Picking Winners Post Trump Trade | 1000x

Now, one thing that I will say, just to finish the thought, he friggin' legitimized Solana right there. Like, if you're a Solana holder, you can feel damn good about your bags for the next 4 years. Um, the casino is called Solana, and Trump just created a massive game at the casino called, you know, Trump, Melania, and Barron.

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And we're live. Welcome back to another episode of the 1000X Podcast. Uh, Europe edition. Avi is at an undisclosed location in the Swiss Alps. I'm still in France, and major, major congratulations are in order, Avi. So happy for you. So happy for you.

It was, uh, it's amazing thing, honestly, amazing thing. Found an amazing— the best girl that I could have ever possibly hoped for, and I'm just, you know, I'm overjoyed. So thank you guys.

I'm thrilled for you guys. Massive congratulations. And, uh, yeah, enjoy the, uh, the unfettered fun now, because once the kids start showing up, oh my God, it gets pretty crazy.

And, and for, for, for, for those of you that, that saw the tweet, just know that's tongue-in-cheek, because family is, family is always the main quest. Family's number one.

The best quest. It's funny, like hyper-gambling with crypto becomes harder and harder as you have more and more people kind of like sharing your book with you. When you're solo, it's easier. But yeah, it's true.

I mean, you can't, but it also instills a sense of, you know, what's kind of interesting is it like instills a sense of pride to your work. At least it has for me where like you actually want to work harder. Gives you some level of motivation to get in there and grind it out because you actually, you have like a concrete reason for it other than yourself, which is often a lot more, uh, how do I say, like, it's, it's, it's, it's a lot more motivating.

Yeah, that, that's why I think, uh, most of the world's successful, most successful business people are married, um, or have been married. Anyway, massive congrats to you. I'm so, so thrilled for you and your, your leading lady. Um, Next up on the docket, uh, before we get into the markets chat, the, the Bankless guys wrote us an open letter, Avi. Um, I don't know if you saw it, but apparently you said something last week that, that upset them. Uh, I'll just quickly say my piece and then you can say yours. I think, um, okay, so basically to recap, last week we, we sort of had a discussion about the AI CC token and how The insiders sold a bunch of tokens on day one, uh, into the hands of retail investors as soon as they were able to buy. The token crashed and it was, it just was a bad look. Um, uh, so let me just, you know, first of all, I liked the Bankless podcast for a long time. Like I listened to it as I was preparing for my professional career in crypto. It helped me learn about the space. They've definitely onboarded a lot of users, which is good. So props to them. I don't know, you know, I met them briefly at Permissionless. They seem like really nice guys, so there's no like personal animosity and I don't want any beef with them. You and I just call it like it is and read what we read online and do our research as best we can and say what we feel about it. That's sort of what we do on this podcast. Where I think I was unfair to them in my representation of things is that I didn't represent their side of the story. I just sort of represented the side of the story that is on the internet. Shortly after we recorded, they published their side of the story and they included it in their open letter. Unfortunately for them, I don't think, like, we don't, nobody knows what actually happened during this. Like, nobody knows ground truth, but if you just assume that their version of the story is ground truth, and that everything else is wrong, which, you know, I guess is a viable assumption for this conversation. Their version of the story doesn't like look any better than what we were talking about. Like they sold $50,000 worth of tokens instead of $500,000. They say it wasn't their fault because it was Bankless Ventures and they had no idea what's happening. So they sort of like pass the buck to their team or their junior guys or whoever. They basically, they're just sort of, um, I don't know, it's very confusing and also, uh, They're, they're big boys. They're the biggest podcast in the space. They don't need to engage with minnows like us, but I don't know. I, I'm, I'm left scratching my head. At the very least, we should have given them, uh, their, their side of the story a little airtime. At worst, their side of the story makes them look worse than what we were talking about. I don't get it. What do you think?

