This week’s column is about our company, Rosa & Roubini Associates, which is at a crucial junction of its journey. As can be seen on our website and social media channel, the company co-founded by Brunello Rosa and Nouriel Roubini has rebranded, with an evolution towards digital assets.
As capital, currencies and entire economies undergo a profound transformation—from cryptocurrencies and stablecoins to central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and the tokenisation of real-world assets —Rosa & Roubini is expanding its capabilities to meet the moment. Building on its deep-rooted expertise in macroeconomic, cyber-risk and geopolitical advisory, R&R is launching a dedicated Digital Assets Advisory Practice to help clients navigate the economic frontier of the 21st century. The team has also evolved and expanded to respond to these new demands, to include experts in the digital economy from various fields of technology, to offer well-rounded consultancy services through our digital asset advisory practice.
We advise corporations, financial institutions, and governments on the full spectrum of the digital asset revolution—from navigating the fast-moving global regulatory landscape, to integrating digital assets on balance sheets, unlocking new value through asset tokenisationand understanding the geopolitical implications of stablecoins and state-backed digital currencies.
Our value remains the same: independent, rigorous analysis at the intersection between macroeconomics, geopolitics, cyber and political risk analysis, policy and market implications. And now, with an eye on how those forces intersect with digital innovation in finance.
Content remains key. Together with the new appearance, R&R’s products and services will also evolve. R&R will continue to produce research on the domains of its traditional expertise: macroeconomic, policy and market analysis, expanded over the years to includegeopolitical, political and cyber risk analysis. Building on the success of “Smart Money” on the geopolitics of digital currencies, R&R’s research on Fin-Tech will further expand to cover digital assets in their various aspects.
As a result, every week R&R will publish a set of PRIMERS on the key aspects of the digital asset economy, such as tokenisation, stablecoins, Web3 and metaverse, quantum computing and cryptography, and digital transformation of financial institutions and services.
The first of these PRIMERS is titled “Beyond the Physical Domain: A Primer on Digital Identity, Assets and Currencies as Cornerstones of Web3 and the Metaverse”. It discusses the evolution of the internet from Web 1.0 (read only) to Web 2.0 (read-write) to Web 3.0 (read-write-own) and the strong interrelation between digital identity and ownership in Web 3.0 and the metaverse. It also discusses how AI interacts with digital assets in Web 3.0:how AI agents are becoming real economic actors in cyberspace .
As has been reported, Coinbase, AWS (Amazon), Anthropic, Circle, and NEAR just launched “x402”, which is the first protocol embedding stablecoin payments directly into HTTP. It doesn’t require wallets, APIs, or billing cycles. This intersects with the other great innovation taking place during this period. Namely, the launch of stablecoins as the foundation of the new financial infrastructure.
When AI agents can directly purchase data, execute trades, and pay for services using stablecoins, we are likely to experience an exponential acceleration in economic activity. The blockchain AI market is projected to grow from $448.5 million in 2023 to $3.4 billion by 2032 at a 25.3% CAGR. But the real prize is not the market size, but rather controlling the payment rails of “AI commerce.” The ongoing war to own the infrastructure of the new digital world has just found another battleground.
