Can Bitcoin Break Through $70k, Or Lower? | 1000x Live

Avi, we have 2,000 people watching this livestream and you just blew up. That was crazy.

There's no way we have 2,000 people watching this.

Yeah, we do. We do.

I can see why there's so many people. There's literally no reason. Wait, are we, are we live right now or are we just— Oh, I thought I didn't.

Yeah, we're live. We're live. Like, I was okay.

I know. Yeah, this podcast is great. Everyone should watch.

I'm kind of shocked that And we're live.

Welcome back to another SNX podcast. We're here. Yeah, there are a fuck ton of podcasts with people who don't trade and are never like— yeah, guys, look, if the market's trading, market's trading. I'm sorry, I had to short the entire market.

So just so everybody knows what's been going on, this is our first time live streaming on YouTube. This is going to be a recorded podcast, but it's being presented as a stream where you can join in and chat and we can all talk about crypto together. And then we can put, um, different comments up on screen to just sort of like discuss what people are talking about if there's something kind of relevant to go over. But feels like it's been a pretty massive week of news and accumulation of kind of like coiled springs in the market. Haven't really broken out yet, but a lot to talk about, don't you think?

Yeah, I mean, the last, the last 5 days, there's just been a lot of vol in the market. Up to 65K, all the way back down to 61.5, and now nobody has any idea what's going on. Joe, I don't know if you saw, but I tweeted out a poll that said, hey, is Bitcoin going to be up down or sideways in September?

I voted up.

I voted up. Up and down were within margin of error. I mean, nobody, nobody has any idea what's going on, which to me is pretty bullish, not gonna lie.

I, I'm, I'm as bullish as ever. I mean, we're locked in this range, we can't seem to break out of it in either direction, but I think the next move is up, not down. I'm really convinced of that. So every time it starts to trade back down towards the bottom of the range Everybody freaks out. Hey, are we going lower? Are we going to lose all our money? Is this the final time when Bitcoin goes to zero and the charade ends and we all have to go back to our day jobs? And my take, for what little it's worth, is no, we're just ranging like we have during every other non-2022, non-2020 summer, um, because people are off, uh, not paying attention, they're off on vacation. And when people get back in the saddle in September which does tend to be a pretty bearish month for Bitcoin, unfortunately. But I think, I think as we go into the fall, we're going to get some serious bids here for a variety of reasons.

Yeah, I mean, we've, we've talked about this for a while, that September is probably going to be bullish for BTC, and I, I stand by that. I mean, if you look, when we were trading, when we were trading below $60, we were both sitting here. I literally had a bull as my background, like, guys, this market is, is going up. I mean, just to, just to recap, at least in my opinion, what happened and why we sold off so hard. You just had a lot of— you had a lot of selling because of technical reasons as the yen carry trade unwound. NASDAQ came off, Bitcoin came off, and that caused the sell-off down to 50. What wasn't true was that there was overwhelming weakness in the market. It was just a technical move. And so now that we've sort of rebounded that entire, entire move, went back up, went back up to $65, I think it's possible that we can trade between $61 and $65, maybe $60 and $65 for the next 2 weeks or so. But at some point, I think that the allocation that we're expecting comes into the market and then you're probably looking at 70 and you're looking at 70 with no supply overhang, which to me sets up for a very, very, very bullish Q4.

Quick question for you on that. Why has the supply overhang gone away? Like, are you talking about the US Marshals selling Silk Road coins or—

Yeah, it's not that the overall supply overhang has gone away because I still think that there's going to be some government sales that are going to need to occur. It's that you've had a lot of the weak hands sell out and you've had the average price that people own a Bitcoin go up a substantial amount. And so the people, you know, just to, just to take a step back, something that I've always used for trading this type of market is what are, what are people's price targets? What do people think that Bitcoin can go to? Basically, the people that bought in the $30s and $40s and when the average price of buying Bitcoin was $30s, $40s, people's price targets were like $70 to $80. And now that average price has gone up because a lot of people have taken profit, a lot of people have gone out, a lot of people panicked out, then bought back in. Price targets are starting to go higher. They're starting to go $100,000, $150,000. And so they're just less likely, you know, every day that goes by, people are less likely to sell $70K than they, than they were before, as long as the average price goes up, right?

What do you use? Yeah, how do you track UTXOs? Is there like a metric on, um, one of those Glassnode sites that you look at a lot to—

Yeah, you can use, you can use on-chain metrics to track it. Glassnode's pretty good. For checking when the last, you know, the average price of the last Bitcoin moved. But also just more, more generally, like yearly, weekly moving averages still going up.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, I completely wholeheartedly agree with that. One thing we should talk about, because I, you know, I've got a sideways background behind me, like my process for dealing with these types of markets is to do nothing. Like not to, not to stop paying attention. I'm super dialed in, but I'm remaining disciplined and I'm not trying to overtrade. Um, part of it is because I don't want to realize a bunch of gains for tax purposes and then turn around and maybe miss a rally. But more importantly, like, I just think we're range-bound. I don't think I have the ability to predict when we're going to break out. I feel confident in the direction that's going to— the direction of travel when we do break out. So I'm just trying to remain disciplined and do nothing. It's not the most exciting strategy, it's not very sexy, but it, you know, frankly, it works. Um, there is plenty of money to be made as an active trader, like buying dips and then lightening up on pops. You're very good at that, Avi, but, um, I'm a little bit less active, so I think my strategy works as well in a slightly different way.

