.16%. Now you're at $2,000, and then $4,000, $5,000. October, November — this is when I got in. November 2017. I bought my first Bitcoin for $8,500 and I thought I was way overpaying back then. The federal funds rate was due to be hiked yet again in December, and we kept going up and kept going up until, of course, 2018. Then we had a nice little crash, and that covers that.
Now, of course, we come over to 2019 and look what happens. We start to cut rates and we went from a Bitcoin price of $10,000 and it drops down. That's interesting — drops and goes up a little bit. Now we drop here and the Bitcoin price drops. That's not how it's supposed to go. So it went from 2% to 1.9% and 1.5%. Now you're down to $7,000. What happened? It's just how it is. It's just the cycles.
And of course, I still believe that there is a big play for midterm elections and presidential elections. And then we can see here that when we went down and had essentially no rates, we were doing pretty good. And then here we go again — we hike rates. Now this is the time when Bitcoin starts to fall. But then around December 2022, again, we just got done with the midterms going into December, and then 2023 — look what happens. Price starts to go up. Even though rates are going up, the price of Bitcoin goes from $16,000 to $23,000 to $27,000. And the rates keep going up. So again, it's not just about the rates.
And just recently, you can see here that we were nice and flat around 3.6% or so, and then around $76,000 we raise the rates and look what happens to Bitcoin — boom, $81,000, $84,000. So again, I know a lot of people put stock into it, I get it. But I just think it really comes down to cycles.
Ripple's Moody's Rating — What It Actually Means
That leads me to my next point: business cycles and the adoption phase. Ripple lately has been doing some pretty big things and I'm kind of impressed with them. Is that also because I may have invested in XRP? Absolutely. Because guess what? I'm in it for the tech. The number-go-up technology.
So, Moody's — very world-famous — gave Ripple Labs' USD stablecoin an A2 long-term and P1 short-term deposit rating, and favorable. The agency said the strong rating reflects the stablecoin's reserve coverage, liquidity, and redemption arrangements. This sounds pretty good, but I took a look and I'm like, what the heck is Moody's A2 long-term and P1 short-term rating? Does anybody know what that is? Well, that's my job. I looked it up and it's not that great.
A2 long-term rating — the definition is: "Obligations judged to be of upper medium quality and subject to low credit risk." What an awful way to say things. Even like a dating profile: "Hey, I'm upper medium quality, you should pick me." Anyhow, so that's not so great, but it's better than being awful.
And Moody's P1 short-term rating: "Issuers rated Prime 1 have a strong ability to repay short-term debt obligations, though they are slightly more susceptible to adverse changes in economic conditions than Prime One issuers." So this is a good thing. It's just not a stellar ringing endorsement, but we'll take it for what it is. Congratulations, XRP Army. Hopefully the price goes up. I'm with you on that one.
90% of Large Businesses Are Adopting Tokenized Cash Payments
To finish this up before we get into the Q&A — payments. On this channel, I've talked a lot about where I think the next narrative is going. And I think we're actually getting out of the nonsense phase and actually seeing stuff being done and usable. This thing called utility.
Now, I'm not going to say that this whole market is driven by utility. This whole market, in my opinion, is driven by speculation first, speculation second, speculation third, and a little bit of utility. All you need is a little bit of utility.
And this made me stay up and take notice: 90% of large businesses are embracing tokenized cash to speed up payments. I think payments will be a great thing across the board. I think it'll be payments, tokenization of real-world assets, and also AI agent payments — because you need rails that are high speed, low cost, and no friction.
This one here was quite interesting. It was a survey — DBS commissioned EY to conduct the study — and it wasn't just a couple of small businesses. It pulled 422 business and finance leaders across 11 markets, including the US, China, Germany, and the UK. All represented organizations with annual revenue above $500 million. So not chump change — half a billion dollars, doing pretty good.
