Trading Crypto's Election Year | 1000x

We cannot understate the importance of the world's preeminent superpower, a nation-state with basically unlimited resources backing our space, as opposed to actively trying to fight our space like, like white blood cells fight a virus. So I think if Kamala wins, we're going to see a big dispersion trade. We're going to see Bitcoin outperform everything else in the crypto asset space like crazy. Bitcoin dominance is going to go up. All these other tokens, like you're going to see a lot of people throwing in the towel. Meanwhile, if Trump wins, like, we might see tokenized equity on the Nasdaq. Like, it could, it could get there pretty quick.

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Welcome back to another episode of 1000x. Market, market is currently dying, which is honestly to be expected at this point. I'm sorry we didn't record before the Trump announcement, but basically that was possibly the most telegraphed thing I've seen in a very long time. You had 30,000 coins added to open interest. In the week leading up to his speech at Nashville. And so obviously, kind of no matter what he said, short of I'm buying billions of dollars of Bitcoin, it was— the market was going to sell off. The good news is that as far as I can tell, we're pretty close to the end. I think that there's, there's an unwind happening right now because people are getting out, and there was a lot of— there was too much excitement going into this, but we're almost totally unwound. Uh, ETH is finally doing well. ETH/BTC— ETH/BTC has come up because I think it's slowly running out of sellers, and the ETH outflows have actually outpaced the GBTC outflows pretty significantly. And Solana is still holding up quite nicely. I mean, we almost tagged $200, and you know, we're back down at— we're back down at $178. But once this unwind happens, we are in a pretty good position. I'm going to be very, you know, beating the bull drums. I know I got my bear behind me right now.

You're in the bear's lair.

I'm in the bear's den. But I'm going to be beating the drums of a bull pretty soon. For the last, you know, I was sweating so hard because I think we were short around 68, 68.5. Got up to 69, 70K, and I was like, dude, there's no way, there's no way that this is sustainable. But I was sweating for a bit. Now we're good.

Yeah, I mean, I, I, we're just banging around in Bitcoin in this like tight little range, kind of 60-bit at 70, or maybe 56-bit at 74 if you want to zoom out a little bit. It's, it's a wide range in percentage terms, and I think most traders in most asset classes would be delighted with that sort of amplitude. But we in the crypto world, man, nothing, nothing really gets us excited if it isn't 100% instant gratification rally, like face ripper rally, and we're not getting it. Um, yeah, I think, you know, what you just said is really important. You said that short of Trump saying he was going to buy billions of dollars of Bitcoin on some sort of regular basis, the market was going to sell off. That's absolutely right. I would put a little asterisk there and say RFK actually came out and said he was going to do that. Um, if only, if only— there's a lot of things he would do if his, uh, if he were in the Oval Office. R—

I mean, RFK is kind of irrelevant, and the dude said he had a brain worm. I mean, you can't really elect a guy that said he had a brain worm.

Actually, I, I loved it. I just thought that in the crazy world we live in, like, why not, why not, why not vote for somebody who's being controlled by an alien space worm? Like in Men in Black. Anyway, that was a tangent. Like, you're right, Trump would've had to come out and announce what RFK announced in order for the market to keep going. And it's funny, like when I was at Cumberland, you know, there was always somebody on the team who would be like, oh, so-and-so is gonna speak at Breakpoint, like we should buy Solana, or, oh, they're gonna talk about Render at this conference, we should buy Render. And then, you know, more recently it was like, oh, Ilya is gonna talk to Jensen at the NVIDIA conference, we should buy NEAR. And honestly, like, these trades just don't work. I— they're not, they're not good trades. Like, the thematic trade here is crypto is about to go parabolic. I believe that for a number of different reasons. Um, but the near-term trade— or sorry, not the near-term, the trade of the last basically 6 months that would have made you money— is just buy when it dips and sell when it pops. Just keep trading just like range trading. The problem with that trade is that no participant who's still in crypto is a range trader. Like, every single crypto person who's left standing right now is a momentum trader. They— if you trade ranges in crypto, you, you miss these big blow-off tops and you get nuked in 2022 and you're dead and you're out of the market. So yeah, we have a market of momentum traders getting chopped up in this range, buying high and selling low. And so I guess it pays to range trade, but the question is for how much longer. Seems like, you know, with the giant bear behind you, Abhi, looks like you are still range trading, but soon you're gonna—

