Palantir Co-Founder Joe Lonsdale Says AI Could Be Next Crypto Catalyst

Joe Lonsdale, founding partner at 8VC and co-founder of Palantir Technologies, Inc. PLTR, appeared on CNBC's "Squawk Box" Monday to discuss artificial intelligence as a potential catalyst for cryptocurrencies and the value of crypto as a safe asset in an inflationary environment.

What Happened: Lonsdale predicted that broad adoption of AI across industries will lead to a significant surge in productivity that will benefit society as a whole.

The Palantir co-founder noted that if certain consumer areas can successfully integrate AI applications, AI will become an active participant in the crypto market, making it a potential catalyst for price movement.

"AI agents are going to start doing a lot of things in our economy and for AI agents to coordinate with incentive systems, they are probably going to use crypto," Lonsdale said.

The tech entrepreneur highlighted Bitcoin BTC/USD, Ethereum ETH/USD and Solana SOL/USD as the cryptos most likely to be used by AI agents.

“And they are probably all correlated at the end of the day,” he added.

Related News: Brian Armstrong: Bitcoin ETF Approval Is Win-Win For Coinbase

Lonsdale also argued that different cryptos can be a reliable store of value in an inflationary economic environment. If the U.S. continues to carry a massive budget deficit and inflation returns to recent high levels, “you could see crypto do very well,” he said.

$BTC, $ETH, $SOL Price Action: Crypto prices surged into the end of 2023 in anticipation of spot Bitcoin ETF approval. The broader crypto market has cooled off to start 2024.

According to data from Benzinga Pro, Bitcoin was down 0.43% at $39,916.57, Ethereum was down 1.37% at $2,203.63 and Solana was down 0.91% at $87.96 at the time of publication.

Image: Arek Socha from Pixabay