Welcome To The Banana Zone | 1000x

You guys are just not appreciating what's happening right now. You guys are not appreciating that the sitting president of the United States of America has said that he cares about Bitcoin price. You are not appreciating the fact that the potential incoming Treasury Secretary owns a ton of BTC and likes Bitcoin and wants it to go up. You're not appreciating the fact that Michael Saylor has seemingly created an infinite money glitch where he just gets to buy more Bitcoin because people are so damn euphoric about this thing. We're above $100,000. And retail, while in, is still looking at where to buy. This episode is brought to you by Definitive. You'll hear more about them later in the show. All right. Welcome back to another 1000x Podcast. We are glad to have you here. This has been such a fun couple of weeks. Jonah has been working his ass off, not trading but being a new father.

Yeah, which is why we haven't—

third time, the third time. That's why we haven't had a podcast in a while. He's finally pulled himself away from diapers and throw up to grace us with his take— with his takes on the crypto market. So thank you for doing that. I know it must be really tragic for you to talk about markets instead of picking up poop.

Yeah, um, I definitely wish I was scooping poop right now instead of talking, talking about crypto. But, you know, you'd be surprised, Avi. Um, during some of those 3-hour in-between, you know, like bottle-feeding type scenarios, I'm just lying on the couch trading crypto on my phone. Crypto is a very easy thing to hypergamble if you have even, even a little bit of spare time. You know, it's not like it's really ripped me away. In fact, it's kind of drawn me closer because I don't really have much else going on other than, you know, tending to this little guy while he's awake and then staying up all night trading Solana versus Ethereum like a total jackass when he's asleep. So that aside, why don't we kick this off with Bitcoin trading $108,000 a token. What is going on?

What's going— what's going on?

Where are we? What is happening? Is this real? This is crazy.

What's going on is it's everything that we've been talking about on the podcast basically since the Trump election. Yeah. Which is that, like, you guys are just not appreciating what's happening right now. You guys are not appreciating that the sitting president of the United States of America has said that he cares about Bitcoin price. You are not appreciating the fact that the potential incoming Treasury Secretary owns a ton of BTC and likes Bitcoin and wants it to go up. You're not appreciating the fact that Michael Saylor has seemingly created an infinite money glitch where he just gets to buy more Bitcoin because people are so damn euphoric about this thing by selling over— by selling overpriced stock. You guys are not appreciating the fact that we just punched through all-time highs. We're above $100,000. And retail while in is still looking at where to buy. I mean, I'm getting pings now daily about what crypto people should buy. I had an ex-girlfriend reach out to me, dude, who I have not talked to in a very long time.

Oh no.

And she asked me for crypto advice and it did not end well. So that took a lot of like— she had some— let's just put it like this. She was definitely reaching out about crypto, not about me.

Hey, how you doing? Just wanted to check in and see how you're feeling about, you know, us. And hey, what's— what shitcoins?

No, no, ignored it, ignored it all. Just went straight to the, hey, what, what should I be buying right now?

Straight to the point. Hey, do I buy XRP? I saw that it's trading up like 10x from the lows, but it could still— I don't know, I saw this tweet that said it could— yeah, I'm getting those too. I can't tell whether this is a top signal or whether it's just the beginning of this like massive tsunami of, of of inflows. And I'm still bullish. I think it's the latter. I think basically, like, people call it price discovery on crypto Twitter. I always like— trading lingo— price discovery can go in both directions, right? It's like when you're trying to find a new equilibrium price after some news has come out. I, I guess that's the mode that we're in. And I don't think we really can know until institutions start deploying, and they tend to deploy on a, you know, fiscal year or quarterly basis. So maybe you'll get like the way that it I, you know, commodities is my lens for most of this, like the way that it works with the GSCI or BCOM, which are these two big commodities indices, is they'll start like, you know, if they get a bunch of new cash from investors who want to own commodities, they'll start deploying the cash. It used to be like pretty much the first business day of the new year. And they would deploy it for the, you know, first basically 5 to 10 business days of the new year. And then everybody would front run that. So they started to get a little bit smarter and they would deploy like a little bit after Christmas just to get ahead of that, right? So they would basically start a few days before the new year and then just go a little bit into the new year. And I honestly don't think it's that much more complicated for Bitcoin. Like, if a bunch of people are going to start deploying, like, it usually— the last two, last two, like, kind of Januarys you've seen inflows. This time, I think now that people have the confidence, like you said, about the incoming administration actually not wanting to kill crypto with all of their heart and soul. I think that that confidence will translate into some inflows, and that inflow will probably take the form of dollars getting swapped for Bitcoin on the first business days of the new year. Am I— am I—

I think, I think you're right. I think you're right. I also think what really helps me is when I map out the participants in the market and I try to figure out what each of their goals are. And where money might be coming from and where my money might be coming out of the system. So I mean, we'll start with the obvious one, Michael Saylor. So Michael Saylor has been buying $500 million of Bitcoin a week. Uh, he has about $8 billion left to buy on this ATM that he's got, and he can't actually sell shares or issue more converts starting January because there's a blackout period. So he actually won't be able to raise more money to buy. So until that blackout period is over in January, he's got about $8 billion left to buy. I think he's going to do that before the end of the year. He's probably going to try to speed up his purchases. Now, that is offset by the fact that people now know this. People know that there's a limited amount of BTC coming from Saylor. And if you want to get out of your BTC positions, you probably want to do it with the Saylor bid. You don't want to, you don't want to try getting out when there's no support. But there's a complicating factor of these people also probably don't want to have to pay taxes on their BTC gains this year, so they might wait until next year. You also have retail, uh, that is slowly starting to trickle in. They're buying Bitcoin, they're basically buying all, buying all the Robinhood coins. Um, and what's clear is that there still isn't there still isn't a huge amount of retail in. Like, a lot of this is just ETF buyers. It's a lot of, you know, middle-aged— literally middle-aged people or big-ticket guys just reallocating their portfolios to BTC. Retail is still not here in a huge way except for the chart of XRP. So I think you get in January bonuses hit. I know that sounds like it's a meme, but it's really not. Because at least 5 people have told me, hey, I have some money coming in at the end of the year. What cryptos do you think I should buy? This is very common. And so what you have is you have this dynamic where heading into the end of the year, the bid for Bitcoin gets weaker and the bid for altcoins gets stronger. And that probably causes, in my opinion, a sell-off from BTC in the first 2 weeks of January and a massive bid for alts. In the first 2 weeks of January before Bitcoin continues to go up because of Trump administration actions. That's my, that's my take is we're in, we're in a market where the focus is so clearly on BTC and there's a genuine, true and strong narrative for this asset that's going to propel it forward. But there's also some technical factors that make me at this point want to start selling some BTC and reallocating to alts. I mean, you know, if you are very BTC heavy right now in your portfolio, this is a good time in my opinion to start scaling out, to start buying some Solana, to start buying some ETH, to start buying things that you really like. I mean, I have a list.

