Finding Crypto's Next Big Trade | 1000x

There's no winning. There was this great quote that I'll read, which is basically— it ties into trading very well. It's by Søren Kierkegaard. He says, marry and you will regret it. Don't marry, you will also regret it. Marry or don't marry, you'll regret it either way. This gentleman is the essence of all philosophy. I mean, I kind of— which, by the way, that is the essence of trading. This, this, this, this quote, this is trading in a nutshell.

This episode is brought to you by Perennial Finance, the on-chain DeFi primitive redesigning derivatives for the DeFi native. You'll hear more about Perennial later in the show.

Welcome, welcome back to another ThousandX podcast. It's been a wild ride since our last one. ETF approved, ready to roll. ETH basically doubled in price. I hope at least some people managed to take on that trade, because what, you know, it was funny when I was pitching that trade, I really did think it was a 6-month play. Like, I had no idea that it was going to happen so quickly. I put the probability of it happening very quickly at 20% maybe, but then it happened quickly. I just knew that it was a good thing to hold because when you have, you know, when you have assets that are, you, you know, are going to react to certain events that way You never know when the event's going to come, so it's just good, it's just good to own. But it was, uh, it's good, you know. I think we've done— we've, we've had some pretty good calls so far.

Yeah, I mean, why not do a victory lap? All of crypto Twitter does a victory lap in the most obnoxious possible ways, so we can at least say, hey, we recommended it.

Obnoxious.

No, I think, I think ETH is a great trade. Um, I think that Had you listened to this podcast, you would've heard that word on a number of different episodes and hopefully it did something. But if you didn't, the market seems like it's setting up for a pretty extraordinary kind of second half. I think there's going to be quite a lot of opportunity, but also a lot of danger and landmines if you're in the wrong tokens or if your book's too messy. So This is kind of like a pretty critical pivot point, don't you think, Avi?

I think, I think so. I think the issue, the issue here is that the market hasn't reacted the way that I think most people would have hoped to the, to the ETH, to the ETH ETF move. I mean, yes, we got, yes, we got a nice candle. It ripped, it ripped hard. And ETH is a big asset. So that was a, that was a huge move. But the reality is that we've stalled here. And I think that's just people, you know, people started panicking a little bit that it might— I think the ETF launch might look a little bit similar to the BTC launch. I think a lot of people de-risked on that candle. And I also do think that there are a lot of people out there that just aren't in the market. I think people were caught off guard by the strength and severity of the ETH move. The market clearly was not pricing the ETF in. And so what's happening right here is we're just, we're processing the information, we're processing the, the sales of the people who bought for, for a quick flip, because the reality is inflows aren't going to come probably, you know, for a month, 2 months, because the ETF isn't going to go live. And that gives us the opportunity to probably range for a bit. What I would assume is that you get a lot of de-risking from people over the next, over the next month as they're sort of waiting to see what happens with, with the ETF flows and also The chart doesn't look amazing. I mean, we had the, we had the ETF come in and we didn't actually push ETH through the highs of March, which is obviously a little concerning. With all that said, I think it's all just short-term noise. I mean, maybe it goes down 8%, but the reality is that the market is structurally bullish.

I think so too. And I think what's more important than the ETH ETF approval is the meta behind it, the why. Right. I, so I was originally sort of hoping for a pullback where I could buy some $55,000 Bitcoin just on chop and apathy and, you know, lack of momentum leading to some sort of inertia selling and, and whatever, just kind of like the type of summer where you maybe get the occasional shank to, to add to your portfolio. I'm, I'm kind of losing faith that that's going to happen. I think if anything, we just start to push higher, a lot higher, very quickly from here. And the reason why is, like, ask yourself why the ETH ETF got approved. There seems to be this sea change going on in Washington where the Democrats, you know, are kind of giving up on their anti-crypto stance. And now why would they do that? Um, you know, there's been a lot said about this, so I'll try to keep it brief.

