Trading Crypto's Weekend Meltdown | 1000x

When the market refuses to go up on good news, it's close to over. If you remember, there was news that XRP and SOL were getting CME futures listed and they didn't go up. That's like a very bad sign for the market. It means that everyone's max deployed. And then the other point was after the, you know, reserve came out, Bitcoin didn't really go much higher. Like when things like that happen, you got to, you got to say, okay, let me take a step back. And reassess my portfolio and raise a little bit of cash because cash is more important right now than it was before.

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All right, guys, welcome back to another 1000x Podcast. We are currently in the Situation Room reviewing the carnage. We have noticed that basically everything seems to have died except for Bitcoin. Literally, I think this is the worst carnage I've seen in the markets, you know, I mean, since FTX. When it comes to alts, because Bitcoin is completely fine. And then if you held anything besides Bitcoin, you've retraced every candle since the election, if not more. Like, ETH actually made a new low today versus like a new 2-year low, which is insane. It traded $2,100 Would the last time it traded 2100 was August of 2024. It's pretty brutal out there, Jonah. What do you say? You got any good hopium for the guys?

Yeah, I mean, just looking at my board here as you're talking, Bitcoin is down 3.5%. You know, obviously, if you've been living under a rock, that's because Trump has just started a trade war with Canada and Mexico, and people are wondering just how bad it can get. S&P futures are down 2%, you know, they basically just opened. Um, so that tells you how worried the actual market of companies that build stuff is. So I would, I would call that not so worried. Bitcoin's kind of in line, you know, 2.5%, 2% S&P, 3.5% Bitcoin. Yeah, you know, that's the market kind of telling you All right, it's going to be a little choppy for a while, but Trump is not going to preside over the death of the American equity market to, you know, prove a point here. He's going to use this as a negotiating tactic and walk it back. This isn't the beginning of something new and super menacing. But altcoins, oh my God, Avi, like, they're not just dying like left and right, they're dying like super ugly disgusting depths. AI-16Z down 22.5%. ETH down 12%. Solana down 2%. That's pretty friggin impressive. I think that tells you everything you need to know, like hold Bitcoin and Solana. Um, you know, like for example, AI-16Z, it, it ripped from 25 cents a token to $2.25, you know, in a couple of days, maybe a week. Uh, it was pretty quick. I bought near the highs. Now, you know, like, if, if there are a lot of people out there like me who are just holding alts like that, you're down, you're down 90%. Like, it's that, that's why the timeline on Twitter looks so bearish. But, you know, to the extent that you're not supposed to do that Um, you know, like, this is kind of a told-you-so moment for people that have been over their skis in alts on the highs. Um, I don't know, I think, like, I'm feeling pretty happy about a WIF short that's going on right now that I've neutralized part of my portfolio with. Avi, have you shorted anything to protect yourself, or—

Yeah, I, I didn't explicitly tweet that I was short WIF, but I sent out a bunch of angry tweets about WIF because it was just so, so insane to me that it— look, the moment that the Fed— and I talked about this on Twitter, I think we talked about this a little bit on the last podcast— but the moment the Fed paused, that was just bad for alts. Yeah, like the hawkishness from the Fed was not bad for Bitcoin, but it was really, really, really bad for alts. And I think we both articulated that. And what I was hoping for is I was hoping for some better strength from specific subsectors. That doesn't seem to be the case. Everything just got washed out. And I think we can talk about ETH for a second here. ETH has been the dog of the cycle. We've beaten this horse to death, but I think it, you know, we can, we can do this one more time. Where we say capital— previously, capital coming into crypto was good for all crypto. That is no longer the case. It will not be the case basically ever again that capital going into Bitcoin is good for crypto at large. Capital has to be going to specific projects that are doing good things. Yeah, that's it at the end of the day. And ETH has not done anything interesting for 4 years.

There's like a—

since, since it was a leader in DeFi summer, it literally has not done anything good. So that's why everyone is using it as a short leg. Now I think that in times like these, what everyone needs to hear is that don't worry, there's still opportunity, right? I was short— you know, we talked about shorting SUI once it broke the 50-day moving average. I gave that entire spiel about how once it breaks the 50-day average, it's basically done. Like, once an asset breaks the trend that in this market, an altcoin breaks the trend that it's been holding, it's completely done. And guess what? SUI broke the 50-day moving average at $4.50 and went down in a fucking straight line 50%, right? I mean, sometimes this stuff is as simple as, you know, you just stick to, stick to the basics. Uh, one thing that got me nervous is, especially after the Trump tariff thing, you just look at all of the charts of alts and they had all broken their trends. And when all charts look like they've broken their trends, like the SUI chart, you get washouts because people just capitulate on everything. And my take is that it's the weekend, it's low liquidity. I sent this in our group chat. I nibbled a little bit on Saturday, but my exact statement was, I think you can nibble a little bit here, but wait for Sunday because Sunday is when the crazy stuff happens. And that I think is true, which is why if you're, you know, hopefully we'll get this recording out ASAP, but I think that this is the bottom. Like, I'm like fairly confident that this is at least a short-term bottom.