At the end of the day, you know, you always have to consider, you always have to consider both sides of the story. I think when things are on-chain, You know, it's important to get the facts right. We did overstate how much they sold and ruined the reputation for. They didn't ruin the reputation for $500K. They risked the reputation for $50K. So that's on us. And yeah, I mean, look, they just go to the open letter, read it. They're, you know, it's a very respectful, well-written open letter and, you know, I've nothing but You know, I think we could put this, put this behind us. But what I will say is that there are a lot of people in this space that are grifters. And, you know, it's up to you to come to your own conclusions as to how people act and how they respond to things and the actions that they take. You know, you need to come to your own conclusions. I think one of the worst mistakes that you can make in this industry is assume that people with large accounts or large followings are on your side or trying to actually help you. The reality is that's actually a very small percentage of people, and it's really mostly people that have already made it. Oftentimes people that are not consistently posting or talking about small-cap coins or put it posting trade setups, those are sometimes the worst offenders. I say sometimes, not all the time. But, you know, I think that it's really important also to understand that the crypto VC game— I mean, it's going to upset a lot of people, but the crypto VC game is won by people that get into projects early and sell them when they're overpriced. And that's like the game, right? You aim on something before it goes public at like a $5 million valuation. The reason that somebody lets you in at that valuation is because they get your megaphone and your voice. Comes out at a $100 million valuation because you pumped it up. And then your edge is not the fact that it's actually worth anything or that it's actually going to be a good project in 2 years. Your edge is the fact that it's going to come out at $100 mil. And that's what I don't like about this game. That's why I don't really play it as much. I try to keep my investments in things that I'm willing to hold and not just sell on day one.

You make a really interesting point about relevance of knowing whether or not somebody's made it when you're trying to assess how helpful they will be in partnering with you. And it's funny, in my commodities trading career, when I was— you can't really do it at the junior levels. At the junior levels, when you're looking for a job, you just, you take what you can get. Once you have some experience and you become a desirable asset to a variety of firms, one of the best ways to determine how well they're going to treat you and how generous they're going to be with your compensation I call it the LandGlide test. LandGlide is a site that aggregates all property records in the United States of America into one clean user interface. And so I would look at whoever I was interviewing with or whoever I was going to report to when I was considering new jobs. I would look on LandGlide to see what type of property they owned and what they paid for it. The reason why is If it's like some guy acting, you know, with a big title acting big, but he lives in like a $1.1 million like row house in a random part of Chicago, hasn't made it, right? Meanwhile, if it's like some dude with 3 houses and, you know, $30 million worth of real estate, that, that person's made it and they're probably going to be less stingy about paying you and see it less as a zero-sum game and more try to like make the pie bigger rather than slice, you know, look at it as just this small pie. So I think the land glide test. Applies to crypto as well. And you're right, not to core, like followers, follower count does not equal made-it-ness. You know, it's hard to know in crypto, I guess. But like, yeah.

I also think like the relative seriousness at which people take posting is a good indication of how wealthy they are, to be completely honest. Like the, you know, I take a little bit of pride in the irregular schedule of this podcast. Which basically tells you that we have other things that we should be doing. But then we, but then we get on this podcast and, and, you know, we try, we try to make it work for you guys. But like last year it was maybe this week, maybe next week, maybe here, maybe there, maybe Tuesday, maybe Thursday, you know, and like the fact that, you know, regularly I won't post on Twitter for 2 weeks because I'll just be doing other stuff.

Dude, you're making me look bad here right now. I've never done Twitter before, like recently, and now I'm like, oh my God, I love Twitter. I post all the time. Making me look terrible.

Yeah, it's fine. It's recent. It's recent. You know, I was also like that in the beginning. I, you know, I was also poor in the beginning. So, hmm.

Hmm.

What's, what's really going on over there?

I'm bored.

Did you, did you blow everything up? Did you try to short Trump Coin?