Then you have to, then you have to realize a big tax gain. And pay it in April, April 25th instead of April 26th.

I agree with you. I personally agree with you. Obviously, the big difference for me is that I don't really have, like, it just doesn't matter as much for me personally. So I guess that's a little bit of a bias.

It's something to consider. If it matters to you, maybe you want to sell on A year of basically a free loan from the government is meaningful in a market that we expect to continue ripping like this. In other words, you would rather have that money in Bitcoin than in the IRS's coffers for that year, if you can. So maybe the time to take profit, if taxes matter to you, is January 1st rather than late December. But if taxes don't matter to you, then I agree that the timing would be a little—

you know what, that's a really, really, really good way of putting it. You know, I didn't really— I didn't really think about it the way that you just outlined it to me, but it's true. You basically have to bet that we get a giga nuke because you— if you're selling, your question should be, if I have to pay taxes in April of next year, instead of April of the next year, instead of April 2026, I have to pay April 2025. How much money can I make with that money in the interim?

Right, probably a lot.

And that— and the answer is probably— yeah, you're right, the answer is probably a lot. And so like, if you think that with that money that you would otherwise have to pay in taxes, you have— you're gonna have to— yeah, I mean, it makes— it makes a ton of sense. Now the flip side of this is the reason that I said it doesn't really matter for me that much is because my trading book doesn't have that much unrealized P&L in it because I constantly flip it.

Yeah. So mine has a ton.

So yeah, because, because you're holding— so it matters, right, what your unrealized P&L is, obviously.

Yeah.

Uh, yeah, I mean, if you're an active trader, you're realize— your unrealized P&L is probably pretty low. Because your, your book turnover is probably pretty high. Hey everyone, just wanted to tell you about today's sponsor, Definitive. Whether you're a retail trader or institutional customer, Definitive is helping unlock the next era of on-chain finance. Crypto traders struggle executing large trades while minimizing market impact and achieving optimal price execution. Founded by Coinbase alumni, Definitive ensures you get the very best execution execution for every token on every chain. Maximize profits with automated TWAPs, limit orders for any token, and to get the best pricing possible, route your order through every DEX and liquidity pool with up to 19 times lower fees compared to other platforms. For our 1000X listeners, get no fees for your first $100,000 in trading volume. Upgrade your on-chain trading at blockworks.definitive.fi or check out the link in the show notes.

At any rate, there are factors that are going to make BTC dominance— that could make BTC dominance go in either direction. Let me give you a hypothetical scenario. January 1st comes. It's Michael Saylor's blackout period. The Bitcoin buying kind of stops. Trump hasn't been inaugurated yet. The euphoria is kind of over. Inflows disappoint, so Bitcoin kind of like levels off, just like you were saying. What if alts nuke in that scenario? How are you going to play it? What if, what if there's like no big rotation into alts? What if the whole space just takes a breather and for the first time in basically 2 years, 2 and a half years, everything just kind of like gets cooked? Are you going to be dip buying with both hands? And are you going to be focused on dip buying alts or dip buying Bitcoin?

I'm focused. I'm, I'm focused. I mean, my bet is that the— I've always been of the mindset that BTC this cycle will probably top out anywhere from $125K to $150K. I just think at that point there will be so much unrealized P&L in the market. There will be so many people that, that have bought in, it would take the SBR to really keep it going. Um, and so over the next 2 months, my bet is that alts are just a much better, higher Sharpe trade. That's just my bet.

When you say alts, which— so first of all, I have a much higher Bitcoin target than you do for this cycle, and I expect this cycle to be a lot longer than previous cycles, longer and slower. But what do you mean when you say alts? You're not just going to be going out there like buying an index of the top 1,000 shitcoins. Like, you're, you're going to be—

honestly, honestly, that's probably the best thing that you can do for yourself if you're not actually in the weeds. And you, you know, and the reason, the reason I say that is because kind of everything has a flavor of, you know, it's like a flavor of the month type thing where very few alts will outperform over the course of the cycle. Generally, they outperform over the period of like 2 to 3 weeks because they're the hot narrative of the time. So I mean, it kind of, it kind of depends. I have a— what I always do is I always think about, okay, well, what's my, what's my core? Like, what do I, what do I really like? What do I think will benefit over a long period of time? Because A, it's either undervalued relative to current metrics, or B, I think that the market will allow it to grow a ton. Uh, and my answer to that right now is threefold. It's dino coins that are going to get an ETF are pretty— are like actually a pretty darn good bet. So I actually do like XRP, I do like LTC, um, I, I like, I like SOL.

Litecoin just sent, sent it, it candled just a couple minutes ago.