And they asked them: are you using this or not? The report found that 24% had applied the tech at scale, while 43% had limited live use in selected markets but were using it. And another 21% were running pilots or proofs of concept. That right there, ladies and gentlemen, is the majority — with only 12% not using it whatsoever. That's fine, you don't have to use everything right now. But I was blown away. We're talking about gross annual revenue above $500 million, 422 businesses. That's a step in the right direction.
Payment Rails — Ethereum, Solana, Tron, and the AI Agent Economy
For payments, the rails come down to this — and it's not just what I think, it's what is being tracked by big companies like Visa and Mastercard. For me, the best ones are Binance, Ethereum, Solana, and Tron. Those are great for payments and payment rails. I think they're going to be some winners right there.
But also for AI agent payments, we have to pay attention to not where the hockey puck is, but where it's going. And Near Protocol is looking pretty good. They're big into the agent economy, which I found quite interesting. There's a product on Near called Near Intents. We haven't really covered this, and I wish we would have, because Near's doing pretty fine right now — kind of lagging a little bit in the top 20, maybe 21 or 19, somewhere around there.
First of all, it's not just some random people. Ilya Polosukhin, Near's co-founder, co-wrote the 2017 Google paper "Attention Is All You Need." And that paper is the foundation of ChatGPT. I always found that fascinating — that Ilya, who has actually been on the show a couple of times and talked about Near, was that well-renowned. And what Near is building for AI has already been going on since January and February of this year.
They launched Near Intents back then. You can swap across 35 chains. You've got a private AI agent marketplace — you can hire an agent and pay the agent in escrow, like an AI Fiverr. You get private payments for AI agents so people can't track you. And there's a payment layer.
Here's how Near Intents works. There are three levels. Let's say you want to pay an agent. We've got ten bajillion cryptos out there, and some are super fast and most suck. So whatever you've got — let's say the agent takes USDC on Ethereum, but you only have Solana, or Polkadot, or whatever you've got — Near Intents figures out how to swap it at the lowest fee possible and then route that to the agent in the quickest time possible. If the AI agent wants to go across and leverage a better price, it'll do that and make it work in a big roundabout. Essentially, it's like Hotels.com finding you the best rate.
So there's the first part: we need to transfer it over. How do we do that? We find the best route — maybe Jupiter, which is mostly DeFi for Solana, then 1inch across the board, or maybe Uniswap, or through Binance, or another exchange and another DeFi protocol. Whatever it is, it finds you the best route — fastest and cheapest — because everything changes. If you ever do stuff with DeFi, it finds a winning route. And for the payments to do that, it saves you a bunch of fees, saves you a bunch of money, and then you pay in Near Protocol, and everybody gets paid — AI agents included.
I take a look at that and I'm like, this has been going on since February 4th, 2026, and they've been integrating with OpenAI and Anthropic and others. And I want to be clear — they haven't partnered with them, they are integrating them. It's not a partnership. I misspoke. They're trying to integrate everything.
And if that's something they're going to do, think about the market cap. Right now, Near Protocol is at $6 billion. Pick your least favorite altcoin — let's say Solana, at $60 billion. That's a 10x. That's not bad. Now, Solana could continue to grow — maybe it goes to $120 billion. If it goes to $120 billion, that's not even half of Ethereum's market cap of $287 billion. So as we start to look at things down the road and the narratives that actually lead to the next big thing, I just want you to be aware of where I think things are going. I could be wrong — I've been wrong many times — but that's what I see.
Q&A
Rob: Rob, aka Dad, has given the green light to pile into Near. Well, I have been buying it lately. So if you buy it with me and it goes up and you don't sell, I will dump on you. I will dump on every single one of you out there and I will dump like crazy. So just remember that. Should I take profits? Would Rob dump on me? Yes, he would.
Ran says, "You're stuck in the past, buddy. Hanging your hat on ETH." I'm going to hang my hat on anything. I don't care which one wins. I can just tell you which ones the big corporations and Wall Street are choosing, and it's ETH, Binance, Solana, and Tron. And also, I believe it was VanEck or Fidelity — one of them just launched an ETF with Near — so I can see that one being a big thing.