yeah, I mean, I think it's important to be able to switch your bias in this asset class. I mean, I go from being a momentum trader to a range trader. I think I've said this 150 times at this point, but there are two ways that I look at Bitcoin and I look at crypto in general. And when I'm thinking about how do you buy it, it's, is there momentum or is there value, right? And what you have to understand is most people just stick to the momentum side, but the value side is actually where you make the most money, right? So the question is, at the price that Bitcoin is at, you take into context, as Kamala Harris says, everything in which you came and before it. So you have to look at coconuts. You think Bitcoin just fell out of a coconut tree? No, you have to look at the previous price action. So basically, if there wasn't substantial momentum heading into that move, kind of hard to, kind of hard to buy it. And when I look at Bitcoin basically since, uh, March 5th of this year, or no, I guess it topped out on March 13th. There's no trend, right? There, it's just sideways. And so it's kind of hard in this type of market environment. You just, you can't buy the breakouts. You kind of have to buy the value levels, right? And the value levels are bottom of the range. They're sub, they're sub $60 or they're mid-range. Maybe you can buy mid-range for a bounce, right? $63. But it's really tough to buy top of the range betting that momentum will occur because there hasn't been momentum. So you kind of either have to wait to accumulate your positions lower, or you have to buy a true breakout of the range above $72, which is why, again, when it traded $70 the other day, it just didn't really make sense to buy it because it's just not the market environment to— it's just not the market environment to bet on momentum. You have to, you have to, you have to be careful. And so my, you my view, the reason I have a bear behind me is that, uh, you know, we, we just had, you know, a huge, huge, huge event, which is the former president of the United States, also who is current according to current betting odds, most likely to become president again, to voice extreme support for BTC. And BTC's down. And I think value just— right. So yeah, yeah, it's— you have to, you have to wait. So what I think this event did, you know, Trump coming out in support of BTC, it set a floor. And what do I mean by that? People are going to be more comfortable buying Bitcoin when it's scary to buy Bitcoin now because of what Trump said. They're going to have some, some level of comfort buying BTC in a way that they didn't, that they didn't before. Because if the, you know, former president endorses it, basically says, I think it's going to be worth more than gold one day, then you want to buy value, you want to buy blood, especially since the former president, if he becomes the next president, can announce a strategic Bitcoin reserve, which is, you know, we can talk about this.

There's yet another parallel with the oil market and how that works. Uh, it's, it's, you're, you're right. And you know what, you know what else is crazy in terms of setting the floor, Avi? Um, the other stuff that's going on right now, like the technicals, these 2 seconds are very bearish, like As soon as Trump spoke at the Bitcoin conference, I think a day or two went by, not much time before, um, the Democrats in charge of, of these offices moved 2 yards worth of Silk Road Bitcoin to, you know, a centralized exchange to basically sell. So you have that and you have these, um, you know, just massive outflows from the ETH ETFs, kind of the opposite technical effect of the Bitcoin. So the Bitcoin launch, so basically You have like bearish technicals, you've been trading sideways, the market should be fragile, and yet it's kind of not, like higher lows what we're seeing.

Let's wait. I mean, I don't know. I think the market has been, you know, there's some segments of the market that have been okay. A lot of Solana beta has performed well, and Solana itself has, you know, obviously performed well up until the last two days. Bitcoin itself, I think, has been remarkably fragile.

I mean, yes, SOL/BTC is on the highs of the year right now. It's $0.0027. It was there in, it was there in March during meme mania and then it sunk back down. But now it's right back to the highs. Solana is Teflon right now. I think, I think that strength is going to continue.

What do you think about, what do you think about ETH? And the ratio here. I mean, the ETH ETF has been really, really depressing.

Yeah. I mean, basically what I think about ETH goes back to what we were talking about. I think ETH is a Trump trade and here's why. I think that what matters isn't like who wins the— like, let's talk about what actually impacts the price of ETH. What I think impacts the price of ETH is will there be regulatory clarity under the next presidential administration for crypto assets, or will the current, like, you know, paradigm of let's, let's just throw a wrench in their plans and keep kicking the can down the road, the Gensler, the Gensler way, will that continue? So basically regulatory clarity, yes or no. Basically what I did was I, when I, when I like to put on macro trades, I always like to try and work out a just probability, uh, tree So Trump is at 60% on Polymarket. Let's call Kamala at 40%. Under Trump, I assume that an SEC overhaul is 95% likely. Under Kamala, I assumed it's like 25% likelihood. And then for each of those, like SEC overhaul, yes, no, like if there's a new SEC for, you know, with each— in each scenario, I assume I basically cuffed some probabilities for regulatory clarity. Very high under a Trump SEC overhaul. You know, still high under a Kamala SEC overhaul, very low if Kamala doesn't overhaul the SEC. And then I basically just like put price scenarios for Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana on each of those sort of like SEC overhaul probabilities. And I came up with some forecasts. And basically, that's— it's not, it's not an exact science, but it's something to lean on when a trade is going in your face. You know, you can look at these little spreadsheets that you made and see if the assumptions still make sense. And basically what I came up with is like, If, if the SEC finally gives a measure of clarity to builders and projects on what is and isn't a security, and immediately, like, snap your fingers overnight, ETH and Solana are the protocol layers for the internet of value. Like, massive, massive, massive upside. Like, finance— slow, staid financial institutions will probably stick with ETH because it's stable and they don't need, like, high-performance blockchains. Because they're working with fucking SWIFT and anything is better than T+2, 5 days a week, right? ETH is way better than that, even though it's not Solana. And then Solana, you know, is like a micropayments infrastructure thing that could turn into something huge, stablecoins, you know, faster value movement, all this other stuff. So like suddenly a whole world, like a whole internet of value becomes viable once financial institutions and Web2 companies can reassure their employees and their management and their shareholders that they're not going to get sued by the SEC for doing their thing in crypto. And that's why I think if we get stuck with another Gensler— 4 years of Gensler, or, you know, Gensler 2.0— ETH is going to be absolute trash. It's just gonna— it's gonna underperform. It's gonna look the way that XRP looked after its big, you know, time in the sun. Meanwhile, uh, if we get a new regulatory paradigm, like, all the pipes have been built. Institutions can just light up ETH, and they're ready to, and they will. That's what I think about ETH. What do you think?