And obviously, I like, I like ETH, even though that has an ETF, I just think it's going to get inflows. Then there are things that I think are, like, will be a flavor of the month for a long period of time, which is AI, and all AI coins that actually have a good usable product, I think do, do very well. And then there's a sub subsector of that, where it's basically just products that I think are doing really well. So like Hyperliquid, right? And Virtuals, even though that's technically under the AI segment, I mean, it's just, it's just doing really well. Everything outside of those categories, I don't view as a long-term hold. Yeah, it's a trade. I—

so much to talk about in what you just said. There's like, Which alts do you pick? How long are they going to rally for? Talk about hyper liquid, talk about virtuals. We got to touch on our AI agent that we're working on. But I guess let's start with an area where I have a different perspective than you. I do not think buying an index of the top 1,000 shitcoins is a good idea. Basically, my take for this cycle is that instead, we're not going to have an alt season. There will be altcoins, like many of which we've discussed on this podcast, like AAVE. Which will perform. But I don't think that most alts are a good bet. And I think that you look at some of the alts that theoretically meet your criteria, like Telegram, and they're just flatlining. Toncoin or whatever, you know. So I don't think that buying the index of 1,000 alts would work very well this cycle like it did in 2021. I think instead of having an alt season this time, we're just going to have an AI season. I think that any coin, whether it's great or absolutely useless with an AI theme attached to it is just going to— there's going to be some point during the next 3 months where all of that crap just 10x's for I don't know what reason. Probably because it's under-owned, probably because there's a narrative, probably because there will be some excitement about agents using crypto to transact. And it'll kind of be like, uh, like that sort of like VC excitement, like seed stage VC excitement that people felt about ICOs in 2017. Like our boy Chief, uh, said he's unironically studying the, uh, the ICO bubble, the 2017 cycle to like prepare for what's coming in early 2025. And I kind of agree with that. And I think the way that it's going to, it's going to sort of like take shape is AI coins, right? AI is this new technology that people are excited about. Chatbots are real. It's transforming society. It's clear that the internet of money will intersect with artificially intelligent agents. Those things are already like sending out tweets that are going viral. They have tokens attached to them. It's all kind of cool, but hard to like articulate in very clear terms how it's all going to work out and get put together and translate value to, you know, create wealth for individuals like you and me. So before that is clear, I think all of that stuff is just going to like moon. I think it's going to go bananas. And I don't really want to waste my time with like DeFi or narratives from 2021 or most altcoins other than the ones like we talked about that were obvious, like the ones that Gary Gensler's lawsuits against, or, you know, like the XRPs of the world, Aves, you know, Trump's involved with that. Like aside from a couple obvious alts, like strongest horse in the sector to use your wise words, like other than a couple, I don't really care. I think if I'm just going to go crazy on stuff without really thinking too hard. It's going to be the, you know, like virtual.

I mean, you have to think about what the asymmetry is, right? So when you're, when you're talking about altcoins, a lot of people will buy altcoins to get beta on the underlying related asset, right? So you like, you buy a bunch of DeFi to get beta on ETH because you think ETH is going to do well. You buy you can buy Stacks or Rune or something BTC-related to outperform BTC if BTC goes up. Now that trade doesn't really work anymore. Like it just, just doesn't. And yeah, Rune, I think, I think, I think some people are still stuck in that mindset of let me buy this to get beta to this underlying asset. If you think an asset is going up, just buy it. And if you want beta, buy more.

Buy with leverage.

Right? Like buy with leverage. Like that, that's the way that I would think about it. Is you're very likely much better off if you think ETH is going to do really well and you think that there's going to be an ETH rotation. Why are you buying a ton of DeFi when it can go down as much as it can go up? Just buy ETH, the thing that you actually think is gonna, is gonna do well. Now there's obviously exceptions because there's some things that you think will do better under ETH but have some asymmetry to them. You know, maybe a Uniswap or or, you know, an ENA. So these, these coins, they might have some other narrative pushing them forward, and they're going to benefit from the price of ETH going up. But, you know, I think that you kind of just focus on the, focus on the underlying. You can say, okay, well, Trump is buying ENA, let me buy a ton of ENA. And that ENA is benefiting from the bull market because funding rates are going to be up and elevated for a very long period of time, and that's going to really radically improve their product. And therefore, I'm going to go ahead and buy ENA. That's a great— that's great.

I like that.

But can you say, okay, I'm gonna go buy, like, name any list of DeFi tokens, because, like, 1inch, because I think ETH is going to do better? Why? Why would you do that? That just doesn't make— doesn't make sense to me personally. There has to be some underlying reason.

Yeah, for Uniswap, there's a great reason, which is that they're going to get unsued by the SEC, right? Like, that's, that's the, that's the token that's getting unsued narrative. Um, yeah, you think ETH is going to go up, you're buying it because the SEC is going to change, and hopefully that the actual value, the value of the product will deliver value to the token because of that.

And that, that, that's, that's really the key. Yeah, so you can come up with these ideas, but you know, I would, I would stick to, you know, if you're bullish on ETH, go buy ETH. If you're bullish on SOL, go buy SOL. If you're bullish on BTC, go buy BTC. I think that just because of the, like, form of buyers and, like, the type, the type of buyers in this market, um, you're, you're better off sticking to me, like, meme coins or AI agents now, which I'm actually super bullish on.

Yeah, we gotta talk about AI agents.

We do. Before we get into that, before we—

yeah, yeah, there's more stuff to talk about before we get to the AI conversation.

I was going to say memes have been doing really badly. It just seems like there isn't that much interest in buying these things right now. I mean, you look kind of across the board, they're all off 50% from the highs. They didn't bounce with BTC even though BTC went up. I mean, they're kind of— it just seems like they're overallocated now. I don't know if you have that take.

Yeah, no, I do. I mean, the thing is though, I— it's, it's less about memes coming off. It's just that like I think the casino— that the game du jour at the casino has shifted a bit from the Pump.fun style meme or the topical political meme, the Peanut, the Bowdoin, something a little bit different, right? So guess how much Pump.fun volume is down since the highs?

I don't know.

Um, it's down 50-ish. So graduating tokens, like tokens that make it out of the bonding curve, down 48%. Trading bot volume down 50, 56%. Like, only 1% of Pump.fund tokens graduated last week, which, you know, I think during the peak of the mania, it was like closer to 10%. I have to double-check. Basically, what these stats are telling you is that it's less about like, oh, let's go buy every random meme coin that our boy Ansem decides to tweet about. And instead, there's a little bit more thought going into like, the memeing, right? And what I mean by that is it's not just load up a Phantom wallet and buy some memes on Solana. I think what we're seeing now is like the shift happened with AI 16Z, Goat, right? People are looking for memes with a little bit more substance behind it beyond just one stupid picture. You know, so I think a lot of this AI memeing is happening frankly, on ETH and on Base. So maybe that's part of why you've seen Solana underperform ETH recently. I think a lot of that, like, casino capital is just migrating to another chain. You see tweets all the time about like, oh, how do I bridge from Solana to Base? How do I bridge from Solana to Arbitrum? Right? This is, this is happening, right? Capital is just moving around. It's not the appetite for gambling has gone away. It's, it's just, you know, there's only, there's only so much, like, the style of memeing has changed, not memeing itself. Does that, is that a, what do you think? You're on mute.