Yeah, isn't it crazy though that you pay taxes to have people arrested for memes?

Yeah, well, I mean, should we talk about Telegram and the Pavel Durov arrest? Speaking of, uh, speaking of whatever the heck that was.

Yeah, that was, that was honestly insane.

I mean, I, I actually have a bunch of like normie relatives reaching out to you like, Avi, why do you use Telegram so much? Are you a criminal?

Yeah, basically my, my dad, my dad texted me, my mom hit me up, my sister, and a few, a few of my friends were like, what, do you see this news? It's crazy, this Telegram. You know, the guy, the guy got arrested for crazy stuff. I mean, what's insane to me is that he decided to go to France. I mean, come on, what are you doing? But at the same, at the same time, it was, it's kind of ridiculous to arrest the CEO of a social media platform that has no, I mean, it's not like he was doing it himself. Yes, the obviously every platform including Facebook has illegal things that happen on that platform. Yeah, it's crazy that they arrested—

and it must have been that he didn't cooperate with whatever they were investigating, whereas the, the telling thing is Facebook and all the other platforms must be cooperating. Uh, so it goes to show who's forking over your data and who's not.

I mean, to me it's just Funny that he, he knew that if he was in France for an extended period of time, it's probably going to be an arrest. And it wasn't even an extended period of time. He's there for about half a second.

Yeah, he just got like swiped off the tarmac at whatever private airport he landed at north of Paris. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, tweeted his take on it just a few minutes ago. Should I read it with a It wasn't a few minutes ago.

I think it was a little bit ago.

Oh, you're right. It was a couple hours ago. But let me—

how's your French accent?

You speak French, right? Yeah, I'm married to a French lady.

I'm so sorry.

Yeah. So he said, I've seen the false information regarding France following the arrest of Pavel Durov. France is deeply committed to the freedom of expression and communication. To innovation and to the spirit of entrepreneurship. Isn't it amazing that the president of France can't speak English? Like, everyone's supposed to speak English.

Yeah, but entrepreneurship is a French word.

Entrepreneurship, it will remain so. It shall remain so. This, like, getting arrested for building software thing is picking up steam, and it's kind of freaky. I mean, like, it's like one step removed from getting arrested for saying something on software, which— I'm not like an anarchist or anything. I don't know whether, like, being in the crypto community has turned me into this paranoid schizophrenic or not, but like, I'm— it's kind of unsettling to me. I love Telegram. I use Telegram. What I told my mom today is that I use Telegram because it's the best user experience. You can use the same Telegram account on multiple phones with different phone numbers, which other platforms won't let you do, like iMessage. And it's like, it's fun, and half my community's on here. Like, what, what the heck is wrong with Telegram?

The craziest part about it is that it's not even safe, right? It doesn't have encryption by default. So if the feds wanted to, it's not, it's not as hard to crack as it is WhatsApp. I mean, look, the issue at the end of the day for us and for crypto and generally is that Telegram is associated with scammers, right? Telegram is associated with bad people, with, with bad things. And then it taints the reputation of crypto, obviously, because crypto and Telegram are are intertwined in a big way. And going back to what you were saying earlier, if you can get arrested for posting a meme on X, then at what point can you get arrested for just using Telegram, right? If there's a government out there that brands Telegram as this haven of criminals— oh, if you use this platform, then we're going to call you a criminal. If you tweet this thing, then you are a criminal. I mean, that to me underpins the need for a decentralized social network. That, yes, you know, if, if the centralized version of it gets shut down, then at least all of the data and the way that you interact with people can be ported over to a new front end. And that, that's really, that's really the beauty of all the decentralized platforms, right, is whatever front end you have, whether you use a Telegram app or, or another app, if the backend is all on crypto and it's decentralized, then at least if Telegram gets shut down, then you still have your data, right? That's actually something that I worry about on Twitter is if my Twitter gets shut down, how do you rebuild the idea of having the same followers, having the same DMs, having the same contacts? It just boom, just goes away. Yeah. And so this again is the future in my personal opinion of the Telegram blockchain. Which is why I'm personally still very bullish on Telegram.