I just—

to me, if you have you know, however many tens of millions of crypto holders in the United States, uh, in an environment where, you know, wealth is getting inflated away and people have, people have, you know, significant percentages of their net worth invested in this asset class. Why make single-issue voters of them, especially when the election is going to get decided by a couple of counties and 20,000 votes can swing, swing the whole country one way or another in terms of red versus blue? Like, I think the Democrats, you know, Trump hopped on the crypto chain. Train, uh, came out pretty vocally in support of it. Um, you know, he— there was that crypto dinner at Mar-a-Lago that you were part of, Avi, where he was, you know, just offering full-throated support to crypto, claiming Biden didn't understand it. Uh, now he's like speaking to senior cryptocurrency executives. Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are like advising him on crypto policy. Meanwhile, Biden has, has reversed just flip-flops thinking, you know, rationally, why, why would I, why would I, uh, die on that hill? Like, who cares? I'll join the crypto train too. So I think what this means, Avi, the whole ETF approval is a sign that the Elizabeth Warren, Gary Gensler Democratic sort of anti-crypto obstacle has just been removed. And what that means is institutions can start to get comfortable with crypto. Institutions have already gotten comfortable with Bitcoin and ETH. There's been a, you know, multi-year, almost decade-long onboarding process, uh, but, you know, institutions like Bank of New York Mellon can custody it now. Um, you know, that bill got passed in Congress. Ultimately, where we're at is the floodgates are about to get opened, in my opinion, for institutions to settle on-chain, and the pathway has been cleared for regulatory clarity around whether or not these things are securities, which in turn will lead to a world where companies can just issue tokens and pass through dollar or stablecoin revenue to token holders, uh, much like in, you know, equities pass through dividends. And, and then I think we're in like raging euphoria mode again in crypto. So I think that's basically why I'm so excited right now. And I don't really understand why the market isn't just ripping on all of that, but maybe it's just going to take some time to digest.

I think, I think you're right. I think all of that is true over a long period of time. I think the issue is, and the reason why the market isn't ripping, is because while all of this is extremely good news, it's not clear when these inflows are going to come in. So for example, all of the people that are scared off by the regulatory policy of the Biden admin, well, these are people that are very likely long-term allocators. These are your pension funds, these are your big banks, these are people that were looking at crypto, they're evaluating it, they're waiting for regulatory clarity, and then, and then they're going to come in. And maybe their plan was a 3-year plan. And now this regulatory clarity, what's it done is it's cut down that 3-year plan to a 1-year plan, but it's still a 1-year plan. They're still probably not coming in until January of next year, because they're going to spend this entire year, they're going to probably start dedicating more resources to it. Starting now. Why? Because I think a lot of people, they viewed the election as the main decider. How is crypto going to be treated? And so they were hands-off, you know, if Trump gets elected, we'll start working, we have 4 years under Trump to get into crypto. If Biden gets elected, then we don't, we shouldn't do anything with crypto. So any time spent on it right now is a complete waste of time.

Now that's changed.

As you've, you know, as you pointed out correctly, it's no matter who wins, crypto is in a good spot. It's, you know, actually quite nice. I feel very comfy. The thing is that these people are now only now going to start to allocate time to figuring this out. And so when you talk to, you know, like, say you talk to, talk to the people that are taking crypto investments, talk, talk to big hedge funds, ask them about their conversations with these guys, they're always going to be slow moving. So the real, the real issue is that we don't know when these inflows are coming, and they could come in in a year. What does that mean for the short term? Is that there's no real rush to front run that type of, that type of asset inflow. Because if you don't know when the asset inflow is going to come, then you can't really front run it now because there's so many things that could happen in the meantime. How do you isolate that risk? What if macro starts to go to shit? What if the world, you know, what if crypto in general, what if liquidity gets sucked out of the system? Then what have you done? You've, you've front run for this event that's not even here yet. And you have to sell your position because that event is too far off and you can't justify sticking in it. What it does is it creates stale longs, which is why I think that any movement that we got off of the back of this is— it's kind of like a shitcoin pump. It's like somebody tweeted about a coin that, you know, it's like somebody tweeted, hey, by the way, in one year I might buy some of this coin. It's— and it's a big name, it's a great name. Maybe like, you know, Ansem's out there He's tweeted, in a year I'm going to buy some of this coin. It gets a 10% pump and then it retraces immediately until he actually buys. And that's, that's the way that, that's the way that I'm viewing this market.