For the record, we're recording this around 11 PM Eastern on Sunday night. Um, yeah, okay, you had a really nice call on SUI and how to short that one. You know what's interesting, Avi? Um, the market is handing traders some layups. It's not like crypto to be this easy And I think what's happening here—

what specifically is easy?

I'm getting to it. So, okay. Basically, I think what people used to look at, just from having been trained through a couple of the previous cycles, is that the easy trade is the alt season trade. Bitcoin rallies and then you buy altcoins and they— it's like a leveraged Bitcoin trade, but delayed by a few weeks. Weeks or months. And that's kind of your— that's kind of what crypto does to shower wealth upon people who aren't necessarily like in the mid-frequency game of picking, you know, picking bottoms on Bitcoin. Like, okay, Bitcoin moves and then you get your alt move. It was— that was the previous easy trade. That trade, for reasons you just mentioned and several others, is gone. But now you have this inverse of that. Which is there are too many freaking coins out there, not enough capital, and capital that, you know, wealth that's being created in iBit, the ETF, is certainly not flowing into Doge with Hat because one's off-chain and one's on-chain. So the easy trades are from the short side, and I'll give you an example. I'm not really a big crypto shorter, like I'm mostly in Bitcoin and have been for most of this cycle. For reasons we've discussed. But, you know, Dogwif Hat, my least favorite coin, um, it was announced that it was going on the Sphere. Uh, token rallies from $1.50 to $2 in short order. Then it's announced that not only is the coin not going on the Sphere, or the hat not going on the Sphere, But that everybody who's been pretending to put this hat on the Sphere and collecting retail users' money for, you know, however many months of this WIF is going on the Sphere narrative, like they've never, they've just been collecting money. They've never had any intention of putting it on the Sphere. It's all a big charade, like basically a scam, like kind of a crappier, memeier FTX. With way less, you know, ripple effect and consequences. And the price was $1.50, which is right where it was before the whole, you know, it's going to be on the Sphere merry-go-round started again. So like, to me, when the price— when you have a bunch of like extremely bearish news, like, hey, this thing is basically a scam, it's crime fi, uh, and the price is the same as it was before the crime news came out, there you have— and also there are like tariff rumblings and, you know, interest rate rumblings and all sorts of bearish shaky stuff going on in the broader crypto backdrop. That's like a nice clean way to neutralize some of your crypto exposure. So this is probably the biggest short I've ever put on in crypto, this WIFT short. And I didn't think of it as like— I wouldn't have put it on as a standalone trade, but since I'm sitting on so many you know, you know, so much notional worth of crypto, it feels, it feels like risk reducing to put on a big WIF short because it's against other crypto. Kind of just like, I'm still long, I'm still losing money on this move, but I'm losing less. And there, you know, I picked WIF because, because, you know, new, new scammy information should put the price lower than before the scammy information comes out, which hadn't happened. But like, you know, you could have done this with SUI, you could have done this with DOGE. You could have done this with, you know, AI-16Z or any of these other coins that are down 20%. You could have done it with Trump. Um, and so I think the new— basically, like, inverse alt season is the new alt season. Like, anytime you're, you're feeling worried about your Bitcoin, just look at some oversupplied coin that shouldn't be trading at a multi-billion dollar FTV and hasn't gone down enough and short it. It's literally that simple. I mean, there are plenty of ways to do that now on-chain too, if you— if that's where your money is. Like, you go on the Hyperliquid and do it. What do you think?

The branding of inverse alt season is so fucking funny. It's like, that's so good, Jonah. I like— I— you should tweet that. If not, I might— I might tweet it right now because that— that's so good. I mean, it's— it's true. Literally inverse alt season. Is the way to make money now.

Yeah, I'm tweeting it. Inverse alt season is the new alt season, just short stuff. And I'm attaching a fuck a boot and find dude, uh, Canadian trade war meme.

It's so good. I mean, oh, I like it. There are too many altcoins. Alt season is a myth, but don't despair, just short them and supplement your network.

Yeah, that was my previous tweet. I just put out a new one. I like— I mean, I'm not trying to sit here and pretend I'm a genius. I could have shorted more. I'm obviously taking a bath on this, on this crypto move. Less of a, you know, AI-16Z is my, my biggest, uh, raspberry of the year. That one, that one sucked. But, you know, it's not enough to matter because I'm mostly in Bitcoin, and, uh, I've got some whiff shorts to feel, to feel good about. So I think, yeah, I mean, they're probably not enough people who listen to this podcast to are about inverse alt season is the new alt season. Just, just short stuff. Just look at what hasn't puked enough. Where's Polkadot, my second least favorite coin? Um, has that, has that one immolated itself yet? If not, let's short it live on the podcast.