I'm not. I think this is super bearish Telegram's coin because their visionary founder is now distracted. But I think it's bullish long term, the idea that decentralized social should be a thing where like you have skins for the decentralized chat apps that look as beautiful and work as beautifully as Telegram does. You have end-to-end encryption that's like uses the same open source RSA, whatever it is, library that Signal uses. All of the data is stored on your device, not in the cloud. Um, all of your unencrypted data is stored on your device, and the backend for that is on-chain. Like, now I kind of— I see the rationale for it because this is ridiculous, right? Like, I— it's a chat app. Of course people do nefarious things on chat apps. They probably do them on WhatsApp. And iMessage, uh, as well. I, I don't frankly understand what it is about Telegram that's so special. Um, so on that note, everybody join our Telegram channel. Avi started one. Um, hop in there, we talk markets, it's fun. You can find it. We do Twitter somewhere.

I, I even post pictures of my dog, which is a very, very cute dog. Now I just want to go back to that point real quick. I think that this— there are 30— I think there are 30 people that work at Telegram. The actual Telegram app, but the Telegram Foundation is separate. The TON blockchain is separate from the Telegram app. They have a relationship, obviously, and they were started and it was ideated by similar people, but then it split off. I think what this does is it lights a fire under the ass of the TON Foundation and the people building on TON to produce something really incredible.

That's really nuanced. That's an amazing take. So you're saying this is like one of those misunderstood dips to buy? Like, I have the mid-curve take. Like, oh, it sucks, Pavel's gone, sell it. You're saying no, no, no, no, no, no, no, like, while all the Jonas are selling, buy it. I see what you're saying.

You know, not that— not the Jonas, because the Jonas— the Jonas wouldn't buy back, but you, Jonah, you, you would buy back.

Let me pull up my little TradingView here. Hold on a second.

What's this?

What's our little Smell-O-Gram coin doing right now?

Look, I, I'm, I'm of the mindset that him getting arrested is actually— it's a, it's a barbus it's a, what is it, Barbra Streisand effect where now everyone realizes the value in the fact that Telegram had built out a blockchain. It's like they were— they knew that something like this would happen.

Oh wow, the price action's really interesting in this. So obviously the news gets announced, it was trading $7, it immediately gets nuked down to $5 a token. And then today you've got like Avi Feldman just— or somebody like you just sneakily bidding it on this thesis and it's kind of rebounded. That's really interesting. It does feel like it's bottomed out.

Um, I mean, my take— okay, look, again, none of this is financial advice. It never will be. In fact, if you listen to the words that come out of my mouth, you will lose money and you'll go bankrupt and you'll probably end up on the streets. Yes, let's just get that.

Same goes for me if you listen to anything that I say ever.

With that being said, I think that it's important to remember that there are a lot of people that hold Telegram in a pretty deeply concentrated way. And what we don't know is how they're going to react to this. I think in the long term, this is very good for Telegram and it again lights a fire under the ass to go build a good product. But at the same time, if it goes up back up to $6.50, I think that that's probably a sale because I think a lot of people are going to be, you know, selling out, selling out of their positions slowly because they're very concentrated, candidly. Now, what that, that probably gives you an opportunity, and in the long run, in a year from now, that's going to lead to, in my opinion, a much better distribution. So I think if any, if anything, in a year from now, Telegram is going to be higher than it is, than it is today. But, you know, you have to be ready for the fall of this thing.

Yeah. And you also have to benchmark yourself against Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, and the other things that could also be substantially higher a year from now. You don't want to, like, be up 10% on Telegram patting yourself on the back and have missed a 100% rally in Ether, Solana. So, you know, Honestly, what's interesting, I listened to, um, I listened to Pavel's interview with Tucker Carlson. I'm not a usual listener to the Tucker Carlson Show, but I did want to hear Pavel talk for an hour about his product, and this was like the most recent podcast about it, so I checked it out. Um, Tucker being annoying aside, uh, what I took away from that podcast is that this is Pavel's second rug pull, right? Like Vladimir Putin pulled the rug out from underneath this guy with VKontakte, the Facebook of Russia. He basically told him, like, become an oligarch and publish whatever I tell you to, or sell your stake and get the fuck out. And he chose option B. And so this is the second time he's having, like, his baby taken away from him. I wouldn't— to your point, Avi, I wouldn't be surprised if he's just like, all right, I literally can't trust anybody in this world anymore, I'm gonna put it all on chain and make it this, like, permanent, like, chat thing that exists in perpetuity and can't be shut down because it's decentralized. Like, I— and if anybody is good at building chat apps, it's this guy. This is literally 5 years ahead of iMessage, Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp. It's crazy how good this app is. So I could totally see him doing that, and that, that would probably be bullish the Telegram crypto ecosystem.