Oh, yeah. Speaking of, speaking of tokens that are questionable, let's transition from AICC to $Trump. Oh my. God, what the— like, I talked to a couple of hitters that went to the Trump, uh, inaugural crypto ball, and apparently they didn't get the look. Like, he just dropped it, or his team just dropped this thing at like 9 PM Eastern on a Friday night. Obviously, being in Europe and because Shabbat, like, I, I was sleeping with my electronics turned off. I missed it and woke up to, uh, a really missed huge opportunity.

Yeah. You know what sucks is I went to bed at like 2 AM and I think it came out at 4 AM Swiss time. And that was really annoying because I woke up probably around 9 and I'm going through all these messages and one of my analysts texts me something really funny. He goes, there's a huge liquidity suck because of this Trump thing. Once it blows over, it might be, it's absorbing all the liquidity. This might be a buy opportunity for alts. Once it stops draining liquidity, we might get a bounce. And I was like, what do you mean? Because he goes, once Trump stops draining liquidity. I was like, what do you mean once Trump stops draining liquidity? What has Trump said or what has Trump done? And in the 3 minutes it took me from going to that message to going on Twitter and figuring out what had actually happened, not once did it cross my mind that this man had launched a meme coin.

I mean, it's so crazy. I, I, that's, that's a wild story.

I was so confused by that, by that message. I was like, once Trump starts draining liquid, what, what did he, what happened?

I mean, I think that first of all, there is no comprehending what this man was thinking launching this coin. Like, I get it when he launches a perfume, uh, that's hilarious and kind of tongue-in-cheek. This thing Yeah, so basically anybody with any shitcoin in their hot wallet sold it immediately to Ape Trump. And so everything that's been hot recently, all the AI coins, all the other meme coins, like anything that people had in their Phantom wallet got sold instantly in a rush to buy this coin. Because, you know, you don't— when something this huge launches, you don't have a lot of time to like wait for a wire to clear into Coinbase and then wait the 8 days that it takes for Coinbase to release your funds to send it to Fantom. Like, you just take whatever capital you can on-chain, you get out. At least that's, that's how good trading works, right? Like, when there's, when there's an amazing trade on the board and it's not going to last long, you lift the offer. You don't try to like get mids or get a better price. Like, you just get, you just trade, you pay the, you pay the vig. That's what people did. So it really torched the alt space, um, sent Trump to $70 billion, uh, then Avi, you're going to learn this once you get married. Sometimes your wife will rain on a really great parade, right? Like sometimes she'll be the party pooper. Not often, but sometimes. And then Melania showed up and ended the fun, and Trump Coin went from $70 billion down to $40 billion. Now, unlike some other people who we discussed earlier in the podcast, Trump hasn't dumped any coins on retail yet. So technically that makes him less of a scammer than most. I was expecting him to sell at least something at these crazy valuations. What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, the other thing that I think really pissed a lot of people off is that it seems like a lot of people didn't get into it. Like when, you know, when we woke up, the thing was trading at $15 billion and it went to $70. Like that was still a solid solid run that you could have captured. There's like a 6x in there right there, 5x, whatever, uh, in there right there. And I think it just really got under a lot of people's skins that they didn't ape into it at all because once it came up, they're like, ah, $15 billion, like, that's crazy. But it's like, maybe it's going to reach parity with Doge. Um, one thing that I'll say is that I think the launch of Melania and Baron, I mean, I have no real information on it, But it's possible that that launch was because they didn't extract enough, they couldn't extract enough money from the first launch, or because, you know, they, it seemed like they were locked out. What I will say is that there is a lot of sketchy behavior and there were a lot of wallets that got in very, very, very early and then held and made hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's possible those are affiliated wallets. And so while it seems like he might not have sold, It's very possible that he did when we just don't know, or his affiliates sold and we just don't know. This is a crazy precedent to set for a world leader to launch a meme coin. I mean, I know that this has been talked about ad nauseam on Twitter, but this is like an insane precedent to set that you're effectively extracting value from your followers Like, is Trump Coin going to exist in 10 years? Probably not. It's—