Yeah, I think that's fair. I think this is, at the end of the day, for better or for worse, it's going to take a long time for people to come in, but at least the infrastructure is now built in order to do so. So once people decide to allocate to ETH, once people decide to allocate to BTC, it's going to be easy to do. I think there's still a lot of uncertainty because, as you said, you have to build a spreadsheet out for this, right? Like, will there be SEC overhaul? Will the US be friendly towards crypto? Will the US be friendly towards, you know, applications built? And the answer so far is no. And so you need to see if Trump gets elected. You need to see what happens if Kamala actually switches her stance. Otherwise, you're looking at a lot of uncertainty, and I don't think there are enough people left that are willing to buy an uncertain market. I think basically everyone out, you know, if you look at the numbers of who owns crypto in the US, it's pretty massive.

50 million people.

Substantial portion of the people that invest in the stock market also own crypto, right? And so the way that I view it is it's about the level of allocation, and retail and your average person probably has already reasonably fully allocated. I don't know how much more as a percent of portfolio your average person is going to increase their Bitcoin holdings. So it's really about the family offices of the world, the institutions of the world, the big money of the world, and they're not going to deal with uncertainty very well. So that's my view.

Yeah, I think that's a good view. I mean, ultimately, like, they're— I think what needs to be underlined here is that you have a lot of institutions, family offices, bigger pools of capital. Like, yeah, like you said, the retail degens are either in or they're out, um, by now. But, you know, like, let's just take the pool of family offices, um, or, you know, even, even like basic hedge fund strategies that touch crypto. Those guys are all ready to go. They just don't want to get sued. They— so if, if Gensler gets fired, if Trump starts buying Bitcoin if there's a new crypto-friendly regulatory framework. Those— I think they're ready to pull the trigger. I really do. I don't think it's going to be like 2021 where we were all sitting here like, the institutions are coming, maybe, but we don't know when. Like, they're all, they're all ready. Um, they will show up the second they know they're, they're not going to face legal risk. And family offices too, right? Nobody wants to— because like, if you're a family office and you want to get involved in crypto your concern isn't getting sued. Your concern is like, does your qualified custodian, uh, support Bitcoin? Does your Bank of New York Mellon, does your JP Morgan, like, can they custody your coin? Um, I think family offices are like— if I had to guess, my gut feeling is that family offices are behind the spectacular inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs like IBIT because custody is not an issue there. But I think you'll start to see I think you'll start to see more adventurous, younger, wealthy techie types directing their family offices to go out the risk curve and buy other tokens, riskier tokens, once they know that they can get solid custody and they're not going to get wormholed. You know, it's, it's, it's all, it's all like either contingent upon institutional clarity or it's like institutional adjacent stuff like custody. Lending and all the other things that you want to do with it, with a coin, to make it more capital efficient.

Yeah, I mean, the capital efficiency is actually, actually key. And that's one thing that I hope will happen with the ETH ETF as well, which will allow people to buy more ETH, is that if you can borrow against these things, then you're good, you're, you're good to go. Um, so the way that I'm currently thinking about the, the ETH ETF and like, when do you want to buy a ton of ETH BTC is when you start to get that leveling out of the ETH flows. And when you actually take a look, ETH is being drained a lot faster than GBTC was being drained. And so I think that that sell-off, the full sell-off on ETH, has probably already happened. And what we're What we're waiting for now is we're just waiting for the last little bit to drain out. We actually, the news on the ETH ETF was sold a lot faster. So we went down 17.3% in 4 days. I think the BTC ETF news trade bottomed on day 12. So I think the market's just getting more efficient at pricing the ETH trade. That probably is going to happen with Solana once it happens. And then BTC proceeded to rip 92% in 50 days post. So I'm, uh, I'm, I'm of the mindset that you— we, we can, uh, probably see a pretty strong performance from ETH over the next, you know, I'd call it mid-August is when I'd be— when I'd start to turn pretty bullish on ETH.