Yeah, and, and it, and it should be. Obviously. I mean, one of the things that I think is really important to remember is why we're here in the first place, right? We're here to build censorship-resistant applications so that no matter what the governments try to do to you, no matter how they try to mess with you, you can escape that. That's the key. That's why we love Bitcoin. That's why we love decentralization. That's, that's why we're here, right? At least in the, at least in the beginning. I mean, now, now we're, now we're here to trade 5-minute charts and make money, but at least in the beginning, in the beginning it was very pure. The intentions were pure. Speaking of, uh, speaking of trading, trading 5-minute charts, one of the worst 5-minute charts I've seen in a while is the ETH chart. Do you remember when I told you that ETH was going to be the XRP of the cycle?

I'm gonna pretend I don't remember because I'm long a lot of ETH.

And I, I said, I said it like 2 months ago. I think ETH BTC was trading 0.055 at the time. I was like, ETH is going to be the XRP of this cycle. I got so much hate for that. And the reality is I think that's actually what's happening right now.

I think that's it. That, that's a, that's wrong. That's wrong. A lot of interesting applications are quietly getting built on ETH.

Um, like what? Even, even Vitalik says, hey man, DeFi sucks.

Well, I mean, if you— if, if something gets built on an L2 that rolls up to ETH, is that— does that count? Or you're just saying no, like nothing that's going on on base? Polymarket, that's all garbage. Let's just ignore it and pretend it's not happening. Is that kind of what you're saying?

One thing you named, one you named, one real thing, Polymarket. Great. Polymarket's great. It's on Polygon. It's probably going to move. At some point in the future, and it can be built anywhere.

Yeah, some memes happened on Base too, by the way. Like, there was a, there was a thriving moment there.

But memes, brother, memes—

there hasn't— I put it this way, not, not many applications have been built anywhere this cycle. The two are like Polymarket and memes, right?

Wait, do you smell that? Do you smell the cope? Because I can, I can smell the cope. Okay, we are, we are, we are deranged for— I mean, I, I think I just saw someone— I'm also holding ETH, we are deranged. Yeah, I mean, look, the issue with ETH is that again, it's slow, it's more difficult to use than Solana. Even the founder Vitalik is like, hey, what's going on? You guys are only trying to build out like weird DeFi stuff. Like, we should build some real—

should we, should we read that? Like, okay, so just for context, for anyone who isn't paying attention, Vitalik tweeted something that pissed off or got under the skin of a lot of people. He basically came out attacking DeFi on ETH. He said that it's, uh, he called it an uroboros or an Ouroboros.

It's the snake that eats its tail.

In my California accent, I'd call it "Ouro-bros, bro," like surfer style. Anyway, basically what it's— he's saying that it's just like purposeless, let's call it money chase for the sake of money. Like it's some sort of reflexive cyclical money washing machine, uh, just to paraphrase, and that there needs to be something a little bit more purposeful built on ETH other than just like lending money to people who want to trade with it in order for the ecosystem to grow and flourish. And the reason why I disagree with that is because having worked in traditional finance for the better part of two decades, um, my humble, you know, respectful question would be, Vitalik, what do you think goes on in the normal world of trad fi, traditional finance. It's exactly the same thing. It's just a, it's a pipeline of money that's sort of circular, and people derive value from it. And to me, the, the sort of like most important basic primitive of DeFi is yield. And basically, most of the world can't get a JPMorgan Chase, uh, high-yield savings account. So if you live in one of the, the world's 150 emerging economies with a relatively uninvestable currency, and you decide to store your money on-chain in stablecoins, and you want to earn a percentage yield on it, you want to earn your 5% in line with T-bills, you can do that on-chain, and you would be foolish not to in many cases. So like, I don't understand why that's not valuable.

It is valuable, but it's not an argument for ETH because you can do the same thing on Solana more easily, in my personal opinion.

Yeah, but that wasn't his point. He wasn't saying, I, I just hope this goes to Solana because I want more pure things on ETH. He was just calling the entire activity worthless, which I think is what pissed people off, uh, myself included.

Uh, yeah, I think so. The, the issue, the issue with Vitalik's statement, now that I, I, I more understand what you're saying now— yeah, he wrote it off, but I think he wrote it off for a very good reason. And the reason that he wrote it off is because he's still— I mean, I think Vitalik is candidly still stuck in the 2021 2020 era of DeFi, where you had this explosion of a bunch of different Ponzi schemes, the yield-generating games. Doesn't really happen today in this, in the same way. I mean, people still try to do it. I see a lot of projects try to raise for it. I see a lot of projects try to lean into that. But the reality is that they're just not getting that much money because I think people have figured it out that that's not, that's not the game, right? And so it's just actually, if what Vitalik said was true, I would like ETH more because at least there'd be a ton of activity, right? There'd be a ton of people chasing yield. There'd be a ton of people using these Ponzi-esque programs and activity on ETH would be up and gas would be up. But the reality is that nobody wants that anymore because they realize that it's all, it's all short-lived. I mean, the one thing that people, people say yield which is funny to me because it's not like crypto develops new yield out of nowhere. It just opens up access to a market that already exists, right? It's not like people in 20—

which is exactly what it's supposed to do. It's democratizing, it's permissionless, it's yet another reason aside from censorship, uh, resistance that we like crypto, right? It's the whole point is to democratize financial services. In ways that the centralized entities don't. Like, that's not a— yeah, like, it's not, it's not the snake eating its own tail to have borrowers and lenders doing their thing on ETH instead of through TradFi, through like the, the T-bill ETF, you know. It's, to me, it's like, it's very fundamental and kind of democratic.