this is nuts. It's such a bad look for the space. I mean, like, what we were expecting was a bunch of day one executive orders, a pathway to regulatory framework, and maybe a strategic Bitcoin reserve in the first 100 days. Instead, what we get is like an, like an unannounced pre-inauguration scam coin launch that pissed off the crypto community, like the builder community, because obviously this is not what crypto is about. If you're trying to build decentralized payment rails and value transfer rails, like that's not why like people take this industry seriously and commit their careers and their livelihoods to it. Equally, you know, you had, I think one of the devs was like posting screenshots of his Phantom wallet with like 8-figure gains in it, you know, kind of like flexing, which I think is a bad look from the perspective of just sort of insider trading. You know, the cabal, it's just, it's a terrible look. You're not supposed to do this when you're the leader of the free world and you promised to make the space like an integral part of the economy. It just, It has like an air of griftiness. Now, obviously the official wallet hasn't dumped anything yet, but there's probably a whole lot of grifting going on around the edges, like you said. And finally, like, even the, even the supposed insiders, the people who are part of this inner crypto council circle, they weren't given the heads up either. So it just leaves a bad taste in everybody's mouth. Now, the one difference between— you did mention the phrase value extraction. The difference between this and other forms of value extraction, like it could be considered a form of political donation, right? Like what's the difference between donating a million dollars to the inaugural fund and YOLOing, you know, 5 grand on Trump coin? You know, it probably made some of his base a whole lot wealthier as well. So maybe let's just think of it as like somewhere between a total scam, which would be a disgrace for the United States of America and for crypto. And like the next line of Trump products. This is the Trump lottery right now. One thing that I will say just to finish the thought, he frigging legitimized Solana right there. Like if you're a Solana holder, you can feel damn good about your bags for the next 4 years. The casino is called Solana and Trump just created a massive game at the casino called, you know, Trump, Melania, and Barron.

I view it— I, I view the support for Solana the same way that people would say that SBF supporting Solana means that it goes up in a straight line, right? Um, it's basically, as long as he's aligned with it, that's great, but he's also introduced a risk. He's introduced a risk that if he ever at any point in the future decides to do anything not on Solana, Solana is going to dump so hard you can't even imagine. With that being said, he's probably not going to launch anything anytime soon. So I think we're probably out of the woods on that. But I don't view it as him giving his stamp of approval to Solana for the long term, because I think what people always have to remember is that Trump is not a pro-crypto president. He's a pro-Trump president. And so he'll just do whatever it takes to be good for himself. Whatever is going to be good for him is going to be what he supports. And if at some point crypto, if at some point he starts getting a huge amount of flack for this meme coin, there's like a 30% chance he disavows it and goes, you know, that was my team. I like crypto, I like Bitcoin, but that was my team and I didn't really know what was going on and I would have put a stop to it if they had just asked me. I don't know. He'll find a way out of it if it starts looking bad for him. Let me I'll say that he'll find a way out.

Oh, he will. And also he's famous for not having a paper trail, so there's no like wallet tracking that can be traced back to like Trump's individual trading decisions now. So you make, you bring up a very good point there. What I will say is, you know, if Trump, if we can assume as traders that our kind of like framework for assessing Trump's markets-related decisions for the next 4 years should be like, Does this decision help Donald Trump get closer to being, you know, having his face put on Mount Rushmore or farther, right? Like he's clearly optimizing to be put on Mount Rushmore. He wants his legacy to be, you know, greatest president of all time. He wants people to be worshiping, uh, worshiping statues of him. So I think with that framework in mind, you know, we can also assume that he's acutely aware that becoming dabbling your toes into crypto is more dangerous than creating Trump-branded bottles of wine, right? Like SBF is sitting in prison right now for a big scam and Trump is no stranger to legal proceedings. So I think he's going to be, I think he's got to be aware of that. And I don't think that we can expect this to turn into like a huge debacle. I think it's just like more somewhere between a national embarrassment and an eyebrow-raising, uh, eyebrow-raising moment where at least this time, unlike the ICO boom, unlike NFTs, unlike the brief moment in 2021 when people thought crypto was going to go mainstream, at least, at least crypto is sort of coming of age in the sense that, uh, the gambling use case is really at the forefront. Trump owns casinos. This is kind of, to me, I just, I, I think it's a game. It's a Trump-branded game. And I, as sad as it is, uh, that, that's all there is to say.