That's an interesting way to think about it. I mean, for those who have never been on an institutional market-making desk, basically the thing that clients are most afraid of when they trade with an OTC desk like the one that I ran at Cumberland or, or the one that I ran for oil at Goldman Sachs, is they're worried that the market maker is going to front run you, right? Like, let's say that a producer comes in to hedge a bunch of oil production, so they're going to sell some oil futures. They're always very scared that as soon as, um, as soon as the guy at Goldman picks up the phone, the price of oil is going to start to go down before, uh, before he gets his hedge off, right? And so there, there's rationale. I'm getting somewhere with this, but basically there's rationale for that. And the rationale is the way that it used to work is a salesperson would receive the call from the oil producer, stand up and start waving, doing this like special sign language, like frantically waving to the trader. Like the, the Jonah or the Avi sitting there getting ready to quote. And depending on whether the wave was like a hand scooping air upwards or a hand pushing air downwards, it would tell you whether to start clicking buy or clicking sell. So indeed, there was quite a lot of front-running that used to go on inside of these banks back in the day. Um, then clients wised up, the regulation tightened up, and that stopped. And if you were clicking ahead of a trade, um, you almost always lost money. Frontrunning became nearly impossible because of the, the way that information flows kind of tightened up and the, the speed of trading increased. And so there's still traders out there trying to front run the flows, but like you said, it's literally impossible if you don't know when they're, when they're going to come. Frontrunning only works if there's going to be a big flow and you know exactly when it's hitting the market. So to me, looking at, looking at the market, you, you have a point. It's like, okay, institutions are going to buy a lot, but you don't know when. So I take your point there. It's impossible to front run that because of the timing element. But there is another flow that's looking pretty consistent that I think, you know, I think is a wave you can ride, which is, uh, you know, I'm just tracking the Bitcoin ETF. Grayscale rotation, so Grayscale outflows, whoever was, whoever was in Grayscale and either liquidating it for cash or rotating it into iBit or rotating it into BTC, they've stopped. The Bitcoin holdings of GBTC have basically leveled off. Um, you know, tweeted out some charts about this, but iBit inflows are steadily continuing. You know, they're kind of averaging, they're averaging, you know, $50 million a day.

Ish.

So that steady flow, I think, should keep a floor— that, that is flow that you can front run, or if it's consistent, just ride. That's going to keep a steady floor under the market. It's going to prevent me from getting my dip to buy, I think. And then as the political climate turns, you know, it's only been a week or two since this fast, incredibly relevant political sea change has just occurred. I think that, buoyed by those flows, you can sort of ride a, a gradual sentiment shift into a plus, you know, the halving as well into a more bullish second half.

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I think that's— I think, I think that's actually spot on. I mean, you know, there's— we have to, we have to admit this has been a big shift in the market. And I can't be disrespected. Now, what that, what that necessarily means is just be happy, you know, if you can probably be happier in your position with, with BT, with BTC and ETH. I also do think it goes, it goes downstream. There are a lot of assets out there that were, that were under SEC scrutiny that are now not going to be, that you can probably, you can probably pick up. Now, the, the question of do the inflows come now or later, I think the answer is that it's still later. It's not now, 100%. And so I don't think that necessarily we're going to blink our eyes and be at $100K in 3 seconds. I think what's going to end up— what's going to end up happening is it's going to— it's— there's going to be a floor in the market for a bit because I think that there are people that, you know, on a massive sell-off will now feel more comfortable stepping in and actually picking up asset. So I don't think you're going to get those, you know, crazy— that sort of crazy sell-off anymore. I don't know if we're heading— we're heading for 52, uh, any— any— anymore at this point. I think that it's— it's— it's actually very likely we just chop around for the next, uh, for the next month. And I, I also think that heading into— heading into next year, there's going to be a lot, a lot of good news that comes out with respect to crypto. So if you're not positioned by the end of the year, you, you you probably should be. And so that sort of brings us to, to one, to one question, which is, in, in a market environment, uh, where you have, you, you have this big catalyst that you know is coming, that these inflows are going to come at some point, but you don't necessarily know when it's going to happen, and you think that there's a floor in the market, what's the best way to trade something like that, right? Like, what's the best, what's the best structure? To trade, to trade something like that? Are you, are you selling puts against your ETH? Are you selling puts against your, your BTC because you know that if it trades $60K, you sell it against cash, you want to accumulate? Or you, you really don't think it's going to get to $50, so you're just selling, you know, you basically, you're selling vol because we might go sideways for a bit? Maybe you're like, what happens, let's say we go into a low vol period, what are you doing with your book?

Yeah, I mean, I think the trade coming into this this whole thing has been Coinbase, right? Coinbase stock has been really performing on the back of this regulatory shift, and I'm wondering if that's, if that's going to continue, you know? Like, I'm wondering that the— I don't want to mid-curve this too much, but like, like, deregulation good for Coinbase, um, and then the opposite argument, that, that's the, that's the left-curve take, and then the the smart guy would be like, deregulation is good for, for Coinbase. What I'm worried about is if we go into an environment where suddenly like everybody just can— all the flow shifts onto TradFi exchanges, like I bid on the New York Stock Exchange, does Coinbase lose a big-ass chunk of its business? I don't, I don't know how many of you have traded on Coinbase out there, if you're all just like total on-chain degens, but Coinbase is not cheap to trade on. You know, it's not the best solution. Like, even, you know, we reviewed Hyperliquid a while ago. Like, there's, there's any number of places to get better liquidity on any of this shit than Coinbase. So the more mainstream this becomes, I'm— I'd be worried about that one. Maybe, maybe, uh, like, maybe like a total dark horse trade would be buy Coinbase puts.