Yeah, I think that's look, the way that I view this is that ETH is not going to generate any meaningful activity from the valuable thing that you have just described. That's the issue. And so one, one part is I agree that what you just described is extremely valuable.

Yeah.

And will be used in a substantial way. I disagree that it's going to take place on ETH. And the reason that I disagree it's going to take place on ETH is coming from somebody that has interacted with institutions a lot. There's no actual reason that an institution would go with ETH over Solana, because Solana also has a lot of institutional backers. You see, you see what I'm saying?

No, I disagree with that. I disagree.

People make people— because it's about the application, it's not about the settlement layer. And so, for example, if you want to launch a tokenization project, if you want to launch, let's say, Donald Trump decides to do his real estate tokenization, it's very possible that he builds it on Solana. It's equally possible that he builds on Solana as he does on— that he does on ETH.

I guarantee you, if we're in a world where real estate is getting put on chain, a substantial amount of assets are getting put on ETH. Like, I don't think it's a— I don't think it's like a random coincidence that BlackRock launched their tokenization fund on Ethereum and not Solana. Like they will probably— both of those chains will probably get a lot of action. I don't think it's going to be one or the other. Like, Solana is faster, it's more performant. Frankly, it breaks more, right? ETH is older, it hasn't broken, but it's slower, right? So each one has its benefits and its drawbacks. I think if you're looking for something that's— if you're like at a slower institution, you're, you know, trying not to get fired, and you're looking to build on something with the longest history and the most stability, like, you could choose ETH and not get fired for that. It's decision. Meanwhile, if you're trying to build some like new application that requires a lot more entries in the ledger, you probably would be safe putting that on Solana, especially as the blockchain matures. So I don't think it's like either or, I think they can both coexist.

Yeah, I think the issue, the issue for me is that I disagree with that for one reason. And it's that there's really not that much differentiation in terms of risk, if you're going into crypto, you're— that, that, that's the risk in my— that's, that's 95% of the discussion in the first place. It's the, the fact that you're going into crypto. Then there's 5% of discussion around, okay, like, how do we get into crypto? But I don't— these people differentiate a little bit, I think, between ETH and Solana, but not as much as you think, at least from my discussions.

Okay, I mean, I trust you.

The issue, the issue is, hey, do we do anything with crypto?

And so you're saying once they cross that chasm, they're just headed straight to Solana, they're not even going to bother with ETH, or if they had to, they're going to go to like partner with Coinbase or something, and it's going to go on Base and the fees won't accumulate to the mainnet.

The other, the other thing is that a lot of, a lot of this will have to do with BD. And right now Solana is more centralized than ETH in terms of BD, and nobody does BD for ETH. Vitalik, I guess, L2s do BD, but the reality of the situation— I say that a lot— the fact of the matter is, the fact of the matter is, what you have to understand about this, ETH has no business development, number one.

Number two, uh, yeah, where am I?

Anyway, long story short, the problem is that ETH doesn't have BD. L2s have BD, ETH doesn't, and that tech doesn't always win out. Let's try some— let's try something different. Instead of arguing about the philosophical part of it, you think ETH/BTC is up or down in a month?

Probably down. Yeah.

And why do you think it's down?

Because the trend is your friend, and that's just the way that the flows are going right now. But between now and next year, if, you know, ETH could be up a lot versus Solana— Solana is like near, near cycle highs, um, and ETH just isn't.

I think that Solana chart's going one way, and that one way is up and to the right. It certainly isn't going to the left, but I know, I know it's going up into the right, and ETH, unfortunately to me, unless it gets a— it could get a sailor. So if anyone's listening, if ETH got a sailor, that would be great. That would be a great thing because we could all just go long ETH BTC and make a ton of money.

ETH needs Larry Fink to just come out and be like, I'm replacing my back office with this and I'm going to go on CNBC once a week to re-explain why, right? That would be— that would be that moment.

So then with that, with that in mind, I wonder if you just stay short ETH/BTC until you get a piece of news. Because what, what we're, what we're saying here, if you really step back, is that there is no narrative, there is no reason for ETH to go up. It needs a catalyst, and the catalyst will probably be telegraphed in the sense that it will be an announcement or it will be it probably won't be anything other than an announcement that sends this thing back up. And so on any bounces, stay short and use that as a hedge for your book.