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I hope my comments didn't make you think that I was saying that this is a bad thing, because it's very much so not necessarily a bad thing. It's just that all of the good things have been so thoroughly discussed everywhere else that I wanted to provide some level of temperance against where, where it could go wrong. I mean, this is unambiguously, as it stands right now, a very good thing. And the reason that it's a very, very good thing is because it's drawing a tremendous amount of attention to crypto. Huge amounts of the dumbest people in the world have just become very wealthy. A lot of that money is going to be recycled. You know, when people make these kinds of gains, they tend to not hold onto them. They tend to continue to gamble them. They tend to not, you know, and that money recycles itself very well. One thing that really stood out to me was just how poor the entire rest of the market did. And that has everything to do with what you said in the beginning, which is You just, you didn't have time to go wire money in. You just had to sell whatever you held and get into Trump some way. And I think that is going to, you know, that liquidity suck, we're slowly going to start to see money come back into these other arenas. And I do think that this makes it a huge buying opportunity for AI coins, not necessarily for meme coins in general, because I think that meme coins are going to— they're going to be competed, you know, they're going to be outcompeted by Trump. I think if like your idea is, okay, I want to buy a leading meme coin, you have to allocate to Trump now. Whereas AI agents, like it's a real product, real narrative, real building. The only thing is that speculation has been drawn away right now. I mean, if you saw Virtuels revenue is down 99% from the highs. And a lot of that is due just, you know, the hype cycle has passed and people have stopped talking about AI, which tends to make it a really good time to actually go in and buy. Like once people have stopped talking about it, that's when you should probably be allocating.

I completely agree. I tweeted something to that effect yesterday. I think that promising projects that could be the base layer for variety of different agents that cross the chasm into the mainstream, like in particular, Virtuals and AI16Z. I think these levels are starting to get tasty now. I obviously bought Virtuals below here and AI16Z above here, but like you said, I don't think that this was a frothy peak, pico top moment for the space. If it were, you would have seen fresh capital allocating to Trump and all the other coins going up in, in sympathy with it. Instead, what happened is people just rotated from their existing meme coins into Trump. And so like, I do think this is kind of a nail in the coffin for WIF, for, for GOAT, for a lot of these random, you know, like no utility meme coins. But over the long run, like you said, I think some of the more interesting projects that are actually building and shipping stuff that people will use, like the Eliza framework, uh, just as an example, or maybe Hyperliquid too. Um, this is a great entry point because you've just had— it's like a, it's a technical sell-off. It's not a fundamental sell-off. Uh, I know, I know I probably look ridiculous talking about fundamentals and meme coins in the same sentence, but like a technical sell-off is just when you have a bunch of capital exiting the space for exogenous reasons. Having nothing to do with the thesis itself. And a fundamental sell-off would be like, all right, new regulation has passed that renders this type of investment like less, less worthy of your time, or it makes the risk-reward way worse. And it's really the former. It's a technical sell-off. It was like a, a big liquidity vacuum that, that drove this thing. So I do think it's a great investment opportunity for the other AI coins. Also, I also continue to expect that AI mania is coming sometime this year. I don't think we've seen anything close to what mania looks like. And in turn, when we get to, like, just as a barometer for mania, Avi, if you want to do an interesting thought experiment, everybody follows a constellation of accounts on crypto Twitter. Rewind the clock to when Trump was trading $60 billion or $70 billion near the highs, basically Look at those hours and then cross-reference them with the tweets that you got in your feed from various accounts shilling that coin and saying it was going to go higher. Those are those accounts who are like telling you to buy it on the highs when it was obviously like turning into something unsustainably ridiculously expensive. Those are the mania accounts, right? Use those accounts as a barometer. When they start shilling something that's just 10x'd. Like then, you know, you're in mania mode and it's time to reduce. So that'll be like a good, that'll be like when, when the accounts that were shilling Trump at $70 billion and telling you it was going to 10x from there, when they start telling you your AI coins are going to 10x after they've just 10x, that's when you get out. We're not even close to that right now. No, none of those accounts are even talking about AI. Why? Because it hasn't rallied in the last 24 hours, you know?