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Look, I mean, here's, you know, in, in times like this, it's, it's easy to grave dance, but I do want to, you know, point out a little bit of hope for those people out there that there's always opportunities. And one of the biggest opportunities that I still personally see is that a lot of the coins that are getting ETFs still got nuked really hard. Like XRP got nuked ridiculously hard. LTC is below 100. SOL is way off of its highs. If you really want to— I genuinely believe that buying those alts against ETH is a great— is still a great trade, uh, you know. And this is actually giving entries because for some reason they all went down more than ETH. I assume because there was a lot of already pos— there was a lot of pre-positioning in those coins. All of that positioning has just been liquidated and wiped out. This is a great time to go back in and put on, like, put on those pair trades that do have real catalysts. I mean, the ETF catalysts are the last remaining real catalysts in this market outside of Bitcoin catalysts.

Like, would you put them on as pair trades? Because like, with Bitcoin basically, unch, it's the same trading the pair as just trading the coin versus the dollar, you know, almost. Like, would you buy the— would you buy these alts versus— like, would you buy SOL/BTC, or would you just buy SOL/USD? I would buy—

I think it's a matter of your risk tolerance. Like, I wouldn't short them, I wouldn't buy them against BTC, uh, I would buy them against ETH because I just think that's a better risk-adjusted play.

Yeah, smart.

You know, it just— it's, it's a better expression of alpha. Yeah, in my personal opinion, you know, like, do I feel comfortable holding Litecoin just, just holding Litecoin? Not really, because I think it's not the best asset in the world. But do I feel good holding it against an ETH short? Yeah, I feel better about— I mean, I can hold BTC long term because I think that there are a lot of really good catalysts for it. I do think that they're also very good catalysts for Agents.

Yep.

Um, you know, and just general AI coins. And so I'm pretty I'm like comfortable accumulating some of those at these levels. Like, I think Virtuals here is actually a pretty good buy. It's great, just like hold on, not touch. Um, but yeah, like for, for something like an XRP ETF, no, I'm kind of just—

yeah, yeah, like, that's smart.

So basically there's kind of no reason to hold that outright, personally.

You're kind of, you're kind of looking to buy if, if it's a little bit out the risk curve and speculative, you're looking to buy it versus ETH. But if it's something battleship like Solana you would buy it outright. Speaking of Battleship, like, you know, this, this is a great time to test your conviction. If something's down 80% and you were thinking of buying it, but you haven't yet. And, you know, you're, you're hesitating now, it makes you wonder how convicted you were. I think the only thing to buy, like you said earlier on the podcast, is projects with an actual roadmap. That are going to ship something great. And tellingly, the only things that are up versus the dollar right now on my board are Hyperliquid and Fart Coin. Um, so, you know, two opposite ends of the spectrum. Uh, you have your favorite meme and your favorite DEX. So yeah, I think I might finally, whenever I cover my WIF short, try to buy some, uh, try to buy some hyper liquid. I think that's—

I think, I think you should be— I think you should probably be covering your RIF short now. I mean, this is, this is a great— like, this is where you shove. This is, this is where you buy. Yeah, I mean, just kind of across the board, we've had, I think, $2.17 billion liquidations— billion dollars worth of liquidations over the last 24 hours. That is Massive.

This is nuts.

I cannot remember the last time that there were this many liquidations.

I mean, who's still levered long this market on the highs? Like, who's, who's using leverage? I, I obviously used a little bit with a short, but that's against longs. Who's outright long with leverage? I, I don't know. We advise against that on the 1000x Pod.

I mean, a lot of people, man. Like, this is, this is the whole market. It's a casino. What do you mean, who's long with leverage?

Not me, that's for sure. Um, maybe, maybe I'm the idiot though.

But, but the thing about WIF is, I mean, WIF is over. WIF is done. WIF is like— WIF is zero now.

So why should I cover it then? Why should I cover it? Why should you?

Because, because I think it's important to remember that when something go— even if something is worth zero, if something goes down 70%, in 3 days, or let's see what happened.

It's down like 40%.

Okay, but it's down 70% in the last 2 weeks. That is— you're due for some level of mean reversion.

And like, you don't know how this came out, right? Things are different than 2 weeks ago. It isn't just like a flush with nothing having changed.

The news is there's also beta to the markets, right? Yeah. And to be completely fair, I don't know with 100% certainty if the WIF thing was a scam. Like, it's entirely possible and actually probable that the guys running WIF are just dumb and that they genuinely believed that they would get on the Sphere and they genuinely thought that they would be able to figure out how to do it. And then it turns out that they couldn't, but they couldn't turn around and go tell everyone that they couldn't. So then they kind of just— so then they kind of just got stuck. I mean, I've seen, I've seen this sort of, I've seen this sort of malicious incompetence happen a lot, Jonah, as I'm sure you have as well. It's like, never— it doesn't start off as scammy, it doesn't start off as malicious, but it is, you know, like, we're gonna raise $700,000 and we're 100%, like, we are set, we're gonna use this money and we're gonna put it— put this thing on the Sphere. And then they call up the Sphere and they're like, hey, uh, can we put our dog with a hat on the— on your Las Vegas Sphere? And then the guys are like, who the fuck are you? How did you get this number? Please hang up.

Yeah.