Yeah, that's probably the way to play it. I mean, when you do that in tradfi markets, when you like collect some carry trade, like, oh, this whole borrowing yen, swapping into dollars, and lending, lending dollars thing, it's just up and to the right. And then one day you're down like 3 years worth of money. I don't think it'll be that kind of a violent move in ETH/BTC or in SOL/ETH. I think it's— you'll probably have your chance to flip before you get ruined if you're paying close attention to the charts. I agree with you, Avi.

Yeah, maybe, maybe Larry Fink will come in and save you. I mean, that's, that's always my, my thesis is, is I hope for richer men to save me. What a great thesis.

I mean, until they're— until the SEC, like, on a serious note until the SEC allows capital to flow into our space in new ways, like, you know, allowing tokens to pass through dividends or allowing tokens to give you equity in projects— token— basically tokenized equity with a super clear regulatory framework. Until that happens, the only source of capital inflows is richer people buying your bags, or armies of smaller people buying your bags.

Yeah, I prefer the armies of smaller people because it's a lot easier to sell, sell to them personally.

Yeah, I noticed when I was getting out of Bowdoin that big pumps can occur on small volume, and little, little amounts of volume, uh, when you try to like push it through the exits and the price down quite a lot. I, I did notice that.

Yeah, I mean, you have to, you have to be really careful trading those things. I mean, there's, there's a specific, there's a specific way to do it. Actually, I, I just ran into this because I'm accumulating a small cap which I can't talk about, but because I don't want to get in trouble. But I think that the best way to accumulate these things are to put in small— basically put in these small market orders that just spike the price, and that always attracts sellers. And then people will come and sell into that, and then you can just do it again. Because what people look for to sell is they look for, you know, they, they look for weird price action. So for example, if you have a one candle that's 10% in a small cap, people will often take profits into that. Versus if you TWAP into the token over time and it goes up like 1% an hour, then people are actually a lot more likely to buy it. And so it's actually counterintuitive, but I think it's— I think it's better to market buy then to TWAP in.

I don't think that's kosher in trad fi. Like, I hear my compliance officer from Goldman Sachs, like, over my left shoulder, like, I wouldn't do that if I were you, Jonah. That's basically, um, called painting the tape.

No, I don't think so, because we're not like— I'm not like, you know, if I, if I have a TWAP and I guess it's—

you have a rationale for the trade, right?

Do you like, do you like one, do you like one market order an hour. Why is that— why is that bad to do one?

Yeah, I guess you're genuinely trying to buy it. There's like—

I'm trying to buy the whole thing. It's just like— and so you're not doing like— you're allowed to pick how to execute. I'm allowed to do one large order every hour instead of one order every 5 seconds.

Yeah, that's true. No, it's— you're absolutely right to do so. Um, I didn't— I guess that if you're trying to just get more liquidity by executing a different type of order, it seems totally legit. Obviously none of this is compliance advice or trading advice. Again, we clearly don't know what we're talking about, but it is, it is kind of an interesting concept. Like, how do you get the most liquidity? How do you attract people's attention? How do you sell it? Are a lot of these tokens— how's the OTC market, Avi, since I left it, uh, you know, a year and a half ago? How has it evolved? Is it super deep and liquid for random low, low market cap coins, or have things gotten worse since then?

I have absolutely no idea, to be completely honest with you, because I don't trade OTC anymore. Um, I just go, you know, we just trade direct, direct on exchange.

Having run an OTC desk, I would not, I would not trade OTC. Like, it's— I don't understand why people do it, frankly.

I mean, look, there— if you're going to be trading in this asset class, the especially if you're short-term trading. So it doesn't really matter if you're gunning for 2x's because your execution costs are, you know, if your exchange costs are 3%, 5% each way and you're going for a 2x, 3x, 4x, who cares? But the issue is that a lot of people are gunning for 20% and then they don't take into account execution costs and they don't take into account smart accumulation or smart selling. And then what they end up doing is if you're gunning for 20% and you're 3% in one way and 3% out the other, you're really hurting your risk-reward. So you have to be very careful, which is why whenever I trade this asset class, especially on choppy days like today, the goal is always to— it's a Costanza rule: when things are down, that's when you buy, and when things are up that's when, that's when you sell. And I definitely think that anyone that's click trading, if you're, if you're click trading more than like, if you're doing more than a million dollars in volume, which is actually pretty easy, I know a lot of people with like $100,000, $50,000, $10,000 that somehow hit a million dollars in volume. Um, if you're, if you're doing, if you're doing that much volume a month or even, you know, every 6 months it's worthwhile invest, you know, paying $5,000 for a good execution tool, whether that's in, you know, whether that's in Silico— I, I don't use them— or CoinRoutes or something else.

Lily, Lily, Lily, Lily here says limit buy, not market buy. And I kind of agree with Lily. Like, I think that unless you're in a hurry and you're FOMOing into something, doesn't hurt to just stick a bid in there and wait for it to, to get filled.