I mean, I agree with you tactically, but I think that it's important to note that ETH ETH was never like this benchmark important trust in the space, right? Like it was always the sort of redheaded stepchild of GBTC. GBTC had like tens of billions of dollars of AUM. It was this massive trade where you could like create it and then sell it at a premium versus the Bitcoin that you had in there. And it was this arbitrage and it was like dominated news flow back in the previous cycle. And it was like this massive thing that then entangled a bunch of people. Three Arrows Capital exploded on it. They pledged as collateral as part of the FTX FTX estate. It was like this big story and this big macro asset and this big way for people to, you know, retail people to buy Bitcoin in their 401 7 years ago. Now, like, ETH never had that cachet, right? ETH was— I think ETH was just a way for degens like us to, you know, basically replicate the GBTC discount trade on a shortened time frame. And so the rapid outflows right now aren't that surprising. It isn't, it isn't like something that's as sticky as GBTC was. So I don't, I don't know if I'm as bullish as you are based on like price action mirroring what Bitcoin did post-GBTC Bitcoin ETF approvals. But you might be right. I mean, I think I'm bullish for other reasons. There is one other big reason that I didn't bring up that I'm bullish both ETH and Bitcoin and also Solana to some extent, which is, again, I do think that Trump is going to get elected. I do think his odds are being undervalued by Polymarket right now. And one thing that he's going to do, both he and Kamala will do, whoever wins is probably devalue the dollar, right? Trump wants to do it as a mechanism for trade, uh, basically to make our exports appear more, you know, cheap and, and, uh, you know, good value to foreign consumers because he's obviously— he's, he's obsessed with trade balances or imbalances. Um, so weaker dollar means, uh, stronger Bitcoin. And the other one with Kamala, just to finish the thought very quickly and then I'll stop rambling, uh, Kamala, I think if she wins, we can expect a repeat of the Joe Biden, uh, stimulus orgasm of 2021, where it's just like, we're gonna print trillions to pay off student debt, we're gonna print trillions to, you know, do social, social welfare type stuff, uh, like, you know, preschool and after-school care and that kind of stuff. Like, you just, just wait for the printing machine to start humming. And, and that, like, Bitcoin's a great debasement hedge as well.

When you think about the election, people got really excited when Kamala got installed, and I think there were some polls that came out saying that she was leading, leading Trump. The reality is that politics and markets and life work in a very similar predictable pattern, which is that whatever the most recent thing to happen is, is the most important thing in people's minds. You saw this with the Trump assassination. People were talking about it. Oh my God, Trump got shot. This is going to change everything. This is going to change politics. The world is going to change. And it's a few weeks later and nobody's talking about it. Kamala, you know, Joe Biden steps down and Kamala steps up. This is new. This is fresh. This is exciting. In 2 weeks, people are going to forget that this was this crazy event that happened, that Joe Biden stepped down, right? And this was encapsulated. Somebody on Twitter, I saw a funny post, talked about President Garfield's assassination. And they said, this, this will be taught in history books from, for years to come. This was an insane event. We, America will never forget this tragedy. And now I bet you like 75% of people don't even know this guy, right? President Garfield.

Isn't Garfield an orange cat? Who's Garfield? Who's President Garfield?

Andrew Garfield.

Never heard of him.

Exactly. Yeah. So James Garfield, sorry. James Garfield, 20th president of the United States, was assassinated on September 19th, 1881. The shooting occurred less than 4 months into his term as president. Actually, that's kind of crazy. Oh, shot. Yeah, that's a real bummer. 4 months. Didn't last very long. Anyway, long story short is that every event that you think is going to be life-changing, every event that you think is going to impact your life for an extended period of time, everything that you think is going to— you know, every event where you're just like, oh my God, I can't believe this happened, I almost guarantee you it will fade into irrelevancy, which is kind of nuts to think about, but it just happens so often. I mean, like, think of Right, think of all the announcements that seemed like huge in the moment that in hindsight are no longer that big, right? Elon Musk selling Bitcoin off of his balance sheet in May. Yeah, catalyzed some sell-off, but then 2 months later we were right back to where we were before, and Elon loved Bitcoin again, right? And so you have all these things that happen, um, that don't really impact price in the, in the long run. They impact it in the short run. That's not to discount what just happened. That's just to say, you know, don't overestimate the impact of these events. The world tends to just go in a direction, and Trump, my personal opinion, is the better candidate than Kamala. And so despite the fact that she got a recent boost, I think he still probably wins.