One thing, one thing that I've definitely noticed is, so you had this in the past, the memes were created within crypto and then disseminated throughout, right? So like, uh, well, not, not necessarily. True, actually. I guess Doge was the dog in the meme and somebody created that. But what I'm trying to articulate is that memes have been, you know, they have a community behind them. They have content created. And oftentimes that content is created outside of the meme circles and then adopted by the meme because it's important to generate a community if you have a meme. That's why you constantly see memes launched in crypto about TikTok stuff like Chill Guy, right? It's rarer that you have these crypto memes explode because you need consistent content creation in order for these memes to actually do well, right? You need a community manager, you need people to be posting pictures, or, you know, it's actually a lot of work to get these, to get these things off the ground. Now what I like about the AI agents, which is what you were alluding to, it's like, what, take— taking some mindshare about away from memes, is that you can have auto— you can have automated content creation, you can have an automated marketing, uh, team by creating a Twitter that has an AI behind it and telling it to just consistently put out memes in line with, you know, your, your token. And so I think that the, the future of memes very much so looks like that because it's also easier to believe in that than it is to believe in a team of people. It's like, okay, we're creating this AI to pump our, to pump our meme that literally never rests, that is around 24/7 to put out content, to engage with people, to grow this thing. Um, like, why would I trust a team of humans to do that when I can just—

yeah, they could just get sick of it or rug the project or move on to something else or, or, or not put the, the hat on the sphere, you know? I, I totally get it. Yeah, so I think this sort of like one-shot let's, let's build a meme on Pump.fund and see how it goes. Like, I agree, there's not enough there for people to invest in, but the hyper-gambling attitude is still, is still abundant. And, you know, that's— I think that's why you and I have gotten a little bit involved in the Virtuuls ecosystem. Um, like, I'm, I'm so bullish Virtuul, uh, Virtuul, the token. I think that the ecosystem itself is interesting as well because allows people to create memes with automated content kind of backing them as opposed to just one picture and a team. So, you know, I guess on that note, maybe we should talk about the 1000x agent we launched, you know, 1000x on Virtual as an experiment. Obviously, it's going straight to zero. You shouldn't buy it with any expectation of financial gain. It's just a tradition coin. It's a terrible idea, but it's still fun to experiment in crypto because you learn stuff. And it, you know, helped me, for example, get my head around virtual and look at this, you know, $2 billion FDV token and think like, this, this is, this seems like a 10-bagger to me, you know, I'm going to get involved.

I think one of the, one of the biggest issues with traders in general in crypto is that they don't actually ever touch the products or use them. And so I'm not always perfect at this, but I make an effort to try to engage with popular products in crypto, to use them and actually see how they operate and see what they're good for and see what they're bad for. So when we were discussing, hey, what, what's going on with virtuals, why not make an agent? And we did. And then the group chat found it basically immediately and then pumped it up to 6 million FTV, which was nuts because the thing is really stupid right now. You guys are crazy. And then kind of forced our hand into figuring out how to actually make this thing valuable, because we don't want to just, like, abandon it now that so many people are in it. But the experience has taught me two things. One, people are rabid about new innovative tech in crypto. Still, when something cool is built, people go crazy for it. And often I think we've lost this. I— we've sometimes you lose that. You think, oh, well, whatever, it's just whatever's going up at the time. And the second is Virtuals is really fun. It's really fun to try to create an agent and try to make it do what you want it to do and see if you can make it into a better, smarter version of yourself, see if you can create engagement with it. And the Virtuals tooling stack is great so far for really basic stuff. For the more complicated things, I think that it's still way behind custom. I mean, I don't think it's very obvious that it's way behind custom frameworks like Eliza, the AI-16Z, and all these other things. But the issue is that those products aren't particularly friendly to noobs. In the future, they will be.

That's how you know you're early, though, right?

But it's like the same thing, right? I mean, if you wanted to go launch a token 4 years ago, you couldn't do it unless you knew how to code. And so like, you got to program in Solidity. Like, you had to. There was no way around it. Um, you need to hire somebody that, that could do it. Uh, it wasn't difficult, right? It was basically a bunch of copy-pastes, but you still had to deploy it, right? It took some level of technical understanding to get these things off the ground. And that's where I feel like we are with agents right now. We're not we're not at the boom period yet because it's still hard to make something useful. But over the next year, it's going to become increasingly easy to make something useful. And then it's going to be able, it's going to be increasingly easy to make something that's better than a human at running marketing or creating content or building, building a community. And then that's when it really takes off the next level. I mean, Like, I'm— I'm— I'm— Virtual's dip today, I'm eyeing it with intense interest. Like, I, I like hope it comes down even more so I can buy more.