That's actually kind of interesting, uh, by— I mean, Yeah, I think that Coinbase is kind of like, it's bad, it's bad to trade on. But the question is, if let's say, you know, meme coin mania continues, right, or altcoins or altcoins continue, well, COIN still represents that ability for more traditional folk that only have access to a brokerage to bet on the growth of, you know, basically altcoins, right? Because yeah, almost all—

and Base is fucking exploding too. That's in a good way. They're, um, L2.

Actually, you know what I read today that was wild? How much, how much volume do you think Robinhood did in meme coins over the last 2 weeks?

Oh man, um, I— when I was quoting Robinhood, we were like, they were basically only listing, uh, Doge and SHIB. I don't know what meme coins are on there now, but let's say, let's say, uh, 40 million a day, dude.

They did $4.5 billion.

Whoa.

Yeah, $4.5 billion in meme coins over the last 2 weeks. Pepe. Pepe.

Oh, last 2 weeks. Okay.

Yeah, but like, how— like, come on.

No, that's enormous. What memes can you trade on Robinhood? I don't have a Robinhood account.

I know, I know you can trade Pepe. I know you can trade Doge, um, memes, like crypto. On Robinhood is probably something that we should know. Yeah, like what, what types of— what, what we offer crypto. Let's see, what, what do we got?

By the way, $4.5 billion over 2 weeks is $321 million a day. Damn, that's, that's, that's serious volume. That's like 2021 type stuff. And while you're looking this up, you know, I talked to some of the younger traders that I've met just through my commodities network the guys that are like passionate, you know, oil, gas, gasoline, jet fuel traders, these, these sort of like commodities guys. I mean, the average, the average one has like 30% of his or her net worth in crypto right now.

That's insane.

Trades on leverage. It's, it's crazy. It's like people with any risk appetite in that generation just do not see a path to financial freedom through trad fi. Stocks and bonds. So I can, I can understand why Robinhood's churning, you know, $300, $350, like mid-nine figures a day in memes.

Dude, that's, that's actually, that's actually wild. And one thing that I'll say is that if, if this continues, and maybe Robinhood is, is the play for like the traditional guys that have a brokerage if they want, if they want to bet on memes. Maybe you just buy Robinhood, and the chart actually looks quite good. Uh, it's rallied, it's rallied pretty aggressively over, over the last month.

Um, so I just asked, uh, asked Grok on Robinhood. You can— Grok on Twitter is great for everything. Doge, SHIB, WIF, Bonk, Pepe, and Floki.

Is, is that— is Gronk— is like Grok fucking with us? I don't understand.

Could be, could be fucking with us, but That's pretty bananas.

It's a great meme coin proxy. So it's actually possible that as people want to get access to meme coins, but they can't actually get on ETH, they can't actually go buy, you know, go get on Solana, they can't go get on all these L1s because you're regulated. Buy some HOOD because that $4.5 billion number is pretty nuts. Now?

That is—

yeah, so like, that's, that's significant. That's significant appreciation for Robinhood.

When I was quoting Robinhood, they were making 35 basis points on every dollar of notional that a retail user would trade on, uh, on their platform. Now I think they've since reduced that to like 20 basis points, but if they're trading $350 million a day that would be, let's see, that would be $700,000 a day of just meme coin revenue. Yeah, it's pretty fucking bananas for a, for a platform like that. So yeah, that's, that's maybe a stock you buy is like meme coin beta because I don't think the equity analysts are paying attention to that.

You know, the more that I think about it, the more that I like it because we all, we all know that these types of, these types of assets that are basically you know, ETF lights or ways to access the crypto market that nobody else can have, they actually tend to do— they tend to do very well. So I actually like that. I like that a lot. Maybe I need to go pick up some HOOD.

Man, me too. There's weird alpha in some of these, like, like listed equities that touch crypto, like ETH, for example. GBTC was a fucking grand slam. Now HOOD in meme coin mania. Yeah, for some master Um, for some reason, TradFi just doesn't pick up on this stuff. There's like a weird Chinese wall between the world of TradFi and the world of shitcoins. Um, what I'm concerned about though is, okay, as we go into the second half of this year, we're all bullish on Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana. The bar for investing in something in a in a token that is not Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, or something in the meme coin casino, which isn't even an investment, that's just fun, right? That's just— that's craziness, um, is so high because the thesis and the risk-reward behind the benchmark L1s, Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, is just so good. So like, I'm getting really worried about two things. I'm worried about, one, putting my money into an altcoin that just tanks or flatlines while the rest of the market rips and missing out on the huge rally with that capital. Or two, um, being risk-averse and having all my money in Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana, and then like some fucking name-your-sector summer occurs, de-pin DISO, I don't know what, AI, X, crypto, you know, it could be Livepeer, it could be Tao, it could be any of these fucking things. And I miss out on a 1000x, right? So I'm— it's dicey right now with the altcoin space.