I think he wins too. I mean, okay, so when I talk about Trump trades. I'm talking about like episodic macro themes, right? And the probability weighting of those things. Catalyst trading is like, oh, I'm gonna buy Doge because Elon's gonna go appear on SNL. Oh, I'm gonna buy NEAR because Ilya is going to talk with Jason Yanowitz at their conference, right? I'm not— I'm a terrible catalyst trader. I think I'm a decent episodic macro trader, and I, I personally am, am I am a momentum trader, and so the way that I avoid killing myself during these periods of chop where it's like, oh, some bullish catalysts come up and we rally up to $70K and some bearish catalysts send us back to $65K, is I stop trading. And then in, you know, like in big moves I do okay, or if I get it dead wrong I'll just get out of the market and sit on the sidelines for a while and then get back in when the price is more in my favor, um, and the risk-reward is better. But like, I'm a macro trader, a macro momentum trader. You seem like you have this ability as a more active guy to kind of switch back and forth between range trader and momentum trader. So are you looking for a theme?

No, it's just being a crypto trader, I think, because unless, you know, if you're a crypto trader and you want to actively trade BTC and ETH, you have to build that skill set. You have to know when it's time to set and forget, and you have to know when it's time to pay attention. And this is just by virtue of you get it after a while. When is Bitcoin trending? When is ETH trending? When are these assets trending is a very, you know, it can be subjective and you just have to understand, you know, what to look for in these, in these certain types of, in these certain types of situations. I mean, it's It's actually— I'll give you an example. When you're looking at Bitcoin and on a 1-week time horizon, I'm staring at the 1-week chart, uh, and then I stare at the 4-hour chart, and then I stare at the hour chart, and then I start the 5-minute chart. Basically every micro dip gets bought up. When every $100 goes down and then boom, it gets swallowed, and that's been happening for a week straight, that's momentum, right? And that's what kind of, kind of what happened in October of last year. If you look at the period of time from Tuesday, October 24th to, you know, November 24th, which is about a month period of time, there was a full month where every dip would just get Slurped.

What do you call that? A doji? A downward dangling doji?

I have no idea, but every, every dip would just immediately get eaten up, uh, and you never actually had like a trend down for, for any extended period of time. That to me signals that you should just stick long and just wait until you get a crazy blow-off, which we, which we ended up doing, right? And so, you know, there are all these different tips and tricks.

Are they slurping it right now? I mean, you watch every— you watch this thing tick for tick. What's going on here?

No, they're selling it. A lot of sellers in this market, which is again why I have the bear here. I'm still, I'm still pretty bearish. I think that, you know, from here I'm not gonna get crazy along unless we trade $63,000. So, you know, like right now at $65,850, Bitcoin is pretty bad tech. I think that it's really slow and block sizes are too small. Uh, when it trades 63, I will reverse my opinion.

Um, okay, so I'm avoiding this range trading because I don't watch the market tick for tick like you do. So, you know, to all the traders out there who don't exhibit the peak performance attributes of market focus and process that Avi just described, you're probably better off setting it and watching from the side, watching your position from the sidelines rather than like just constantly getting in and out. Um, but what I would say is I do think that while catalysts, as Avi said, come and go and momentum comes and goes, it's really hard to understate the importance of a regulatory, macroeconomic, or other sort of broad-based backdrop theme and its impact on macro assets like Bitcoin and ETH. Like, for example, I'll give you an example. The— I keep going back to the Gensler SEC, like the slow grind, the— that sort of like war of attrition on crypto where the SEC just basically sandbagged it in the United States for 4 years. That impacted a lot of people, including the two of us, right? And it also impacted the price. It delayed institutional adoption. It slowed down the ETF approvals. Like, it forced a lot of people out of the market, forced a lot of capital out of the market. Like, these paradigms matter, and they're not catalysts, they're paradigms. So when we're talking about Trump trades, we're talking about Kamala trades, what we're talking about is like not a catalyst. An election could seem like catalyst. It's, it's really what paradigm are we going to be looking at for the next half decade. And I really, you know, to your point earlier in the podcast, Avi, I agree, we cannot understate the importance of the world's preeminent superpower, a nation-state with basically unlimited resources, um, backing our space as opposed to actively trying to fight our space like, uh, like white blood cells fight a virus, you know. And that's, that's relevant. So I think If Kamala wins, we're going to see a big dispersion trade. We're going to see Bitcoin outperform everything else in the crypto asset space like crazy. Bitcoin dominance is going to go up. All these other tokens, like, you're going to see a lot of people throwing in the towel. Meanwhile, if Trump wins, like, we might see tokenized equity on the Nasdaq. Like, it could, it could get there pretty quick. And I think you're right. You can't understate the importance of that.