I'm in, and I, I, I'm hoping it comes down more too because I want to buy more. I'm so bullish this thing because I could totally see this becoming like an absolute killer app for crypto, just allowing— using, using the community building power of a token plus the virality and ease of use of just an automated always-on marketing agent. And like you said, we're so early that like using Virtuuls, that like just for people who haven't, you know, played around with it, they have a sandbox where you can deploy an agent once it passes the bonding curve because of investment. Then, you know, your token is live and you basically can create a Twitter bot, or soon in the near future, a Telegram bot that will behave and tweet and message the way that you want it to. And you sort of like fill out effectively a rudimentary questionnaire, uh, describing how you want your bot to behave. And then you deploy it and it's really stupid. And then you tweak your questionnaire and it gets slightly less stupid and so on and so forth. But then eventually what happens is you reach a threshold that you can't pass where the bot is still just not getting good enough at what you want it to do for you to be happy. And at that point, what you have to do is basically write your own agent with custom functions that links to news feeds or token prices, or in our case, podcast transcripts. Uh, you know, our, our agent, we want it to sound and think and tweet like we do, but all the time to provide takes on tokens, crypto markets in general, and, and sort of macro X crypto type analysis 24/7, 365. And we have a tremendous amount of content to train the agent on because we sit here and talk to each other every week. And it gets recorded and transcribed. And we have a community that we can use to crowdsource ideas on how to make the spot better. So we have all the ingredients, we want to make it good. The thing is that we've sort of reached the threshold for how much that, you know, you can do without actually writing code. And so then the next threshold that you have to cross, it's like the bar is so much lower than what it would have taken to deploy a token 4 years ago. Like, you don't need to know how to write Solidity. You basically need to upload a JSON file, which for those who don't know is like basically the kind of language that APIs use to communicate with any other computer language, um, you know, like Python. Basically, you need to upload a JSON file with your custom functions and your calls to, you know, a server you could set up with, uh, parsed transcripts or ideas about how to give, give this bot context. And the thing is, like, we're so early that the world hasn't really figured out how to design agents that are effective. Other than maybe, I guess people talk about Zerobro or Zeribro, I don't know how to pronounce it, or AI-16Z or Athena or some of these other ones. But like, I could very easily see every podcast having an agent that sort of like helps listeners and community members think about topics related to the podcast that the podcasters don't actively discuss. Right. Answer, answer questions in the mindset of the podcaster. Like, that's just an example because we do podcasts. I'm sure, I'm sure this, this is like so universally applicable, this agent concept and linking it to value is a great way for community members to contribute and get rewarded appropriately. So like, I'm, I'm stupidly bullish virtuals for that reason, not financial advice. At $2 billion FDV, it seems like, seems like a no-brainer.

The only, the only point of caution that I'd make is that it's, it's very easy to be a category leader if you release a product that doesn't exist. But once you release it and it's very good, then other copycats will come on. And it's actually probably likely that you guys were not the most competent. You just had the best idea at the right time. And so, and there are network effects there, but I don't— and that's sort of the issue. There is no network effect with an AI agent creation platform.

Yeah, you're right.

There's no network effect because the AI agents all exist by themselves. So there's only a tool, like it's basically just tooling and what is the easiest platform to use. And that, I think, is dangerous. With that, with that being said, this area is so small that I would just advocate buying a basket of the stuff that's good. And then if, if stuff comes out that's better, just buy more, just keep adding. Because my bet is that this sector is going to explode. And I don't necessarily know right now what the winner is, but the sector is going to explode. AI season, it's sort of a no-brainer, right?

Yeah.

So yeah, AI season is the new alt season, uh, you know. So I'm— I really like it. I mean, right now, Virtuells, I think, is the best because it's very easy to use. Um, only issue is it's on base. In ETH.

Yeah. Getting stuff from Solana to Base is not fun, but it's possible. Crypto's UX is still terrible. You basically, you basically have to, if you want to do stuff like that, like Coinbase is the best gateway for you, the best portal. And Coinbase has a way of like being a little bit, little bit stingy with, with their, with your funds. Like you, you send stuff in and they hang onto it for a few days. They don't let you send it out. It's, it's a little annoying. It's not, it's not my favorite place to do crypto.

Yeah, no, I, I agree with you. It's not great. I mean, the one thing that is very clear to me just based on what's already happened and the products that have launched are that there have been— there's 4 years of innovation that's been held back by regulation, and people just weren't interested in creating new and better products for crypto, because they didn't know if they were going to get sued for it. Like, why work on improving the UI of crypto? Like, if you had— let's say you have a great idea, why launch a project to improve it if SEC can put you in jail?

Yeah, Chris Dixon was talking about this at Permissionless. We listened to this keynote at Permissionless where Chris Dixon was like, yeah, every single builder in our, you know, A16 in the SEC portfolio who's working on crypto is just like doing something else right now, because they don't want to, they don't want to spend the next 5 years in court.

And so what we're going to see even in the first year, which is going to be really fun, is we're going to see an explosion of new products. And I urge all of you to try them out. Like spend 5 minutes every time you see a new product that looks even vaguely interesting, click around it. Like try to use it, like $50. If it's possible, if it's not on ETH. Yeah, you know, like, use, use your time, use your time wisely. Uh, probably much better spent creating a list of 100 projects and then using them than reading 100 tweets. Yeah, that would be my, that would be my guess.

And if you want to get involved in Virtuals and use that product, which both Avi and I have definitely enjoyed, you should hop in our Niger Delta Avengers chat room and DM us if you want to help us break that barrier where we are now from like filling out the questionnaire and making it sort of good to writing a bunch of code and making this agent really friggin awesome. We need some help with that. So we're gonna source it from the community and hopefully, hopefully this bot is just gonna get better and better.

I'm actually really bullish on our bot. I wasn't in the beginning because it was a mistake, an experiment, and I thought it was just you know, a joke. And then a bunch of people have started messaging about how to improve it and how to actually make this thing useful. And I do now believe that there is a great— there's a pretty great use case for having a bot that analyzes CT and tries to find opportunities, and that tries to find opportunities in the noise. And then not only that, like a personalized— it has a Telegram bot we're going to make this thing a personalized trading assistant. You can talk to it about your trades and it'll say, hey, well, why did you— did you think about this, or did you think about that? I think that that's actually really useful.

I think it's valuable.

Yeah, it's a product. Like, if you think of a trade, it's like, okay, well, uh, you know, maybe you should check the distance from the most recent MAs. You should check the funding rates on this thing. You should check the order books on this thing. And by the way, this is what they are. Right? It's like having— it's literally in the future, it could be like having a trading assistant, trading analyst in your pocket that is actually even giving you trading advice on how to structure it.

Right?

It's like, okay, well, I really want to buy X asset here. You tell it, and then you tell it why, and it pokes holes in your thesis and then explains to you how you should think about entering it from its perspective.