And then they hang up and they're like, well, we can't tell our audiences because we built up this whole blah blah blah, so like, let's just keep trying to get on the Sphere. You know, I, I actually— I actually bet that that's what happened as opposed to we're going to take this money and just run with it.

This thing's going to zero, Avi. It's not low enough.

Yeah, it's just, it's down 25% today.

Like, I'm, I've never been in the business of holding on to a short if it goes down 25% in a day. I think that's like a general rule of mine, is if something goes down 20% in a day, I'm taking off it. If it goes, if it goes up 20% or goes down 20%, I just, I take it off. Yeah, but I just, you know, in one day it's like, you know, they just— it's just not time to cover the shorts. And yeah, it's just not how I personally trade. I think it's time to move on.

I just like, dude, looking at this ETH chart is disgusting to me.

I mean, the thing reverted everything after Trump.

Everything.

Gross.

It just reminds, you know, like, I don't think we can say this enough. The people buy—

like, alt season doesn't exist anymore because the people buying Bitcoin don't rotate it into alts because they're not gamblers and they don't seek higher rewards.

The people that are—

that drove Bitcoin up to $109,000 are in large part ETF buyers, people buying on Fidelity, people buying in brokerage, institutional guys. These are not guys that are rotating capital into your coins to send them, send them higher. And quality matters. That's why HYPE is $22. Yeah. And it's up today. That, that's why HYPE didn't collapse in on itself, because there's genuine real value there. That's also why Solana is only down 3% today.

Yeah, right. The trade is to close your shorts and get long hyper liquid here. If you're, if you're not already.

That's a trade.

And, you know, maybe, maybe buy some SOL, buy some XRP, buy some LTC, buy some things that will, that will have positive flows going their way.

You know, one coin that has been outperforming that nobody talks about, by the way, is Monero, which is fascinating to me.

It's a privacy coin, right?

From the Monero. Yeah, it's, it's the biggest privacy coin. It's doing extremely well. Clearly there's a demand for privacy. I mean, it is like the narrative of it is Bitcoin but untraceable.

It is pretty like—

that's a pretty good narrative, um, for, for, for a heavy Bitcoin-denominated market. It has held up extremely well. Now the issue is you can't pair— you can't trade it in a pair because kind of just grinds up. And so like, it outperforms to the downside and to the upside. So you have to weather a ton of vol on whatever short leg you have, because, you know, ETH often will outpump it to the upside, and then you're going to get all freaked out. But, you know, it's probably, you know, the more that I'm thinking about Monero, the more that I realize it's probably worthwhile to have in your portfolio. Because, you know, privacy combined with like a truly private currency. I mean, that's— as Bitcoin gets adopted and so many people, uh, you know, hold it in ETFs and whatnot, and as it becomes more trackable, you know, there is this old idea that Bitcoin was a Swiss bank in your pocket. Yeah, that's no longer true, but Monero is. Monero is literally a Swiss bank in your pocket.

I mean, that's a really interesting take. I mean, allow me to humbly challenge your thesis here. So the FDV of Monero is $3.7 billion. Um, the FDV of Zcash is $500 million, so 1/7 the size. Uh, Zcash is down 26% today. Monero is down 11%, but I agree with you, it's definitely outperforming and it's been performing all year. What is it about Monero that's better than Monero?

Monero's actually used— I mean, this is kind of an old, an old argument. There's also, um, there's like a conspiracy theory that actually more Zcash was minted than we know of.

Oh, wow.

And that's why it performed so poorly, because there's actually a lot more of the supply than we think. Because the initial ritual— what do they call it? The, you know, the ritual to create a seed and then burn it to like fully encrypt it— that, that was compromised. And I I like, I'm not, I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories, but it kind of makes sense when you consider just how poorly Zcash performs consistently.

It's like, who, like, where does all of this selling come from?

Like, why is it literally impossible for this thing to go up? Like, it just doesn't go up.

That was my question. I was going to be like, why would you, why would you pick Monero over Zcash?

But you know, perhaps because, because Monero goes up and Monero is used Yeah, like the, the, the bottom line is people use Monero.