There's no winning. I read there was this great quote that I'll read, which is basically— it ties in, it ties into trading. Very well. It's by Søren Kierkegaard. He says, marry and you will regret it. Don't marry, you will also regret it. Marry or don't marry, you'll regret it either way. Hang yourself, you will regret it. Do not hang yourself, you will regret that too. Hang yourself or don't hang yourself, you'll regret it either way. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy. I mean, I kind of— which, by the way, that is the essence of trading. This, this, this, this quote This is trading in a nutshell.

The way that I had it explained to me by one of my mentors, who's this like legendary natural gas trader guy, he's like, Jonah, in natural gas trading there are only two emotions: shame and regret. And it's basically what you just said. Shame, shame when you, uh, when you miss out on a trade, and regret when you fucking buy the wrong thing and lose your shirt. So I don't like— think of all these, think of all these sexy like mega launches that just occurred, right? There's like, there's been in the last couple years has been Aptos, Sui, Sei. I don't know, maybe you put Worldcoin in there, Telegram, TON, whatever. Um, are we supposed to own any of that stuff going into this like new paradigm? I'm kind of thinking no, you know.

You know what, I think, I think they're, I think they're good for trades. The What I've failed to see is any real traction. And I would love if anyone in the comments— one of my favorite things about doing this podcast, Jonah, is that anytime I say, well, this isn't happening or that isn't happening or this sucks or that sucks, we inevitably get comments that say, you haven't looked at this. So I'm hoping that we get this this time. Avalanche, Aptos, Sei, Sui, all of these other platforms outside of ETH and Solana, Arbitrum, Optimism, nothing is happening. Nothing is actually happening with these platforms anymore. And I think that's one of the reasons why meme coins have popped so hard, in my non-professional opinion, is that last cycle there was at least a facade of happening on L1s. There are all these partnerships that they were announcing this, that we're going to build this, we're going to build that. There are all these you know, the game of, well, it's Uniswap on this protocol, or, you know, Balancer on this protocol, or blah blah on this protocol, so on and so forth. That has disappeared from crypto. You don't hear anything out of these L1s anymore pushing that they're actually doing real work. Or if they are pushing that, it's not widely appreciated, widely known, or realistically at the core, widely cared about because it's viewed as fake. So my view on this is that these guys— the reason is because these guys aren't actually doing anything, and it's, you know, only so long that you can, you can keep that facade up. With that said, it would be nice if somebody in the comments comes in and tells, and tells me otherwise. It's just I, I haven't paid attention to that area of the world, and maybe I should, but I haven't because there was you know, I was for a very long time, and my takeaway was, well, there's kind of no reason to. And that doesn't mean that they're not going to pump. It doesn't mean that you're not going to get a good trade in, right? They're always, they're always idiosyncratic buyers of any asset. If you have, you know, if you have a monitor of all these different L1s and you're tracking their volume, and then one day you wake up and the volume is 5x what it normally is and price is not up that much, then maybe you need to buy this thing. However, that doesn't mean anything for the long term, right? It's just a— it's just a good trade. And that's how I feel about a lot of these— a lot of these assets right now. Unfortunately, they're not good trades. They're just, uh, you know, they're not good investments. They're just good trades, which is fine, right? That's okay. Um, you just have to sort of know what you're getting yourself into.

Yeah, I agree. I think another thing that you can do to play these sort of like these downtrends, right, like what's— if you think about just from a market structure perspective what's actually going on inside of a SUI or a SEI or an Aptos or a NEAR or an Avalanche, the reason why they sort of trade broadly correlated with the, you know, Bitcoin and ETH is because there are correlation algorithms that, you know, let's say every time ETH ticks up and NEAR is unchanged, the algorithm will like buy a little bit of NEAR. These are like, and vice versa, right? So these are called mid-frequency correlation algorithms. Sometimes they'll pair trade it versus ETH, sometimes they won't. Um, so like crypto, there's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy because of these correlation mid-frequency algorithms that keeps all of the major benchmark assets in line with each other. But underneath the hood, what's going on inside of an ETH is like, or a Solana, like there's actual shit going on. There are developers, there's an ecosystem, there are new users coming in, opening wallets, buying tokens. And then in these sort of like more dead zone ecosystems, like, uh, I don't know, Polkadot, there's, um, not much happening. And so except insiders and VCs unlocking and selling, right? So the pairs are where you can really read the tea leaves of what's go— what's going on. Like, obviously, notwithstanding a massive catalyst event or an explosion in volume, the day-to-day in like the Polkadot-ETH pair or the Near-ETH pair will just be this like smooth downtrend. And so one thing that you can do as a trader if you're focused on this full-time is you can identify opportunities where perps in these, you know, kind of dead ecosystems trade at a premium. And then you can pair trade where you short the, where you short the alt L1 and buy the benchmark L1 like Ether, Solana, because these smooth trends, like these things last for weeks. Um, so you could pick up a little bit of funding and a little bit of smooth P&L. I don't personally have time to do that sort of thing anymore, but I used to.