Buy it versus Bitcoin, for example, because crypto could go down. But you—

and this is, and this is, this is, this is the end goal of it. At the, at the end of the day is how do we create something that both finds opportunities and helps you refine your own? And it's very, it's very possible. It's really cool because I do this to myself, and I'm sure you do too. Whenever you come up with a trade, you try to think about, well, what else should I be looking at? Well, instead of set, you know, sitting there for 10 minutes trying to think about everything, ask the, ask the bot, what else should I be thinking about? And it's the same thing as, it's the same thing as, uh, ChatGPT. When I ask ChatGPT for things, I don't necessarily take into account everything that it says. But if I say, hey, uh, you know, what's actually really fun if you have like a business idea ever, it's like put it into ChatGPT and argue with it about the business idea. And it'll give you 60% actually good feedback and 40% complete nonsense. But that's okay. It doesn't need to be perfect. It doesn't need to be right. It just needs to, you know, give you a broader picture. And I think that's really important with trading. If you have somebody or something in your life that can give you a broader picture of what you're thinking about, they don't necessarily need to tell you what to do. They can just say, oh, but you haven't thought about ABCDE You know, and you go, okay, well, the first 3 don't matter, but these last 2, that's good. I didn't think about it.

Yeah. I mean, it's not just bots that do that. Like, that's what trading floors are good for. The reason why you sit on a trading floor instead of just sitting isolated in your own little, you know, trading cave somewhere in the middle of nowhere, just trying to like express with your money ideas that are banging around in your head is because being around other people is good for trading. It helps you avoid groupthink. Like you said, a bot is like 60% interesting ideas. 40%, like kind of nonsensical garbage. Like, that's what people are like, you know, when you sit on a trading floor and you turn to the guy next to you and you say, hey, I'm thinking of buying like fuel oil cracks. Here's why. They could tell you, they could give you 3 reasons that are totally stupid why you're wrong, and 2 reasons that you're like, oh dang, maybe I should actually go and do a little bit more research before I put on this trade because I might have missed something huge. Like, groupthink is death in trading. And unfortunately for a lot of people, sitting on a really nice elite trading floor filled with smart people who follow the market just as closely as you do is kind of like a luxury that, you know, isn't available. So frankly, like, that's, that's something a bot can help you with. And ChatGPT is just awful for trading advice. So maybe we can, maybe we can build a bot, train it with Llama 3, deploy it as an agent on Twitter and Telegram and engage with our community and try to, try to build like a bit of a trading floor for crypto style experience that people can use not to replace their thinking, but to augment it. And so I, You know, I'm excited about it. I think it's fun. It's not like, it's not like a full-time job either. This is something that we can sort of side hustle and work on together and document our progress. Um, but because the use case is so crystal clear, it's, it's an, it's impossible that this isn't useful for other people as well, which is why I think like Virtuells is at, again, at 2 billion FTV is sort of a steal. So, uh, you know, I take your point about there not being a network effect for this one, but. Yeah, if people can start to figure out how to launch projects that launch agents that are better than Virtual Agents, like buy those tokens as well, buy them instead, buy them and buy them in addition. You know, this, this use case is crazy bullish, Abhi, which brings me back to your original point about your cycle top target for Bitcoin being $150,000 a token. Like that was the top end of your range. That's only 40% higher than here. Like, If there's an SBR buying like hundreds of thousands of units of Bitcoin, agents are going viral, crypto is legal. Do you really think this whole market is going to rally another 40%, top out, and then we go into another vicious nuclear bear winter for 2 years? Is that really all we have to look forward to, Avi? Or do you think all this, all this new stuff is going to propel us a hell of a lot higher than $150K? Because I do.

I mean, you know, one thing that I've been batting around in my head is that there's going to be a decoupling between Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto market because the reality is that while they use the same underlying technology, they don't really— they're not really doing the same thing other than BTC and memes, I guess. But like, memes are kind of just, just lottery tickets.

I mean, just on that real quick before you go on. Bitcoin is a meme coin. Its community members just happen to be more prominent. They're like Donald Trump and Scott Bessant instead of like you and me pumping, you know, talking about some random shitcoin. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, I think that's, I think that's fair. I mean, that's always been my take, is that Bitcoin is like— the reason that meme coins have value is because Bitcoin is basically just a meme coin, and It's just a matter of social acceptance at a certain point. But Bitcoin has really broken out to be about money, right? Like, it's genuine money. And when people buy BTC, what they think about is they think about, okay, well, this is an allocation to my portfolio, right? Of long-term portfolio. It competes with gold. It genuinely is now an asset class, uh, and I need to own it because in the future it'll become geopolitically relevant. That's kind of like— that's really right now the thesis for Bitcoin is simply it will become geopolitically relevant. There's no other— there's really like—

it already is, right? Central bank's honest, and right, that's why BlackRock just greenlit all of its RIAs to move from 0% to 2% allocation to Bitcoin. which is ridiculous.

I mean, basically, before now, it was— the thesis was a bit different. It was, people might think it will become— it's underpriced relative to the probability of it becoming geopolitically relevant. And now it's at a price where it kind of just has to— like, it's just not going to stay here unless that happens. Everything else in crypto— I mean, meme coins are just lottery tickets. Maybe they go up, maybe they go down, they die eventually, except for Doge. And then outside of that, it's products. It's things that people use on a day-to-day or week-to-week or month-to-month basis, because using blockchain technology is better for this than anything else, because you can transfer value more easily, because you can engage with people more easily, because you can get buy-in more easily. That's really the big difference, which to me means that over time, I'm not saying now, I'm not saying in a year, but maybe 5 years, maybe 10 years, the holder base— I mean, it's happening now, you see it. The holder base between people that own altcoins and own a virtuals and the holder base of Bitcoin is going to diverge pretty significantly. Right? Like, that the type of person that owns virtuals is more likely to be a Silicon Valley cutting-edge tech guy. And that was true of Bitcoin up until the last year, up until the launch of the ETF. And now the— it's, it's almost completely different holder base. These are not the same. These are not the same people anymore. And that's going to decouple it from the rest of the crypto market, in my, my two cents.

Okay, so you think that— I totally buy that Bitcoin is kind of a different asset class from the rest of the blockchain world. Rest of the tokens. So is your take that at least for as far as this cycle is concerned, Bitcoin's kind of going to top out and then the other stuff just keeps sending? Or am I misunderstanding?

I think it's twofold. One is that Bitcoin can top out and alts can send very easily. The other point is that Bitcoin can run as it has been running and alts can do poorly, as has been happening. But the point really that I'm trying to make is that you can have an extended period now of outperformance from crypto projects if Bitcoin's going sideways or down. And that's actually like fine, that, that's probably gonna happen at some point, right? It's like, it's like because the, the cross-asset you know, the, the cross-asset ownership is much lower. Now you can see a world where Virtuoz 10x's and Bitcoin goes down 10%.