I guess if we're entering a world— so, okay, so this sort of transitions nicely into a conversation we should be having about two things. First of all, when's the market going to turn in the short term? Because it definitely will turn. Trump's not going to like stubbornly ride this to zero, uh, this being risk assets. And the, the second question is like long term, like The fact that this happened changes the world a little bit. And what does that mean for crypto? One implication could be that in a world of trade wars and, uh, you know, increasing barriers to global trade, like maybe privacy coins like Monero are more relevant, which is long-term very bullish for a smaller cap asset like Monero. Um, Like, for— and kind of where I'm going with that is, let's, let's focus on the long term for a second. A trade war is bearish risk assets and bearish crypto in the short run because it just means that prices are higher for people, there's more economic turmoil, companies, uh, you know, their profit margins thin because they can't pass on all of the increased tariff costs to consumers, etc., etc., right? Like, all the, all the, all All the reasons that are getting priced in right now, but longer term, like if you erect barriers to trade and you're Donald Trump and you're in charge of the United States, whose currency is the US dollar, which is the preeminent global reserve currency of the day, and you decide to start waging wars, trade wars against people, that weakens the long-term viability of the dollar. That makes it less exciting for Canada and Mexico to trade bilaterally with the United States. And instead makes it more exciting ever so slightly for them to trade bilaterally with each other, not in dollars, right? Because obviously the dollar is being weaponized a little bit here. So if in order for Canada and Mexico to trade with each other bilaterally in the example that I just mentioned, they could do with US dollars, and then the Fed and, you know, Mr. Trump would have access to pretty much any kind of punishment they want to lay down on those two countries for doing what they're doing. Or, or they could just pick another currency. They're not going to pick the peso because Canadians don't have a lot of use for pesos. Mexicans don't have a lot of use for loonies, which are getting, you know, both of those currencies are nuking, by the way. The Canadian dollar is having a day like, uh, like one of these AI coins. It's puking right now. Um, ultimately you need an alternative reserve currency that's kind of like independent The euro doesn't really qualify, neither does the yen. Bitcoin just feels like that alternative reserve currency that's just sitting there as a dark horse on deck, waiting to, waiting to, you know, waiting for prime time. And these sorts of actions intensify the long-term drumbeat for Bitcoin adoption for reasons I just described. I think they also intensify the, the drumbeat of, you know, long-term adoption for privacy coins, though I've always avoided those because frankly, I think they tend to facilitate a lot of crime and terrorism, and it's hard to really like get long something even if the use case is exciting that, that's meant for that. So I don't really have a view on Monero, but I could see this scenario being very long-term bullish Bitcoin and very long-term bullish Monero. Short-term though, I actually don't think this is that big of a deal. I think Trump's going to U-turn this pretty quickly, and I think this opening salvo is just meant to extract a little bit of pain in order to ultimately end up with a better deal. Then, you know, what do you think?

I think that's the, that's the classic take that seems to be floating around. It's also my take is that Trump is, Trump is obviously using this as a negotiation tactic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The issue is the response. The initial response from Canada and Mexico has been for Canada and Mexico to sort of join arms and sing Kumbaya and say, we won't stand for this US attack on— you know, he's like, we won't stand for this and we're going to administer retaliatory, you know, retaliatory tariffs. That's not a good sign because it could mean that this gets dragged out. I mean, Trump has an ego at the end of the day.

And he needs to win.

Like, he— this needs to turn into a win situation for the United States. And the question is when. Like, when does that happen? I think it's very clear that it's way worse— like, tariffs are way, way, way worse for the country that has a higher percentage of their trade allocated to, you know, whatever country is administering the tariffs. I mean, Canada exports basically everything to the United States. It is way, way, way, way worse for Canada to have the US put tariffs on Canadian goods than for Canada to put tariffs on the US. It's just that, that, that's obviously true.

But it seems like there's some appetite from politicians in Canada to subject their population to this. And what you don't want is you don't want these tariffs to go up and be in place for 3 months before the Canadian citizenry revolts. I mean, like, what forces these politicians to back down?

Wasn't Trudeau due to get booted out of office? Like, I thought he was supposed to be gone by now. I mean, that's a pretty easy one, right? Like, he just sort of— he fights Trump tooth and nail, then he leaves a couple of weeks later, and then Poilievre, this is whatever the issue—

the issue is that Pierre is also in favor of retaliatory tariffs against the US. Like, this is like a bipartisan issue in Canada that they're all angry at the US.

Yeah, I'm left scratching my head too. How about this? Let me, let me bring in an analogy from the oil market. So during the Trump 1.0 administration, he was fighting against a similarly, you know, let's call it stubborn regime, the Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran. He wanted to starve them of cash. He exited the JCPOA unilaterally, um, at a time when oil prices were threatening to rip into triple digits because supply was maxed out everywhere. Um, and so by taking Iran offline, uh, you know, the price was starting to get pretty dangerous for Trump after exiting that deal. So basically he did a similar thing. He was like, fuck Iran, We're going to sanction the crap out of these people. We're going to exit the deal we have with them, the nuclear deal. Maximum pressure, maximum pain. Then oil prices did something that were, you know, that was bad for Trump, right? The worst thing that can happen to you as a United States president is an energy crisis like what happened under Biden. Um, then Libya went out. My favorite warlord, Ibrahim Jathran, uh, started fighting Khalifa Haftar, and Libya lost like a million barrels a day of production. Then oil, oil went ballistic, and Trump was between a rock and a hard place. He wanted— on the one hand, he wanted to sanction Iran and, you know, stop out their regime. On the other hand, he didn't want to get basically riots on his watch in the United States and get voted out of office. Because of, you know, because he caused any energy crisis. So he did a backdoor deal and wavered the sanctions for a little while to let Iran continue to export. He acted like the waivers were, you know, because the waivers were fairly public. Like, he did it, he did it quietly, but it was still public enough that people like, wow, Trump's backing down. So he didn't waver the full amount that was sanctioned, he wavered some of it. And then he did another thing, which was just let the rest of it out into Chinese bonded storage without telling anybody. And you wouldn't have known that unless you were in the oil market, which I was at the time, like in the physical oil market. Basically, Iran was selling oil to China— well, basically storing oil in China in Iranian oil tanks on Chinese soil, and then it was just disappearing from those tanks into God knows where. When, you know, people in the oil industry knew that China was taking oil out of the Iranian oil tanks that were— that happened to be in China and using it in their refineries at a discounted price. So basically it was like this super backdoor way for Iran to sell oil, and Trump did that until the price of oil crashed back down to—

so what you're saying is that he might potentially look for backdoor ways out of this fiasco that he has caused for himself?