Yeah, that's, uh, I, I remember seeing some of the, some of the charts that you had shared in the past where you basically look at the, the, the distance from a moving average on these, on these sort of pairs, and when it had gotten to a point where it was like, you know, 2 standard deviations away from the average distance, then you just buy it because these, these pairs tend to also just be mean reverting in general.

Yeah.

So I, yeah, I, I remember that, and I think that's a good— it's good, probably good trading for right now, especially because— I mean, actually, the more that I think about it, especially because if these assets don't have any real fundamentals behind them, it's— and these pumps are just idiosyncratic buyers in the market, that mean reversion happens probably very frequently now. So if you have a— if you, if you want, you can even set up a screener to say, well, you know, look at you can go by each coin, you can pick the most correlated coins for every coin, like the top 3 correlated coins, and then calculate this screener and then just find out when there's large standard deviation moves. Could be, could be, could be a good exercise. If you build that, come, come call me, I'll, you know, I'll pay for your product.

Another good one, uh, shout out to Josh Frank who built the tie.io VC unlocks. Like, imagine you're a VC locked into one of these just totally dead mega-cap assets in crypto, you're just literally crossing off days on your calendar one by one until you can get the fuck out and redeploy that capital into something interesting. And so I think that maybe not outright, but, you know, these guys have gotten lucky, right? All of their shitcoins have rebounded massively since the collapse, and a lot of them are locked up in SAFs that were minted in the sort of 2021, 2020 era. These guys are gonna, these guys are gonna get out as soon as they can. So those will, that'll knock the pairs down, the sort of like alt L1 versus ETH pairs. Um, so maybe if you have the unlocks calendar, you can, you can get ahead of that and make some easy money. That was something we did at, uh, at Cumberland as well.

Yeah, it's, uh, I, I hope that doesn't get too widespread because some of these trades get really crowded. Um, but the, you know, one of the, not not to just like go down listing all the different trades that are kind of interesting, but one of my favorite trades is, uh, is the, is the airdrop trade. So for example, Arweave is getting a massive airdrop over the, over the coming, uh, over the coming weeks. And right now I'm looking at the futures curve and you can short, uh, Arweave futures and they're not backwardated yet. So you basically just get the free airdrop. At some point, that future will go backwardated and you'll actually have made some good money on it. So you can make it— you, you can actually— what's kind of interesting is you can actually make money both ways if you time it, if you time it right. You can, you can short that, short the future, buy spot. The future will go— if you short it now, the future will go backwardated. You can buy back, uh, you know, you can, you can buy that, buy back the future and then actually go, uh, short on the, on the PERP, which is kind of nice. Interesting.

Just looking at the— speaking of airdrops, I'm just looking at what happened to Friend. Not so friendly price action there. These airdrops, when was the last time an airdrop—

but at some point, at some point, Jonah, everybody will forget that Friend exists. It'll bottom out, all the sellers will be out, and then it'll rip. This is what happens. You just— the key is remembering to pay attention. Like, that's genuinely the key because I fall into this trap a lot.

Like, here's my problem. Unlike some people on crypto Twitter who are super popular, I'm not really a cheerleader. Like, I'm occasionally willing to just like throw in the towel on stuff forever and just be like, this particular asset is fucked. I'm worried. I'm not saying it's fucked, but I'm worried that Friend.Tech is just toast and the token is is gone. Like, no, I— man, this is why people hate me out there.

But like, yeah, I mean, what is the— you're kind of, you're kind of a hater, just being honest.

Well, no, I mean, I, I love, I love Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana and certain memes, but like, what, what is there to— don't you— let's not pick on friend tech. Have you heard or, or witnessed like examples in crypto of products that launch, they're popular for like a month until people lose interest, then they go silent, then the airdrop happens. Around the airdrop, people start farming and getting involved and being active to claim their tokens, and then shit just dies again, um, afterwards. Like, aren't you worried about buying airdrop tokens in— because of that sort of price action and activity pattern?