Yeah, yeah, I totally— and that kind of, that, that definitely, that type of price action does play out on very short time frames, um, but it could absolutely play out on slightly longer time frames. I mean, I have a slightly different take. I think that, you know, you just said that the market— the whole thesis for Bitcoin used to be that the market had underpriced the probability that it would become geopolitically relevant. Now I think the market is— Bitcoin is obviously geopolitically relevant already in a big way, but I think that the market is drastically underpricing how geopolitically relevant it already is and massively, massively underpricing how geopolitically relevant it will become over the course of the next 4 years. And so I— my, my Bitcoin price target is a multiple of yours for, for this. Let's call it cycle, and cycle being however long this bull market lasts before we enter like a real proper crazy bear market where, where expectations shift from, you know, good things for Bitcoin to, you know, crypto is dead, crypto is a scam again. So until that crypto is dead, crypto is a scam moment, I think we're going, you know, at least like somewhere between $250 and $750 a token. And the reason why I think so It isn't just the SBR. It's the idea, you know, we talked about it on previous podcasts. It's the idea that there will never be only one SBR. If like, if it's either zero or dozens of them, right? So I just don't think the market has caught on to that. And that's what makes me so ridiculously bullish. And I don't see Bitcoin as bifurcating from the rest of the blockchain space. I see it as kind of a bellwether benchmark. So I think if that's going on, you know, it's hard for me not to see some alts performing, though I don't expect alts as a space to perform. I expect there to be wild, wild dispersion within the altcoin space. And I think that certain sectors will just go absolutely ballistic, like AI, and other sectors will just, just sort of remain pretty flaccid. Or uninteresting. Um, and that's the job of, you know, the, the individual out there to try and pick what's going to go up and what's, what's not and try to, you know, select cycle bags appropriately. The other thing about Bitcoin that has me pretty excited at the moment is the idea that like institutional inflows, like, okay, we're excited that Bitcoin's becoming geopolitically relevant. We're excited that there's going to be a bunch of SBRs probably. We're excited that, um, it's now becoming part of, uh, you know, just a retail person's portfolio. You know, okay, it's okay to hold 2% of your portfolio in Bitcoin. Like, that would have been unthinkable even a couple years ago. That's very exciting. And we should also bring up that $60 trillion worth of assets are getting handed down from boomers who are all no-coiners to millennials and Gen Z who are all crypto-obsessed gambling maniacs. Because we live in a generation where you, you need to gamble a little bit in order to have a better life. Um, whereas our parents didn't, our boomer parents didn't. So all of that's going to go into basically iBit, right? So that's going to be a huge thing. But all of that's kind of like, aside from the fact that it's now also okay, and this is what's— what I've been getting to this whole time, it's also okay for institutions to own Bitcoin. And that's new. And, you know, the institutions were supposed to be, you know, the institutions were coming was like the mantra of the 2021 cycle. They didn't come because Biden and Gary didn't let them. Right now they can come. Now they can get involved. Now they can. Now, you know, Texas Teachers Retirement System can hold, hold 2% of their portfolio in Bitcoin. Yale can hold 2% of their portfolio in Bitcoin. And honestly, the other thing is like, why is basis Why is hyper liquid basis 20% for Bitcoin? Why is CME basis 10%? It's because institutions can't stomach like obvious crypto arbitrage trades because the word crypto is in it and they don't want to get stuck in court for 5 years like my, you know, some of the people I used to work with. So basically, like, now that that's all off the table, the wave of institutional capital that could flow into this, into this sector as a whole is like there is no way for the current participant base to front run that. And that's why— that's part of what makes me so damn bullish. But like, ultimately, and just to finish this rant out, where this all matters for certain altcoins, not all altcoins, but certain altcoins, is the idea that it is really impossible outside of crypto to transfer an asset to somebody else easily when that asset ticks around all day, right? Like, you can kind of wire money same day, like payments in most countries are pretty easy. There's Zelle, right? What you're doing is you're sending a stablecoin, right? There's no way to like— there's no way for me to like send you some SPY. So like some of the S&P 500 ETF without having to wait like 2 weeks for some system to transfer it from my brokerage account to yours. Like, that's impossible. Crypto is the only, only platform, the only set of rails that allows you to transfer like dynamically liquid, you know, volatile assets instantaneously. And that is going to matter more and more as people denominate their wealth in dynamically traded liquid volatile assets instead of effectively stables, which is what our parents' generation did.

So in summary, you're so bullish you can't see.

In summary, I am still so bullish I can't see straight. And it's not just crypto. I'm bullish. I'm bullish stocks too. I'm not bullish commodities because I'm bullish human innovation, which means that you're kind of bearish commodities in general because they always find ways to dig it out for less money. But like, ultimately, like, I, I think you're supposed to hold risk assets until the redistributionists take charge, the AOCs and the Bernies of the world. And we've just seen that like this massive political wave effectively take all the global macroeconomy in the exact opposite direction. So barring World War III or something super bearish, like China getting into like some hot war with a bunch of Asian countries or the United States, like barring one of those like left-field events where who knows if the world will end, you know, you're not really thinking about your crypto. Barring that, I just like the literal opposite of what would make me bearish just happened. I don't know what I'm missing. I feel like I've lost my mind because I'm so much more bullish than everybody else. And the market's on the highs, like you said. So maybe I'm, maybe I'm just crazy. But I really believe this. Like, I feel super convicted right now. I'm not, I'm not bullish gold. I think that, I think Bitcoin is a catch-up trade. And when Bitcoin gets to the same market cap as gold, it's probably, or when MVRVZ hits a cycle peak, I guess, probably time to just like take a breather. We're not even friggin close to that. We're not even— we're like a fraction of those levels.