The information is too transparent in crypto. If you have a limit buy and you put in a limit buy and it's visible, whether that's an on-chain limit buy or exchange limit buy, I think that that's just— I don't like limit buys. What I like to do is I like to sweep at a certain level, which is why I think execution tools are great. Because what you don't want to do is you never want to broadcast that information out there.

No, that's fair, that's fair. Especially in really thin markets where some of these low FDV coins— or sorry, low market cap coins, low float— um, it's really like if you're getting in there trying to buy for a prop trade, it's often just you, right? Without you, the only thing you're seeing on screen is like market maker on market maker violence. And if you're getting in the middle of that, like, those market makers are going to notice you immediately and kind of get— make the price, uh, do things that are not what you want it to do, which is why you have to be careful.

And especially, I mean, so this week in TradFi has been the lowest— I mean, basically the lowest liquidity week in all year, which is the summer, which is to be expected. I think Bitcoin is trading like an illiquid shitcoin right now, which is one reason why you probably just need to walk away. You know, like establish your positions and walk away. There are, there are a lot of good catalysts coming up that I personally, I personally really like. I mean, you have some conferences like Seoul Breakpoint coming up, uh, you have Stacks releasing their Nakamoto upgrade, you have Aptos running on the Korea Blockchain Week. Remember Aptos and the Koreans, one APT equals one apartment? That means There, there's some good—

I, with all due respect to the, the cool guy with the long hair, like, why? Why? What's the point? Somebody explain to me why Aptos?

Like, what? Most of the— most— the point of these things is to trade them and make money and then watch them go to zero after 3 years.

Or not, like Cardano and, and Polkadot, but Yeah, fair enough.

Yeah, actually, what is the market cap of Cardano? I haven't, I haven't thought about that coin in a while.

Let's see. Yeah, enlighten me.

That's crazy. It's still, it's still top 15. $13 billion.

$13 billion. That's good.

$300 million traded a day. See, that's the thing. The point of these assets is to trade them. There's, there's a few select group of assets that are actually gonna do things in the future and be useful, but the majority of these things are just for trading.

Avi, we have 2,000 people watching this live stream.

There's no way we have 2,000 people watching this.

Yeah, we do, we do. Um, I can see why there's so many people pay—

there's literally no reason I, I, you know what I think it is?

I think you and I have both worked in pretty professional trading floor environments where we have a conversation like you hear in these trading floor environments, and I find it refreshing to hear other traders talk on a trading floor. I don't think there is any of that for crypto.

Wait, are we, are we live right now? Are we just— oh, I thought I didn't—

yeah, we're live, we're live. Okay, like, I was—

okay, oh no, no, yeah, this, this podcast is great. Everyone should watch.

I, I'm, I'm kind of shocked that, um, yeah, it's authentic, that's for sure. We clearly don't know what we're talking about. But yeah, I think it's interesting that there's no real place to hear trading floor talk in crypto. It just doesn't exist because there's no crypto trading floor. It's just a bunch of people holed up in their basements around the world or, um, super fancy offices, uh, clicking and trading. And it's kind of a solo game and you don't want to be in your own head too much. So it's important to, it's important to talk. That's a, that's something we should all do a little more of, is get out there with the community and try and chat. Another shameless plug for our Telegram chat room. Jonah, do you own any SOL altcoins right now? The answer is no, I'm flat memes, completely flat memes. Take some more questions. Why, why, why be flat memes? Here's why I would be flat memes. The reason to be flat memes right now is because there's no catalyst. There's literally no reason to be long a meme coin as the space consolidates and you have more and more supply getting printed on Pump.fund every single day. Um, I think that's going to distract from WIF and Boden and all of the other exciting— well, Boden's dead— WIF and MOG and all of the other ones that are still alive. That's why I think that there's no real meme trade right now. I think that memes are going to be the last thing to rally after a big Bitcoin pump, uh, or a big Solana pump. But I think it's too soon for that. I think you're safer in the majors. I think we need to just weather this, this next sort of fall period of chop. Let's see what other interesting, um, what other interesting comments are in here. So this guy Robin Debates says, bruh, you have 300 viewers, don't be pretentious. Uh, bruh, we have 2,000 viewers right now. 300 of them are on YouTube and 1,700 are on X, so you can see this stream in multiple locations. Um, that's, that's why it's like that. It's over for Helium. If Avi is truly on Helium in Puerto Rico right now, which I think there's like a 60% chance of, then yes, it's— this is definitively the beginning of the end for Helium. This—

okay, don't, don't even, don't even start.

Welcome back. I've been, I've been monologuing here with the, the chat room.

What the fuck are you monologuing about?

I was— we were monologuing about how Puerto Rico is not necessarily up to snuff in terms of Wi-Fi infrastructure, how you were shilling Helium while your— what, your Helium Wi-Fi broke down.