I mean, the, the answer, the answer is no, mainly because I can't think of many other products in crypto that have— like, how many other products in crypto do you know that are like Friend.Tech?

I guess there's Farcaster, but yeah, not really, not really many. It's— I guess Telegram kind of competes with Friend.Tech, and they're kind of in crypto.

They're, they're just not that many crypto— like, I, I just wouldn't say that they are crypto products. That have come into favor and then fallen out that have actually, you know, achieved the, the prevalence of something like a Fintech that are actual real. I mean, obviously, 100%, you see it with all the speculative things, right? You saw like GMX was huge for a bit, uh, you know, Rollbit was obviously very big for a bit and then fell out of relevance. There, there are these assets that were tied to speculative products that fell out of favor. But, and, and FrontTech is a speculative product, but it's a different type, right? It's genuinely a social media platform. And so I do have to give them some credit, uh, that they're, you know, that, that they're going to be around, they're going to figure out a way to, uh, you know, to pump, to pump their token, for lack of a better word. Uh, but, you know, I actually can't think of any like FrontTech-like platforms that have reached this you know, reach this state.

Yeah, I'm struggling. I'm just throwing out things. Bored Apes was kind of a social network with a value attached to it. Uh, I don't know. I basically— what I'm doing here is I'm just kind of trying to parse through the altcoin space with you and see if there's anything worth doing there against the backdrop of this like screamingly bullish, amazing risk-reward in the benchmarks.

I mean, I'm right now, I'm a benchmark maxi. What can I say?

Yeah, it's just the other stuff is just like the benchmarks are so obvious to anybody who's paying attention. And the rest of it is like, I just, I can't get my head around it. It's too dicey. It's crypto still hasn't had its mainstream adoption moment.

You know, the one thing, the one thing I mean, even with benchmarks, it's been just a bit sad. To see is for the last 3 days there's just been a consistent TWAP out of ETH/BTC. I think the market in general has been conditioned to fade ETH/BTC. And so it's, you know, it's down, it's down 1%, it's down 1.5% today. Bitcoin, Bitcoin is up and ETH is struggling. I think that what's a bit sad is even with all this, all of these tailwinds, ETH can't— it can't catch a break, man. This thing just like keeps getting slammed.

Well, who's slamming it? It's people who are long ETH taking profits. I think that the same thing happened to Bitcoin after it gassed higher. Uh, people were getting out, right?

So yeah, let's see, let's see if they come back in.

Well, I mean, they don't need to if an ETF gets approved, which it kind of has, right? Like, um, you have a new buyer base coming in, or Maybe TradFi starts opening wallets and settling stuff. You get the BlackRock Biddle Fund expanding. I, I don't know. Um, it's— ETH/BTC is a tough one, but I think if you're gonna look at an alt, like a pairs trade that's steadily trending lower, you don't look at ETH/BTC, you look at one of these alt L1s versus Bitcoin or alt L1s versus ETH. Actually, maybe that's the way to structure it. And and Alt L1 versus Bitcoin, if you can get that pair on.

I think that, yeah, you just risk— I think it's all about entry point for that. It's like what you kind of want to wait for is you want to wait for one of these scam pumps on like a, like an Aptos. You wanna, you wanna, you wanna see it go up like 15, 20% in a day, and then you're just like, all right, get me out, get me out, get me out, go, go, go, go, go.

That's a good one to short, Aptos. That one has huge VC unlocks, uh, coming in the next year or two.

Um, although it's, it's, it's, it fucking died in March, came off 50%, it's been sideways. The issue with, with these trades right now is that a lot of them are already off. So I'm, I'm of the mindset that I kind of want to wait to, to short these things, but we'll see. What one thing we didn't, um, mention is that, uh, I don't know if you saw the headline come through that Musk is working with Trump on crypto. And then Musk came out and said, just kidding, never mind. The issue is that you're dealing with two of the biggest liars that have ever existed on this planet. And so you don't know which one is lying. Like, one of them is lying, but it's not like there's one trustworthy one and one not trustworthy one. But the whole, uh, the whole point of this was that if, if it's true, you probably want to own more Doge.

Yeah, I mean, a, a WEN Doge ETF, right? That's— that could be, that could be pretty wild. I do—

do you think, do you think our society has jumped the proverbial shark after the Doge ETF? I think society in general, I think it's already past the peak.

I think this is— we're witnessing the decline of Western civilization already for a number of reasons. I, I don't think society's jumped the shark if we, if we end up with a Doge ETF. I think most zombie companies and most equities and crypto in general is already far crazier than an ETF for a popular meme coin. I really do. I think we're, we're far beyond that point of wildness already.