Yeah, I mean, if, if we get If Gensler gets fired, I mean, basically just make a list of everything that's under SEC investigation and—

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Yeah, let's talk baskets. So you were talking— there's an AI basket. That's a great basket that we should start talking about. It's like the—

which coins are being investigated by the SEC and are going to just absolutely rip once Trump gets elected. Yeah. I mean, if anyone has ideas, any listeners, comment it below. But I like UNI a lot. Lido is really good. What else?

Hmm, let me think here.

It's probably it.

I think Coinbase stock just explodes.

Coinbase definitely does well.

Like, you're supposed to see Coinbase's market cap converge with the CME. I don't have my Bloomberg in front of me, but it's, it's a number of billions. It could get weird.

Yeah, weird, weird is a good word for it.

Banana zone.

Definitely, definitely, definitely in the banana zone if that happens.

What, what do you think happens to Yeah. What do you think happens to coin, like to the miners in a Trump winning scenario?

It's a good question. The thing about the miners is that a lot of them have just, a lot of them recently have been driven by things outside of BTC, right? So there was a, they just turned into a data center trade for HPC. And so it's a bit, you know, they're, I think Riot, it's like the pure play miner. Um, oh, everything else that I look at just turned into a, turned to an HPC play. So it's kind of hard to say.

I think, I think it's, uh, I think it's cyclical. Like, I think the miners are all focused on AI right now because everybody's training expensive models, but you don't need that kind of compute forever once all the main models have been trained and they've absorbed the entire internet. And I think that You know, I didn't come up with that thesis. I listened to some tech podcasts that did. But like, let's say that's true. And let's say that Bitcoin's trading $150 because, because, you know, the United States is either buying it or printing dollars with reckless abandon. I think you see the miners like pivot back to crypto. I think AI and crypto are kind of like the two ends of the spectrum that these miners can service, and they probably will. They'll just do an economic calculation. And just like a refinery will be like, is it more profitable to produce diesel or jet fuel? Like, I'm just going to switch between the two, like you'll see, you'll see the miners become like the mobile, like the sort of like, uh, nimble compute equities that can just sort of like be like refiners that produce whatever the world needs at any given time.

Yeah, I think, I think that, I think that makes sense. And the only, the only question that I always have with these, uh, with that specific trade is just the demand side, because every research report that I take a look at talks a lot about the supply and the investment in infrastructure and then less so on the demand side. It's almost like like that's a given. It's like, yeah, of course there'll be demand. And so that I think is, is the only, is the only danger, uh, with, with that trade. And just, just, just to take it back to, uh, what else might do well in a scenario where there's, where there's more clarity, basically anything that would do better if it was integrated with traditional finance. So, I mean, DeFi in general, I think does extremely well.

I was most bullish, like, in a scenario where, like you just mentioned, like, where crypto can integrate with tradfi. I was thinking like, oh, to me, the most bullish token in the world is Ondo. You know, we obviously talked about it. We did our little project review a while ago. But then I looked at Ondo's fully diluted valuation. It's $10 billion. Circle is about to go public at $5 billion. So maybe Circle's the trade. They're like, there are all these little weird adjacent trades where you could probably get a 2 or a 3-bagger if you pick it up ahead of, uh, ahead of it. Like, I think, I think Trump's gonna win. I don't— I think Polymarket's wrong. And the reason why I think Trump is going to win is because I think that his campaign strategy is to slow play all of his criticism and all of the dirt that they have on Kamala until basically just before the election, and then he's going to dump it all out, right? There's no point doing it before she even gets the nomination.

So 100%, and so it's about the, it's about the recency bias again, right?

Yeah, exactly. So like, there are no secrets about Trump. The guy's like getting shot on live television in the face. Like, we know, like, his dirty laundry is out in the air for everyone to see. Meanwhile, um, Kamala, like, the country doesn't really know her yet. And so if I were a Republican strategist, I would tell Trump like, cool the jets until she secures the nomination and the, you know, the coconut brat frenzy stuff sort of like dies down. Like all episodes do, and then, then, you know, just start blasting the airwaves with, you know, anti-Kamala propaganda and getting her dirty laundry out there. Like, that's what I expect. I bet, like, we're going to get like an FBI Hillary emails 2.0 type thing for her. And I really think she's going to lose. Like, I'm willing to bet a lot of money on this. And I am, you know, indirectly via crypto, like, I'm pretty much all in at this point. So at this point, like, when that happens, um, you know, I think, I think that's— I think if Polymarket is underpricing it, certainly like Circle, Circle stock, Coinbase stock, um, and a bunch of different random tokens that aren't currently overvalued, which is— there's a lot that are overvalued, so you got to be— you got to be choosy. Certain baskets of, uh, cursed tokens. Yeah, maybe Uniswap. Maybe Lido, maybe, uh, maybe even XRP. Like, you know, tokens that, tokens that are getting basically teabagged by Gary Gensler will probably rally a lot, you know.