The thing about ETH is people say it's slow and clunky and there are different problems with the intermediaries and the protocol at some points. Yeah, I get it. It's true. But it's the same thing as — I'm old, so I remember when computers first came around and it was like from one day to the next, everybody had a Microsoft computer. Everybody. And you saw it in business. The reason people adopted it in business was, first, it was new, there were other competitors out there but they weren't really to scale. And I think what people were looking at was, "Well, John got his company into Microsoft and no one got fired over there, so I'm just going to do that." And I think that's kind of the mentality here. They're like, "Well, it hasn't been hacked per se, people haven't lost their money, everybody else is using it, so let's just use Ethereum and see where that goes."
And until they really start to choose other rails — which, let's be honest, Ethereum's been around quite a long time and has proven itself to not shut down, not have specific issues to the chain itself — it's been doing pretty great. Not great like super fast or super cheap, come on. It just does good enough. It's like in the army — if you're good enough, you get promoted. You don't have to be spectacular or stellar. Just show up with the right uniform and you get promoted.
Nosman asks: what did I miss about the Fed? Is it hawkish or not? For the future, it's pretty much bland. They're not going to raise rates, and midterm elections are next Tuesday. So the chance of them hiking and then looking like a political move was 0.0.
Someone says: don't forget you can also stake Near. These are things I forget — thank God you guys are here. I use Kraken as my exchange. I used to use Coinbase. I just don't like them. Oh, did you see that? Coinbase lost a bunch of your personal data yesterday. Yeah, it sucks. I was going to cover that, but yesterday's video was such a bummer I just didn't want to talk about it. Here's what happened: some kind of third-party integration and your personal information is now out there on the dark web.
But here's the thing — if I reported on every single time personal data gets lost, you know what a boring, depressing show that would be? Because it happens like every single day. So let's just make a deal. We all know that all of our information is in the dark web somewhere. If someone wants to find you, they'll find you. If someone wants to call you and pretend they're your great aunt from the UK, they'll do it. It's just up to you to not get scammed. Good luck.
Someone says: "Haven't you heard? Coinbase takes these breaches seriously." Yes, that was a good one. That's like Ledger with those third-party resellers — "We take this very seriously and we're sorry if a bunch of people lost all their funds, but it's just third-party resellers. Now, they are authorized third-party resellers, and we did leave that individual or those individuals in the Southeast Asian region up on the website, so sorry about that. We're sorry. So sorry." Yeah, that is what it is.
Joseph makes a great point. When I use Kraken, I take the crypto off the exchange and put it onto my Tangem wallet. I do still have a Ledger wallet — I just kind of move things around. And then I also use ITRX and their custody services because I spread things around. I'm not going to be that guy who loses everything. I may lose 25%, maybe 50% in a hack, who knows? But I will refuse to be that guy who loses everything because he's got it in one wallet and just happened to leave his seed phrase somewhere.
Someone asks: is it true that they've just relaunched the McRib in the US? This is why AI was created — so you can find if it's launched and which McDonald's has the McRib. These are the important things. This is why data centers cost so much money. They should, because that's important.
Big Kuna asks: what do you think about Zama? Confidential layer on Ethereum, Solana, and more. Wow. Confidential layer sounds like the next big thing. I don't know. I bought so much hype.
Coin Guess asks: what's your outlook on Chainlink? Do you think there will be one that survives in the end? Every chain needs an oracle — they've got to pull in outside traditional data onto the blockchain. So Chainlink should do well. But boy, that price — I don't know if it's a stablecoin or what, it seems like it doesn't move at all. There are some things we've covered on this channel as far as tokenomics for Chainlink. So far, it's not super conducive to going up. It's just one of those things. And of course, what you get paid in for what you do with Chainlink — it's a difficult one. But it is needed. Sometimes just because it's needed doesn't mean it's going to go to the moon.