Yeah, that's, that's fair. And there, there are a lot of other things that are probably marking the top of the American empire. I won't get into on this podcast because I'll probably get canceled for believing it.

But if you want to get canceled, just say Solana is in trouble and that it's going to go down. That'll get you canceled. But if you don't say that, I think you're good.

I think if you repeat, Jonah, Solana is in trouble 8 times, then I'll buy Solana and I'll actually finally— I think that would be— if you could do that for me, that would be real nice. Much, much appreciated, buddy.

Oh, what, what, I mean, is there even any point asking what else there is to buy besides Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana? I just, there has to be, there has to be some process for, for other than like selling coins that are slowly dying that, that we can use to make money. I mean, I, I'm sort of like, the big, the big red flag for me across all of this is watching what NFTs are doing.

Right?

NFTs basically show you that, you know, just because Bitcoin has pumped every cycle, every bull market since its inception, does not mean that every crypto asset will pump every bull market, right? I, I do believe in NFTs. I think they're going to skip a cycle and probably pump again later this decade. But like, what that goes to show you is just how spectacularly you can underperform. Like the, the BTC-Bored Ape Yacht Club pair is just up only in all environments. And I don't want to— given that as a, as a trader, you know, for the listeners out there, you're always trading a pair, right? You're trading Bitcoin versus USD. If you're buying something a little more speculative, you could consider it like speculative asset versus Bitcoin because that capital would probably be in Bitcoin. You know, you— the onus, like the burden of proof is just so high to invest in anything right now. And so, yeah, I think Avi, you hit the nail on the head. We've just got to start actively trading catalysts, actively like pairs trading, yield farming, collecting funding from perps against spot, like doing all the little creative things that people need to do to eke out a profit. But there is no real investment thesis for long-term holding. Beyond the benchmarks.

Yeah, I think that's— I, I think, I think that's— God, that's so depressing but fair.

Well, it's good for traders. It's good. Yeah, it's good for Avi Feldman. It is.

It's good. It's good for trading, that, that's for sure. And which is, which is what I'm doing. I mean, right now I'm like tactically short the market, um, just because I think that, you know, we could, uh I, I think that we could have the floor fall out from under us in terms of like 5, 5, 6% move. But also, I'm recording this right before PCE, and so if equities and the rest of the market, uh, sell off a ton, that actually makes it a really good buy because that means that the, you know, if we get good data, then there's, there's a, there's a nice upside surprise. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think in, I think in general, in, in general right now, I'm, I'm trade— I'm trading pairs. I'm being, I'm being careful. I think it's, uh, it's, it's a, yeah, it's a, it's going to be an interesting market next, next few weeks, I think, just because there's just no real direction.

These are the hardest markets because these are the ones where you lose focus, do stupid shit, put on a bunch of bad trades, and then in 6 months, you know, you don't notice the pain in the beginning, but then after 6 months you're just kicking yourself. So this is where discipline comes in. I mean One thing that I'm noticing, commodities broadly are rallying, but oil's puking right now. And if we get a proper sell-off in transportation fuels, I think that could help. That's something that the inflation people aren't necessarily laser-focused on right now. If this sell-off continues, which I think it probably will, then maybe you get some cooler CPI prints and maybe the rate cutting starts as we head into the election cycle and then assets overheat. That could be a bullish catalyst. I think other than macro, though, there's nothing like there's nothing particularly crypto-native to cause liftoff at this point. I—

why— one, one question that I had is why did, why did natural gas rally so damn much?

I'm not really paying attention to natural gas as much as I should, but I think, I think that thing was related to some sort of like late winter, um, cold snap or something. It's, I forget exactly why, but yeah, I don't have a good answer for you there. Maybe we should wrap it there then and let the audience enjoy our confusion and feel less bad if you're confused, because so are we. Belong the Benchmarks, help us figure out the rest right now.

Jonah, it was a pleasure talking to you as always. It's, uh, sorry for losing focus towards the end. The market was shitting itself and I was covering my shorts.

Traders gotta trade.

Traders gotta trade. But that's good. It's like you guys are on the trading floor with us, you know? You get to, you get to experience what it, what it's like, you know, the, the meandering conversations, the, uh, actually, can you shut up for a second while I make this trade?

Yeah, exactly.

It's good, it's good. We're just doing our job.

Great talking to you, Avi. Obviously, none of this is investment advice. We clearly don't know anything. Good luck out there.

Don't know a goddamn thing. So please listen to me.

We're going to try to do some more creator dev type, type interviews pretty soon to get you some new content, not just us rambling about sideways markets.

Right. All right. Later. Adiós.