100% agree. That's, I mean, I think the right, the right way to look at it. Is there are certain people that only bull post at the highs and there are certain people that get really, really, really damn excited when something is very obvious. And the reason is because in order to, if you want to bull post when something's not so clearly obvious, you actually need a little bit of guts to do it. You need to say, okay, well, you know, I might be wrong. Like we're sitting here, AI coins are down a ton.

Might be wrong.

We might look like idiots for the next month or so, but we're going to make the call that at some point in the next few weeks, there's going to be a pretty radical bottom if it hasn't already happened. So you can start buying some now. We're going to make that call. And I think it's always better to shill on the way down than it is to shill on the way up. Yeah.

As they say, wealth is made in bear markets.

Yeah. Wealth is found in bear markets and then made in bull markets.

Right. Sorry, got that wrong. It's okay. Important distinction there. Thank you for correcting me.

Important. Well, that's okay. Yeah. I mean, I think that this can go for a bit. I am still bullish on Trump, funny enough.

Why?

Because I think that there's still a lot of people that aren't in it. I think that if Trump's team isn't— and this is maybe giving him a bit too much credit— but if Trump's team isn't completely retarded, then they're gonna figure out a way to add value to this meme coin. Like, they're gonna figure out how to do something.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very low— like, let me, let me talk. First of all, I don't want to touch this Trump coin with a 10-foot pole. I don't understand it. My meme coin framework is if you're early, ape as fast as you can, sell your other shitcoins to buy, buy the new thing. Um, if you're, if you're not early, like, tread with extreme caution. And by the time I turn my phone back on on Saturday night, I was clearly not early to this. So I'm sticking, I'm remaining disciplined and avoiding this thing like the plague, but watching it interestingly as you would watch the spread of a plague. So let me attempt to construct a scenario where Trump gives Trump Coin utility and the thing continues to rally. Imagine, you know, the ethics of this are questionable, but that's just his modus operandi at this point. Let's say that he just announced that he was going to donate 80% of the proceeds from Trump Coin sales to the United States Treasury or to the establishment of a strategic Bitcoin reserve, or in some way basically said, hey, I'm going to take the value creation that I've enjoyed from this launch and I'm going to give it to the American people. Right. Then I could easily see foreign governments, sycophants, people currying, seeking to curry favor with him. In, you know, offering to invest in this coin. Because that all, that sort of thing goes behind, goes on behind the scenes all the time. I know this for a fact because I saw how the sausage was made in commodities, like the sort of, you know, hey, we'll buy your oil in exchange for you, like, not, not enacting some policy that hurts us, you know, like WTI that Texas, you know, West Texas Intermediate is shipped out of various ports in Texas to all sorts of adversaries and allies alike in exchange for all kinds of favors and deals and smoke-filled backroom-related pacts. So I could easily see Trump Coin becoming like this commodity that's treated like that. And if you see hints that that's starting to happen, then, you know, this thing could get pretty frigging big. I assumed that would happen with Bitcoin, you know, but not this.

I mean, here's, here's another question. Post-Trump launching this, are any other world leaders going to do it too? Is this, is this going to spread?

I think, uh, Cuba like is doing something with his shitcoin. I know Maduro created the Petro back in the day, but that obviously didn't go very far. I do think it's, it sets a precedent though. It basically, it gives every other world leader permission to, to start messing around with crypto.