Yeah, I think that's, I think, I think that's all, all reasonable. I mean, I do, I do wonder, uh, when, when this all, when this all comes to a head, I mean, what does the repricing look like? Right, that's something that, that's, that's something that we have to, we have to think about. One thing that's always been clear to me is that whenever people's price targets are too low, you probably just want to sell everything. So the fact that people at $65K were calling for $75K with a lot of excitement makes me nervous. I think you, you need those $100K, $150K price targets because it just tells you a lot about the psychology and mentality of people, if you're asking for $75K when you're at $65K, you're probably selling at $70K. Yeah, because then, because then the risk reward isn't, isn't really in your favor anymore. And so at what point do people get the confidence to call for, okay, this is going to go to $100K, this is going to go to this, this, this is going to go to, this is going to go to $150K? I mean, if you look at DeFi and you're thinking that these things are going to reprice if Uh, you know, Gensler gets fired, it's like, how much, right? What, how big, how big can these things get?

Yeah, not that big. I mean, I think they're layups. I think they're like 2 to 5 baggers, and the 1000x's are probably hiding in the, um, you know, kind of like the 1,000 to 10,000th coin by market cap right now. And I, I don't personally know exactly where to look yet. Maybe like niche AI coins or I don't know, something with a little bit of like native traction. Maybe Chief was right. Maybe I just got to start hooking myself into the Discord fire hose of garbage and looking for those 1000x's. But I, I do think, I do think you're like mega-cap DeFi tokens are just like easy 100 to 500% returns if Trump wins. I, I do. I, I think that's like the kind of layup that you never get in trad fi. Like, if you're, if you're an interest rate trader, you're never just going to like show up and buy something and have it double in on a relatively obvious type move. I don't know, maybe I'm oversimplifying this.

I don't think so. I mean, I think it's also just because you get to, you get to front run those flows because once the market opens up, the flows will come. That's it. But that, that to me, that to me is a, is a no-brainer. Other than that, I mean, kind of in the market, not too much that is crazy interesting to me. I mean, I was looking at, you know, was trying to get a handle on D-PIN because Helium was trading extremely well over the last, uh, over the last week and basically off the bottom was one of the, was one of the best performers. Notice that It was just getting a lot of traction in LATAM. And while technically being crypto, it doesn't really have anything to do with crypto as well. Yeah, other than the token incentive. So it's kind of interesting. So I'm doing a little deep dive on that right now, which I think could be quite fruitful.

I think Helium is so interesting. Like back in 2000, 22, I was shilling Helium to my oil buddies and they were all rolling their eyes at me. But like, how, you know, how is it possible in this world of inflated services and goods that we live in that there isn't a space for a Helium to come in and just offer cheap Wi-Fi or, you know, bandwidth to everybody secured by— I don't know what you call it— proof of I plugged this black box into my Wi-Fi box, um, Anyway, like, my point is, uh, I think Helium is a really good idea, and I think what's holding Helium back is the fact that a token, no matter how amazing it may be— even Bitcoin is kind of just a Ponzi scheme if it doesn't give you some sort of equity or dividend in the underlying project— and I think that soon Helium will be able to register its tokens as securities and offer token holders basically pass-through revenues that come from paying users of the network. And then once that happens, like air quotes, bootstrapping Helium is less reliant on, you know, just more people lighting up Helium nodes and buying Helium and more just like an actual company, like a decentralized Vodafone or decentralized AT&T. And that is probably a better business model than centralized AT&T. So we're really just kind of on the cusp of this massive unlock of, you know, the internet of value. I just hope it happens. Like, I, I really do. I want it to happen so badly, not just for my bags, but also because, like, because AT&T sucks. Like, it would be great to sign up for Helium at one-fifth the price. Of, you know, Verizon, right?

100%. I, and I, and I think, I think the, the real, the real thing here is it just, it's, it, it doesn't— tech, tech's become better obviously over the last, over the last 10, 15, 20, 25 years. We don't necessarily need to have these really expensive, uh, setups, you know, maintained. I used to have somebody in my life that worked at maintaining Telegram, uh, uh, phone poles. And it's very complicated, very difficult. And I think that if you have this infrastructure and it works, it's actually great, right? Probably easy, easier, easier, easier to maintain. Uh, it's just a matter of can you get it into as many hands as possible so that you have coverage. So it makes, it makes sense. I think the, the only, the only drawback was that Helium inflates a ton. There's like a huge amount of token issuance that subsidizes, that subsidizes the running of this, uh, of these, of these nodes. So that's the only thing that I'm, I'm concerned about. But other than that, I mean, obviously great, great idea. And clearly other people think so because people are buying it.