I've got a— I've got a few rebuttals to the peanut gallery. One, I'm on Verizon. If I was on Helium, this wouldn't have happened. Just then. Two, I don't live in Puerto Rico. What is my daily trading routine? Now this is, this is, this is a good question. This is a very good question. So the most important thing in trading to me personally is the ability to reflect on my day, right? Because I need to know— when you're trading, you make a ton of decisions every single day, and if you don't have a process or system to understand what decisions you're good at making and what decisions you're bad at making, you never get anywhere. You just end up, you just end up making the same mistakes over and over and over and over. So I always write down literally every decision that I made that day and why I made it, and then review them at least once a week so that when I go back, uh, I can say to myself, okay, I'm good at this, I'm good at that, I'm bad at this, I'm bad at that, right? So this, this is very important. And by the way, I just found out that Bloomberg has a notes app, which is great. So I just take all my—

Finish the thought. Tell us about your daily trading routine. Come on, stay focused here.

So, uh, the other, the other thing that I think is really important is a trading journal with your trades, right? So the P&L of your trades and then making sure that you can actually tag them and say, okay, well, this is a long-short trade. This is, you know, Rel Valley, I long ETH, I long ETH BTC, or I call it a blotter.

That's what us old guys used to call it.

Yeah. Like a, like a trade blotter with reasonable tags so that you can go back and say, hey, I'm really good at trading events, or I'm really good at trading product launches, or I'm really good at trading unlocks and flows, or I'm really bad at that. Right. And the other, the other thing that's important is making sure that you end up with a system in place. So once you figure out what you're good at. You stay away from doing the things that you know that you're bad at. And I know that that sounds really simple and really straightforward, but you cannot imagine the amount of people that I've seen that know that they're bad at something and can't help themselves because they think that they can do it. They're like, ah, like, I can, I, you know, I know I've messed up in the past for the last year doing this thing, but this time, this time it'll be different.

Trading does put you into that weird mind warp where sometimes you think that, like, you think that you're making money on something where you're actually losing money on it. Like, there's, there's so much weird psychology. I saw this a lot when I was in, um, sell-side trading. Like, you'd have people out on a trading floor making markets, uh, or in the case of physical commodities, like buying and selling assets or assets filled with commodities, and they thought that they were doing great prop trading, um, like, but they weren't, right? They were actually losing a little bit of money prop trading and making a lot of money on the business that they were operating. And there's this weird, like, mind meld psychology thing where almost down to the last person, all of those people thought that they were fantastic prop traders, and then a lot of them went on to go try to trade prop at hedge funds and failed. If you're, if you're just trading your own book, um, you don't, you know, or if you're trading at a hedge fund, like, you don't really have as much ability to get caught in that bias because you're— there's no asset to hide behind, there's no market making, there's no business that you can basically misattribute P&L from to your own genius. However, there is one thing that you can do when you're sitting by yourself, um, in a room trading that really messes with a lot of people's minds that I've seen. And this goes straight to your point, Avi. I've seen a lot of people trade like crazy, churn in and out of stuff, make a little bit of money on it in the middle of cycles where Bitcoin— like, the price of Bitcoin will double, they'll make like 10%, and they'll think they're doing a great job, right? And then after tax, they're left with like even less than what they thought they made. And they're like forced selling things to pay their tax bill. And so basically, the importance of a process is to know not just how much money you're making, but whether you're outperforming, uh, just hodling Bitcoin and doing absolutely nothing. That's really important, uh, to monitor in terms of process. Otherwise, you may actually be losing money versus what you would have earned if you just stuck your money in Bitcoin and, and walked away and spent your precious time earning more money in another way to invest in Bitcoin. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I mean, I, I 100% agree with that.

There's a lot of interesting comments in this chat that we could talk about. Is there anything in particular you want to discuss right now, Avi? This is— I mean, both of us are a little off, off balance because this is the first time we've done this format, but it's freaking awesome.

Yeah, I mean, this is, this is great. Why don't we do one? Why don't we do one again? This— we can even do one on Thursday.

Yeah, I'm down.

Well, maybe we'll invite another guest, but I gotta, I gotta, I gotta hop, unfortunately. Okay.

Well, it was a good time talking to you, Avi. Thanks for, uh, thanks for making time as always. I loved it.

No, this is great. And keep the, keep the comments coming. We love all of you.

We love, we love you guys. Uh, none of this is financial advice. Apologies in advance to our producers who are going to have to hack this together into something that seems halfway professional for the recorded episode.

Anyway, we'll work on it. I'm going to find better Wi-Fi for next time.

Use that Helium, sign up for Helium and tell us how it goes.

Yeah. Bring on high— yeah, definitely High Stakes Capital. Yeah, that's a great idea. Definitely bring on High Stakes Capital for sure.

Okay, yeah, we'll try to get a guest for the next one. Alrighty, Avi, see you later.