I'm just looking here. It looks like the Cuba coin was, uh, was fake. It looks like it was hacked. Oh, uh, so, so they, they, they did. You are right. The official government did post about the Cuba coin, but then they rescinded it and said, sorry, there was an issue with our account.

How Cuban of them. Yeah.

Um, that was, that was definitely their like poverty-stricken analyst or, uh, marketing guy I was like, oh wow, I can make it. Um, but not Cuba. Cuba hasn't done anything, but Mark Cuban has. Oh my God, he tweeted that he, he wants to have a meme coin that will fund the national debt. It's pretty funny. Uh, uh, yeah, I mean, he says if meme coins are the way, maybe I'll issue one with a twist. Same terms as Trump, 20% float, same release schedule. One difference, all the revenue from the sale of the coins goes to the US Treasury. You know what's really funny? Like, he doesn't— I don't think he gets it. He goes, all the revenue from the sale of the coins goes to the US Treasury. What revenue from what sale of coins? Because you just seed it. So you have to sell in order to generate revenue, right? This isn't like a— he's like thinking about like a stock issuance. It's like, oh, I'm going to issue these coins and, you know, blah, blah, blah. But I think that he, you know, he's going to have to sell.

Yeah. Also, that's just called paying your taxes. If you want to give money to the Treasury, you pay your taxes. Also, another thing, like, let's say you wanted to give a million dollars.

It's a way to pay your taxes but make money while you do it. Which imagine, imagine if like you had a scheme where all of the money that was used to give to the government, it was a credit on your taxes. It's like all of the money that Mark Cuban made from this thing was a credit on your taxes if you own the coin.

Oh my God.

I should actually pitch that. I should pitch that.

Avi, Avi Feldman 2028. I can see it coming. Uh, Avi for president. I mean, here's, here's the interesting thing, right? Back in 2021, they branded crypto as Web3. It was really an amazing— it was, it was amazing PR for the space. Like, it made sense. It was— it, it legitimized some of the sketchier aspects of crypto. Me— the word meme coins kind of does the same. Like, at the end of the day, This should just be called Ponzi lottery coins, right? Like, can you get in faster than the herd for something that attracts some shiny object that attracts attention for 10 seconds or maybe 10 minutes, or in the case of Trump, maybe years. Like, these are all just Ponzi coins. They're just Ponzi schemes and there's, or pyramid schemes. I'm not really sure which, maybe a bit of both. It's, it's so weird to me that this is what people are doing now. To, with crypto. Like, fine, I'll take it. The broader macroeconomy produces trillions of dollars of value from legitimate activities like farming and services and, you know, trade. And I guess some of that has to go into entertainment, and some of the entertainment budget is gambling, and this is gambling. So that's great. But like, I would have expected crypto to take a slightly more legitimate turn under the Trump presidency. And I think one thing that I'm, I'm looking for as a personal investor, like, Bitcoin is great, that's great. But for everything else in my book, uh, I'm just like trying to keep my finger on the pulse and monitor, like, will this space ever veer back and outside of gambling into the slightly more legitimate-seeming things like payments and global trade? Or, or are we just like— I don't know, Avi, I want to get your take on this. Is this it? Have we reached like the iPhone moment for crypto and the the iPhone is just an online casino and that's as good as this is going to get? Like, yes or no?

I mean, I would kill myself if this is iPhone moment for crypto, but in some ways you're not wrong. And specifically you're not wrong because we've been saying for a very long time that the whole point of crypto is gambling. The whole point of crypto is for it to go up. And for you to be able to make 10x, 20x, 30x your money. This is the ultimate lottery ticket. Like, the Trump coin is the ultimate lottery ticket. It doesn't get bigger than this. There's no way. It's basically impossible for any single person on the planet to create a meme coin that generates as much wealth as Trump did. Like, it's just not possible. Nobody has that kind of reach. Nobody has that audience. This was the peak wealth generation event of a lifetime, and you probably missed it, and that's okay. There will be others, but this was the peak one. And when I say peak wealth generation of a lifetime, I mean the most amount of money made in the shortest period of time. I think there will obviously be things that can make you more money, because they'll be worth more than $100 billion. And they'll, you know, but I don't necessarily think that there will be anything that will go up to $70 billion as quickly as this thing did ever again. Yeah.