Yeah, I mean, so, so like, just to finish the thought very quickly, sorry for rambling, um, I bet what happens is he does— and I bet he blueprints that. I bet he does like a partial walk back that makes him still look tough, and then if there's real trouble, like a super, super under-the-table thing that most people don't know about to get the rest of the, the way back to square one.

Here's, here's a question. Can you articulate exactly why Trump imposed tariffs on Canada? Like, can you articulate what he is trying to accomplish?

No, but I haven't been paying close enough attention. Something something fentanyl, something something they're not, they're not securing the border well enough. We asked— JD Vance put it nicely. He said there's a lot of fentanyl coming in from Mexico and Canada. We asked them to stop it. They didn't. And now we're on to the, um, you know, instead of, instead of just asking, we're, you know, we're playing tough phase.

Yeah, this is about border security and fentanyl. Yeah. And so it's— what is interesting to me is how, in theory, easy it is for Mexico and Canada to get these tariffs removed by just making public statements that they will attempt to clamp down on the things that Trump is talking about. And yet the response was so aggressive. And I think that if I'm going to dig deep here, I think what's happening is that countries around the world are nervous and scared of the US right now. They're scared that we're going to economically bludgeon them in order to get our way, and that Trump is actually starting with the quote-unquote easy stuff, like forcing Colombia to take immigrants back, which should be pretty darn— of course you should let a plane of your own citizens land. That's pretty— that's pretty standard stuff, right? You should probably let a plane of your own citizens land in your own country instead of sending them back to the US. And then this fentanyl stuff, which kind of just requires public statements and minimal action. Yeah. What's happening right now is a reflection of countries nervous that if they bend here, then it gets much worse.

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Do you think it has anything to do with socialism versus capitalism? Because Mexico and Canada— I don't think so. Okay.

I don't think so. I think it, I think it solely has to do with the idea that the US is moving away. So there's this great tweet that articulates what's happening right now looks dumb unless you put it under the lens of the New World Order, which is for the longest time post-1945, America was the indispensable country. America was the country that would go out there and it would build up other countries and it would give aid to other countries, and it was the world's policeman, and it would dictate policy around the the world and it would try to shape the world in a way in its image, right? It's like, I want the world to look like this and we're gonna work towards this and we're gonna do this by using our wealth to flush other countries with our wealth, right? We're gonna be so good to so many people that they're gonna love us. And that's really what we did. I mean, if you think about it, the amount of money that flows out of the US to other countries specifically so that we can, you know, move forward on our foreign policy. Not, not trade, but like soft power. Like, that, that era is coming to an end. And Trump and his, you know, a collection of people have decided that now America will stop pushing its image on the world. It will stop trying to dictate what this world should look like in 15, 20 years, in 50 years. It will stop with this soft power, and what it will simply do is cut the best deals with individual countries for the economic growth of its own economy and its citizens.

Like, that's it.

Like, no more worrying about the rest of the world.

It is simply—

you're, you're, you're an ally, sure, you might, you might be, but that doesn't matter anymore. What matters are, are we getting a good deal out of our relationship? Like, the whole idea of consensus building doesn't exist within the Trump administration. That's why he keeps threatening to pull out of, like, every agreed-upon accord. Like, the, the, the idea that it's good for the world to have a group of nations that act in a certain way, and that the US will subsidize those nations to get them to act in a certain way and to support the US that, like, that, that's over. And so, so that, I think, is what people are fighting back against, right?

So it's kind of like global cooperationists versus, like, the hedge fund pod shop model of global geopolitics. So let's say that—

and that's very, very— to bring it back around circle, that is so good for Bitcoin, you have no idea.

That was what I was about to ask you. I was like, let's say we enter a multipolar world with no global hegemon. How does that make you feel about the price of Bitcoin in 10 years?

Or it makes me feel like this thing should be $50 million.

It's, it's like in a world where there isn't one, you know, Team America World Police making sure everybody's, you know, running democracies and liberal democracies and whatever, like it to me, it's just like the dollar cannot cannot live in a multipolar world the way that it is right now. Like, it's going to be a very diminished asset. And I think that currencies such as crude oil and liquefied natural gas and gold and Bitcoin are the only stores of value and means of exchange that will be relevant in a world with like Well, here's, here's superpowers kind of like all threatening each other with nuclear weapons.