You know, I think everything you said is accurate. And what I'd say is that the economy has been held back by poor decision making for a very long time. And this is just so clearly you know, it's a repudiation of all of that. It's a repudiation of everything since effectively the Obama years. Right. And this, this allows us to get into a just crazy mega bull run scenario. And I don't necessarily think it ends when the redistributionists come in. I think it ends when, you know, I'm not a political dogmatist. I view both sides and I try to look at the pros and cons. And when you look at the liberals and their view on the world, it's, you know, I think the pros and cons are reasonably obvious to people that sit on our side of the political spectrum. They're, as you said, they, you know, redistribution is very high up on their menu of things that they want to do. And that by definition caps the top. And so the, you know, we're just not going to grow as wealthy as we would otherwise because we have to spend a disproportionate amount of our time, income, and energy taking care of the bottom quintile. And that is their preferred status quo because in their minds it doesn't matter how rich people are on an absolute basis, it matters how rich people are on a relative basis. They'd rather all be living in mud huts if everyone lived in a mud hut than, you know, have some people be extremely wealthy but everyone has a fridge. You know, the— on the conservative side, in the, in the world, in the world of Trump, in the world of Elon, they're, you know, giga free market. They want people to be able to innovate. They want people to be able to do, uh, you know, what they want when they want in order to advance the human, the human system. And now what that does lead to is it leads to precursors to the great financial crisis. It leads to people, you know, with very little regulation, you do get boom-bust cycles. That happens because what ends up going on is that you have people handing out mortgages to people that don't deserve it because they're making a ton of money because the market's going up. And so my best guess is that it ends when things get like really crazy, but things aren't really crazy yet. So, you know, my view on this is that We, we have some time, but, you know, I'd probably sell, uh, when things seem to be too— like, when things really seem too good to be true, uh, time to take some chips off the table.

Yeah, we're not quite there yet. I mean, Trump's not even in office yet. So far, it's all promises.

We're like, we're so, we're so far away from the scenario that I described. It was just a point to make because I don't think it necessarily needs the other team coming into power to blow up.

Yeah, I mean, who knows, maybe, maybe all this, uh, like Trump campaigning on crypto is just a bunch of hot air and he'll break our hearts. But like, to your point, um, it wouldn't really be— like, the bar is already— is so low right now that the risk-reward is just skewed to the upside because the previous administration was so ridiculously anti-crypto that even marginal improvements like not suing everyone who's in the United States who talks to talks about crypto, uh, would probably send the thing higher by another 20%. So yeah, I feel like your downside's capped. I think, um, I, you know, I think it's like you're one of the masters of trading the range, and that's very, very rare in crypto. Like, you meet momentum people in crypto. This is a momentum asset. It's okay to buy rallies. It's okay to invest in things that have already 100x'd because they could 100x again, right? And so I think that is the value and one of the many little pearls of value in these conversations for me. I'm a momentum trader. That's how I've always made my money. And I appreciate speaking to you about being sober about some of these momentum trades, because even though they're lucrative and even though you make your money on them, you have to, you have to take profit at some point. Otherwise, all that money just vanishes into thin air. You're muted.

You absolutely have to. And I think the key here is that you have to, because if you don't in a market like this you actually end up making really poor— most people end up making really poor decisions. And what do I mean by that? If you don't take profits when things are up, you tend to get forced into selling when things are down, because most of you don't have the discipline to just hold things that you think will— are up and to the right for a long period of time, right? I mean, if you, if you own anything other than BTC, there's going to probably be a period of time where that thing's down 70%, and how are you going to feel? Yeah, when it, when it's down 70%. So the, the conclusion is if you decide to buy anything other than BTC, you got to learn how to take profits. If you just buy BTC, honestly, and you're willing to stomach a 50% drawdown and you're not gonna give up on BTC if that happens, sure, don't trade, hold it. If you buy anything else, better, you better be willing to trade.

Yeah, you got, you got to trade. Um, you, you asked me before the podcast, you were like, hey, how do you think about Like, things don't stabilize on all-time highs, right? We've talked about this before. You're like, how high could it go? And what do you look at? Um, let's just talk about Bitcoin again for a second. I think the way that I would look at it in oil, uh, is you have to look at supply and demand. You have to— like, somebody has to take your risk off your hands in order for the trade to keep moving higher. So in oil, you know, if there's a big demand boom, like in the 2000s when China was just buying more and more oil to grow their economy, they were, they were just always there. They were the greater fool, they were buying for everybody. Or, you know, in certain circumstances, you look at supply, like, you know, when a bunch of producing countries just suddenly can't produce anymore because they're having civil wars or disruption or problems or strife or, you know, mismanagement, then those are the greater fools who effectively bail you out of your position. In Bitcoin, you know, at $108,000 a token, who's going to buy from us, right? And the supply side doesn't matter as much in crypto because for Bitcoin, halvings keep happening. Like, there's only 21 million tokens that'll ever get minted. Like, the supply side's not even really something that traders need to actively think about. Because it's, it's just so transparent and planned. All you really have to care about is the demand side. And I think that we can continue melting upwards in price discovery, provided that the following groups of people act as the greater fools to buy our Bitcoin: sovereigns, institutions, uh, retail, but not like you and me retail, like trad retail, like, uh, millennials inheriting a million-dollar home from their boomer parents, selling it and putting $100 grand into iBit, right? Um, you know, SBRs, central banks, um, trading desks, tradfi, like sort of clearinghouses deciding to migrate to crypto. Like, there, as there you can— there are like dozens of different categories of institutions and people that you could you could count out and enumerate who will, who haven't stepped in yet, but almost definitely will. So I think that, I think that as long as those groups are lurking, uh, there isn't too much of a cause for concern other than, you know, black swan events or political, uh, sea changes.

I think that's fair. And as we were talking about at the beginning of the discussion, it's worthwhile trying to map out how you think these people are going to behave. So that you can, you can act around it. I guess, uh, you know, I get, I guess we'll see. Maybe, you know, maybe our agent can tell us.

Yeah, great, great way to wrap up the podcast there.

Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go play with this thing now. It's so fun. It's so fun to code it, or like not code it but tell it what to do.

Yeah, it's already getting better. It's going to keep getting better. We're going to keep working on it. If you're in, if you like our podcast and you want to help make this agent work and try this experiment with us, reach out. We got a couple chat rooms open. Can't wait to work with you guys. And as always, none of this is financial advice. Please don't do any of the trades that we do or talk about doing. It's a terrible idea.

We're just talking to each other. We have really no idea what we're doing.

Yep. All right, Avi.

See you guys.

Great speaking. See you. See everybody.