I mean, Trump is the most famous person. Trump is the most famous person in the world by an order of magnitude, like tribesmen in the sub-Saharan African plain know who Donald Trump is. I'm trying to think of who is like better known than Trump, maybe Jesus Christ or Michael Jackson. So unless one of those two people comes back to life and launches a meme coin, you are right, Avi, like it's— this, this was it. This was, this was the moment that generated the most amount of wealth in the shortest period of time, and it's never happening again. I, I'm, I'm still processing this, like, and I don't even know what it means for crypto. I, I still think it's, it's bullish, but like I'm kind of embarrassed at the moment, you know.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's totally nuts. I mean, the, the best, the best thing that I can think about, you know, the, the best move that I have right now is just buy, buy BTC. And instead of the— you remember the old BTC meme coin barbell that we used to talk about? Now it's a BTC AI coin barbell.

I like that. Um, I like that a lot.

ETH, forget meme coins. I mean, like, seriously, like, like, like, forget ETH, forget meme coins. Like, it might be hard and you might still hold them and you might be down, but like, who's, who's buying them now? Like, who's going to do that?

Yeah, I mean, though, I think the best— I, I would make a slight modification to your trade idea. I would say, like, let's say you had $100 to invest in crypto. To me, you know, not financial advice, I would say $80 in Bitcoin, $10 in Solana, $10 in AI coins. And that's a very like lopsided barbell. Maybe your left arm is pressing a lot more weight than your right, but like if you're expecting the AI coins to 10x in mania mode sometime in the next 12 months, your barbell will be pretty even by then. Maybe, you know, maybe Solana will have 3x and the AI coins will have 10x and your Bitcoin will have 2x. You're feeling really smart about yourself, or maybe all this shit's going to zero. But like, if it is all going to zero, you'd certainly rather be in Bitcoin than some of these other tokens that literally in the last 72 hours went down anywhere from 30 to 80%. Ugh, scary, like scary times, man. This is volatile. No, Trump didn't publish any executive orders on crypto in day one. But he did say he's going to free Ross Ulbricht. I think he's just getting his like major mandate things out of the way, and I do think he will. I do think he will reach crypto. It's just not something that he's going to prioritize to the degree that he's going to put it in his inauguration speech.

It's going to come. We just have to give it some time. I mean, you know, I think Alexander Goode had a good tweet. He said, for those of you that are incapable of basic analysis, no, he's not mentioned any crypto during his speech because he just launched a meme coin that went to $70 billion that everyone in the United States has heard about. Like, the dude has not given up on crypto.

Yeah. And World Liberty Financial is like actively buying ETH, actively buying Tron, actively buying, I think, a few other— yeah, Athena.

Pretty insane.

It's like, this is what happens when you put your Gen Z, uh, NYU kid in charge of crypto policy. Oh my God, this— what it feels like, we're living in a simulation. This is all so insane. I, I mean, yeah, I would just say, you know, for anybody who's listening to this right now, nothing we say is financial advice. Tread very carefully out there. This is some of the wildest price action volatility and like unscripted, unimaginable series of events that I've ever seen in any markets in my career. This is, this is freaking wild.

Yeah, it's insane. It's totally insane. I don't know what else, Jonah. What else you got for me?

Should we just wrap it there and let you get back to your, I think so, your dolce vita? I'm so happy for you, Abhi. I was so happy for you.

I'll be, I'll be back. I'll be back in the States soon. Back, back to the desk working. But for now, I'm going to enjoy these last few hours of Dolce vita, they say.

Ah, bless. Love you, man. Great talking to you. Congratulations. And honestly, so, so, so thrilled. What a wonderful moment. Enjoy every second of it. It goes fast. Take care, Jonah. You too.