Here's, here's where I might disagree with you. Um, the dollar can still go up a lot in this scenario because what's happening is the countries are actually getting— there, there's actually subsidy right now for a lot of countries to interact with America. And when you remove that, you need to pay higher prices for the— for American goods. Yeah, right. And you can't rely on America as much. So, but you have— so you have it, you have a few competing forces. One is that the American economy will continue to grow. And it will continue to produce the most innovative and best products. And therefore, our products will be desired around the world, and there will be a strong demand for dollars because this is the only place where you can have investment. This is the, the, this is the economy that will give you the best return on any bonds that you purchase. Basically, America is the only place to go for investments, and that is bolstered under the Trump regime and the way that he's running the government, in my personal opinion.

So basically you're saying finance and like just regulatory climate is an export that the United States has, that it's, it's, it's an export that will strengthen the dollar.

On the other hand, you have this idea that you can't rely on the United States to act in your best interests. And so your reserve of dollars and treasuries are going to be much lower.

Yeah.

Right.

For on a state level. And so there are these two offsetting flows that I haven't spent enough time trying to figure out, like what way that leans. Yeah, but I'm not making the argument that it's— that this is either really bad for the dollar or really good for the dollar, because I actually see flows going in both directions because of this.

Yeah, I don't have a view on the dollar.

Now, now, for Bitcoin specifically, this is extremely good because you need a non-governmental currency that is apolitical— that is effectively apolitical in a multipolar world, because you can't rely on a basket of your closest allies' currencies. You have to rely on gold or Bitcoin, right? If you want reserves, I mean, you just— you can't have US Treasuries as reserves in this world anymore.

One day they might— you might wake up and they're not an ally anymore.

Yeah. Oh, sorry, you thought those were your dollars. They're actually my dollars. Fuck you. Yeah, I agree.

So this is— this is all like— that's all very, very, very good for Bitcoin. You know, thinking about this, people always try to get around tariffs. If they're— if economic warfare increases, you— maybe that is a big boon for both Bitcoin and Monero because payment, you know, you're going to need payments that exist outside the system to evade tariffs.

Yeah, like that.

That's good. That's got to be a pretty big draw.

I also wonder if you're going to have a premium on like virgin Bitcoin that's been mined like directly from the miner as opposed to Bitcoin that's been in circulation. Because let's say that you buy Bitcoin— let's say that I, let's say that I'm a sanctioned entity or an entity that the United States doesn't like, and I want to buy something that the United States would prefer I not buy, and I want to buy it with Bitcoin. If I go on like Coinbase and KYC myself and buy a bunch of Bitcoin and then send that Bitcoin to the seller of whatever I want to buy, you know, send it to Venezuela and buy a cargo of crude oil. That's pretty traceable. Meanwhile, if I wire fiat to a Chinese Bitcoin miner, and receive virgin Bitcoin in exchange for that, and then I send that Bitcoin off to Venezuela and buy my cargo of crude oil, um, that could take, you know, that's harder to trace, right? Like, that's just not— basically, if you buy Bitcoin direct from a miner and spend it, um, you could do it with a fresh wallet that's harder to, you know, that's not traceable, and your gateway is some random offshore miner instead of, uh, instead of like a basically a heavily regulated entity where every transaction is monitored. So I wonder if, if you're going to see a premium on like people buying Bitcoin directly from miners for the purposes of spending it on things like that. Um, just, that's just tinfoil hat stuff, but to me it seems like, uh, it's a way to make Bitcoin a privacy coin. I don't know if there's enough liquidity for Monero. Maybe an ecosystem could develop But yeah, to me, yeah, I'm calling it now.

My favorite trades are Bitcoin, Monero, XRP, LTC, and SOL. I'm calling it now. Short ETH to zero.

The fuck? Why XRP?

Because of the ETF, Jonah.

Yeah, fair enough. It did just dive like 30%.

And I might have to pick up some DOGE as well.

You know, one thing, one thing I will say is that through all of this absolute, like, horrific shit that's been going on in the market, you know what's been, uh, you know what's been doing real well?

Tell me, Avi.

1000xAgent.

I, I love it.

It's, it's actually like, it's, it's putting out some pretty freaking amazing content. I mean, we're gonna launch a terminal for this thing. At some point in the next 3 months. And I think people are going to be blown away by like the level of insight that this thing is like able to generate. I mean, it's starting to reply to people right now. It's like, it's great, right? So I'll give you an example. Ansem says, if I want to get most up to speed on newest Sol clients in FireDancer, where do I go? Helios blogs.

It replied, Helios blogs might not give you the full picture.

Check Jump Crypto's technical docs. They're leading FireDancer development. SOL's recent performance shows why client diversity matters. I mean, look, it's not a perfect response, but it's able— it's like able to point you in the right direction. Go check Jump Crypto's technical docs. And so in the future, like, this thing is basically going to be a ChatGPT trained on crypto like no other agent. No other AI is going to be trained on the data that this AI is trained on. And so it's just going to be like the sidebar for everyone in crypto, in my personal opinion.