I think the way that price action would play out if like, let's say Trump won and the SEC gets friendly, you were saying like, what does that trade look like? I think a lot of people would expect like a God candle, like this, this massive green face ripper on everybody's screen. I don't know about that. I don't think it's going to be like a 1999 moment. I think it'll be like you'll get a big rally when the election results are announced and it's Donald Trump. If it's Donald Trump, like you get a big rally, or if it's Kamala, maybe you get a big sell-off and then a rebound in Bitcoin and less of a rebound in the other tokens. Kind of like what happened to the S&P when Trump first won. Everybody was like, oh my God, it's going to be World War III. The S&P sold off and then it like regained all of, all of its lost ground and then some. So maybe you get that in Bitcoin for Kamala. But anyway, back to Trump, like if he wins, um, I think you get a big rally on the day, then probably like a little bit, a little bit of follow-through, but then I think you just get this like steady, um, multi-year uptrend as just like project after project gets adoption and institution after institution lights up, you know, either inflows or crypto-adjacent products like lending and custody, which lead to other forms of inflows, settlement on-chain, like gas gets spent, ETH goes deflationary. Like, I think a confluence of factors will lead to like a, let's call it a 2002 to 2007 style rally in crypto, like a slow one. What do you think?

I think this kind of goes into the idea of will there be 4-year cycles, right? Like, are you going to get these compressed periods of just absolute rip, or is it going to be a slower, more methodical growth as you suggested? And I think it's 100% what you suggested, because I think there's the, the issue with the whole 4-year cycles is that Bitcoin— the reason that 4-year cycles would exist is that Bitcoin was an asset that nobody paid attention to. And so you needed catalysts in order to get people to pay attention to it, in order to buy it. And the halving just happens to be one of those, one of those catalysts. So you would go in these 4-year cycles where you'd get this like crazy move into the halving, post-halving, and then you get the crazy collapse, and everyone would forget about it, and then it would toil around for a bit, and then it would come back as attention came back to it for probably for another halving, right? And now everyone pays attention to Bitcoin all the time, like everybody constantly on Bloomberg, constantly, you know, uh, on, uh, on CNBC. It's constantly everywhere. And so you don't have this, uh, you know, cycle of attention in the same way, in the same way that you did, that you did before. Um, I think FTX definitely impacted this a ton and caused, you know, an 18-month lull because everyone was too scared of it. But I don't know what, like, FTX could happen again necessarily in crypto. I mean, even if Binance went down at this point, as long as it wasn't that everyone on Binance lost their money, kind of hard to imagine FTX-level event, an extinction-level event that would nuke Bitcoin out of existence. So I think it's just a matter of a slow growth over time. I mean, you'll have like these 20-30% pullbacks, but I don't, I don't think you're going to get an 80% pullback ever again.

I don't think so either. I, I don't believe in the 4-year cycle anymore. I, I think that you stated it so eloquently. Like, also, what market in the history of, of markets like adheres to a, a like time frame for its cycles consistently for multiple decades? Like, it's unprecedented. It would be unprecedented. It's just, it's, it's too ridiculous. It can't be. So I think we're done with the 4-year cycles. Couldn't agree with you more. And in terms of like extinction-level events for crypto, you could have the US come out and ban it. But even that would— that's probably a down 80% move. That probably doesn't kill it. I think, I think what would be like a pretty scary FTX-like event for the alt space would be— and I'm not suggesting this could happen. I FUDed what I'm about to talk about once before and got absolutely eviscerated for it. So I'm For the record, I'm not FUDing anything here. I'm just hypothetically stating in an imaginary world where Tether collapses for some reason, that would be pretty—

Tether.

Tether. Yeah, that would be the one that really kneecaps crypto for a while.

I think that's probably a great note. I don't know if we're talking about Tether, Jono. We should probably, we should probably talk sports or something.

Yeah, we should probably just stop. Listen, I'm in, I'm in Rick and Morty's garage, right? Like, this is fantasy we're talking about here. Tether's fine.

Yeah, I remember, I remember that. I remember the Tether short. I used to talk about it. And I think, I think everybody shorts them because they're just jealous of the business. Like, how great would it be to run that business?

Yeah, you just sit in Lugano. Drink your macchiato and check your bank account and it goes up by $1 billion every day or something. It's ridiculous out there, dude.

It's just like, it's, it's, it's honestly, it's honestly incredible. Well, anyway, Jonah, as a, as always, great talking to you. It's a pleasure chatting with you. I hope everyone enjoyed this pod. We will, we'll catch you next week. We're going to start doing these weekly, so bringing you guys more content.

Great talking to you, Avi. Thanks for making time, as always.