That's, that's an awesome vision for this project. And at the speed that we're shipping, I think we can get there. Like, I wouldn't be pumping this if I didn't use it myself, because I think that would come off as dishonest. But I literally like I have notifications on for this bot. It— if I'm not paying attention to my TradingView all day because I'm out and about, um, it kind of keeps me up to date. Like, I'm pretty aware of what's happening throughout the day because of what this thing is, is posting. Um, and the best part about it is that it sounds just like you and me, you know. It's, it's literally our— it's It's, uh, you, the way you do it is you build a character file and the character file has like message examples and lore and like biograph— biographical information. And so that, you know, we all, we created from our podcast transcripts and I haven't updated it for the last couple podcasts, but you know, up in, up until 2 podcasts ago, it was, I was like putting in fresh examples and lore and bio stuff from every single transcript. So I guess we're gonna have to automate that too. There's this mountain of work, but this is a fun project. I think a terminal is kind of a, You know, I used a Bloomberg terminal for almost 20 years. I don't, I don't have one anymore. Um, I, Bloomberg is great because it has everything you could possibly want to search for, but what ChatGPT is so amazing for is that it kind of like opens your minds to, to things that are sort of adjacent to what you're looking for and it provides context and explanation. ChatGPT's garbage. For trading. It's so good for learning about many things, but garbage for trading. And I'm— in building this agent, I'm starting to understand why, uh, because piecing trading together is like— it's, it's— it combines so much real-time and not real-time context. Like, we're literally updating— we're literally updating a dictionary's worth of stuff on the back end to teach the bot like why certain features of the market are bullish or bearish— Bitcoin, ETH, etc.— and how to, how to interpret that. And then it comes back and processes all of its information through that dictionary. It's pretty super interesting. Doing it is basically making me a better trader, and then the output makes me more alert and miss less. So I like it. You're on mute.

So it's honestly great and it's already useful for me.

Yeah. Glad to hear you're using it too.

Of course I'm using it. I mean, it's, it's, it's a great, it's a, it's a great product. I mean, you know, and, and in the future people will be able to upload their own data and ask it for its interpretation of that data. And it will be able to do so effectively by using the frameworks that it's already generated. It's pretty cool stuff. Like, I'm very happy with how things have been going.

Me too.

I think obviously, like, AI agents in general have been absolutely destroyed. Have you ever looked at— have you looked at the Zeribro chart recently?

Yeah, it's almost at zero. Does this mean that we're building during the bear, Avi? Does this mean that we're chewing glass? Like all those analogies, it's insane.

It was, uh, it's, it went to a $750 million market cap and now it's a $46 million market cap. Like, that is insane. Uh, there are a lot of projects that will go to zero. There are also a lot of projects that are probably really phenomenal buys. Um, all of the froth has just been washed out of the AI market. I mean, my personal—

right here, I love that one.

Let's see, it is down a substantial amount.

Yeah, that is, that is down only. Oh my God.

And what I, what I'll say, just last point here before I think we wrap it for the day is that this is, this has been very painful. Um, I think you needed to be very quick on your feet in order to avoid the worst of this because a lot of this came, I mean, kind of on the heels of, uh, tariffs. But what I will say is that it's a high— it's two very high hit rate things. When the market refuses to go up on good news It's close to over. If you remember, there was news that the XRP and SOL were getting CME futures listed and they didn't go up. That was very bad. That's like, that's like a very bad sign for the market. It means that everyone's max deployed, like, like people aren't able to speculate anymore because they're max deployed and they're just holding on to what they already have. There's no cash on the sidelines to speculate. And then the other point was after the, you know, reserve came out, Bitcoin didn't really go much higher. Like, when things like that happen, you gotta, you gotta say, okay, let me take a step back and reassess my portfolio and raise a little bit of cash because cash is more important right now than it was before. So that, that, that's what I'll leave you with right now. I think is a really freaking good time to buy. Yeah, like to buy the— to, to buy the good stuff, right? I think it's a really phenomenal time.

I agree with you. One thing I would add to that very well-articulated statement is if something's trading at price X and then a bunch of terrible news comes out in a bear market and it's still trading at price X, the market's handing you a gift. You can get short, especially if there are too many coins out there, and inverse alt season is the new alt season. So look out for— look out for death knells, for the toll of the bell for a project here or there. And if the price hasn't nuked yet, it's probably because people aren't paying attention. They're— you know, you are going to get windows of opportunity to short stuff here before it really breaks down. Um, yeah, nothing we say is financial advice. Uh, we don't, we don't, you know, obviously do that. Please do your own research. Don't take anything that we've said on this pod as a recommendation. Avi, it is, uh, it is great talking to you.

Um, it is always a pleasure. Thank you, Jonah.

This is, uh, it's nice to be dialed in on a Sunday night with markets moving a lot. Feels like we're in the— it's good again. At least we're getting some volatility here, you know, even if we've lost money, or even if you've lost money, like, at least, at least the market is moving.

It's exciting. It's exciting and fun. You can't, you can't be too upset when you, when you get this. Yeah, just, just because it gives you something to do. Um, anyway, Jonah, it's a pleasure.

Likewise. See you.