Why It's Time To Be Bullish

I guess if some alts have bottomed out or they're starting to rally even now despite this like dire fucking sentiment, then we could see some pretty explosive price action. There's no way the cycle is, is going to be over if we're base— if Bitcoin's on the highs or basically close to the highs, all-time highs, and sentiment is this bad. No, cycles end when you run out of buyers, not when you have a bunch of like depressed people who are like on the sidelines. No way, this thing's going to keep running.

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Welcome back to another 1000x Podcast. We are coming live to you. I guess not live because you're listening to this, but Joan and I are live podcasting together, talking about the markets. What's kind of nuts, Jonah, is that until today— so Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday— if you turn on the candlesticks on Bitcoin, just pull up the chart. We literally closed within a $100 band every day. They're wicks for sure, but it's kind of insane. I mean, like the, the close was $96,564 on Thursday, $96,537 on Friday, $96,476 on Saturday and $96,475 on Sunday. I mean, Bitcoin literally did not move at all. Like, it, it did get up on Friday, it got up to $100K and then came back down. But like, if you're just checking in once a day, this thing didn't move. Uh, what is bullish, I'll say, is that we're holding, we're holding the 200-day moving average, so that's nice. Um, sorry, the 100-day moving average. So that, that's good. Uh, and there do seem to be a lot of bids stacked lower, but there are also a bunch of asks stacked higher. I mean, we're kind of in no man's land right now. So what are you thinking, Jonah?

Yeah, it's, it's interesting you bring this up. 8— if you just set your, your candlesticks to daily, um, you've got 8 candles that cross through the current price. 8 consecutive candles, which is pretty nuts. And, uh, if you go back to the first time we breached this price level, which would have been November 21st of last year, there are dozens more candles. Like, we've been locked in this range for, you know, almost 3 months. And what's weird is, like, I think you tweeted this, Avi. You said that rarely do markets, like, just sort of plateau and consolidate into an equilibrium range on the highs. That's what's happening. And I guess what Crypto Twitter and everybody who cares about trading this asset is trying to figure out, trying to ascertain, is like, should we despair? Is this it, or are we going much, much higher? And the question is really consequential because I think if we trade back down, uh, like we've traded down in previous bull markets, which would be like a 30, 40, 50% pullback or worse, um, you know, you're going to see a lot of people blow up. You're going to see a lot of people lose everything. Even this move from $108 down to $92 took out billions of dollars worth of value. People got liquidated. So to me, like, these are big questions that we need to answer. I err in the bull camp, but I think we should spend some time debating the sentiment in the market and whether it's bullish or bearish. You know, right back at you, Avi. What, like, do you think that the current, do you think that the current sort of like apathy and, you know, lack of enthusiasm, despair, anger at the, the overall meta in crypto being kind of like too casino-y and less, you know, less blue sky than, than the builders had originally hoped, like, is, is this gonna take us down? Are we, are we fucked here? Are tariffs gonna nuke the market or is this just like unnecessary despair right before the next leg higher? What do you think?

All very good questions, and I want to start by framing it a bit differently because I think for the longest time, the way that we've talked about the market is we talk about it in terms of up or down. And while we've said in the past that there's going to be a lot of dispersion, and there has been, like, our framing kind of remains the same. Like, are we going up or are we going down? And I think we have to start talking about asset by asset, whether it's going up or going down, because the world— I mean, we're just in such— we're in a very different place today where Bitcoin can be basically at the highs and everything else is trash except for a few assets here and there. I mean, just looking at the market It's like, okay, well, Bitcoin is off, you know, from, from its highs, 10-ish percent. Your average alt is down 50 to 90% from the highs. I mean, that, that's also a huge range by itself. And then you have random assets like LTC, which are also only down 10% from the highs, you know, 15% from the highs. And that's because there are catalysts for LTC like the, like the ETF. You have things like Optimism and Arbitrum which are at their 2023 lows right now. You have something like Worldcoin which is basically making new lows, and then you have something like AAVE which has performed extremely well since the '23 lows, up you know, 4 or 5x, 5x from the, from the, from the '23 lows, but off, you know, 40% from the highs. And so the world is just a very different place today where you can't just talk about up or down. You have to talk about, you know, we should specify exactly what assets we're talking about when we say, are we fucked? Because when you say, you know, are we fucked, is sentiment bad? It's like for Bitcoin holders, I don't think sentiment's bad at all. For people that hold ETH, I think they're ready to jump out the fucking window.

Does anyone still hold ETH? It's not trading like people are hanging on to their ETH. I'm even getting— no, I'm getting calls from like old friends that I onboarded to crypto back in like 2019, like, hey man, are you still long ETH? What should I do with this crap? You know, it's crazy.

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people are chipping out. I think that there's still a lot of that holdover. From uninformed market participants that bought Bitcoin and Ethereum a long time ago, and they've seen their crypto portfolio do well, and maybe they're not checking that close, and they see ETH— maybe, maybe they've made a little bit on ETH, but they don't realize like how poorly it's done in general. Uh, I think a lot of those people are slowly getting out. I mean, you had that realization. I think I bothered you so much about getting rid of all of your ETH, that you finally did it a while ago. So I think you were one of the early guys to get out of that ratio. I think you— I mean, when you got out, like, since, since the time I was— I've been badgering you to get out, which is like early last year, it's down 50% against BTC.

Yeah, you, you saved me a lot of money. And it wasn't like we had some sort of backroom conversation. I got out and then we podcasted about it. It was like you were convinced— you convinced me slowly over the course of like 6 podcasts last year that I should do it. And then I just pitched out of it eventually. You literally sold me in a public forum. So hopefully, everybody listening listened to you too. That was crazy. So thank you for that. So let me just reframe the question then, given your suggestion. Let's talk about Bitcoin and non-Bitcoin. Let's start with Bitcoin. Sentiment is bad for Bitcoin too right now. Like, people are not bull posting Bitcoin. People are like, uh, cycle's over, like, the highs are in. You have some prominent accounts with like hundreds of thousands of followers saying like, if you buy Bitcoin here, you're going to regret it in 2 or 3 months. Um, like, what do you think? Then I'll tell you what I think.

I tweeted, like you said, I tweeted that it's very rare for an asset to go— for Bitcoin specifically, after a parabolic rise to go sideways for a long period of time and have that be bullish. I don't, I don't think I agree with what I said anymore. I should probably issue a retraction, uh, to that, to that statement, because Bitcoin has actually held up better than, than I expected on the sell-offs. I mean, there, there seems to be at least a substantial amount of demand for BTC, even at this $95K level, which has been tested. Like, I thought that the next time we hit those levels, we would, we would go lower, and we haven't. I mean, it's not like we're up a ton since then, up like 2.5%, but, you know, Bitcoin's been performing a lot better than I thought. One of the biggest arguments that people make for Bitcoin having topped here is that there's no more good news coming out for Bitcoin and that Michael Saylor is running out of ammo to buy, to buy BTC. And that's the only thing that's been keeping us up. One interesting thing happened this morning, which was that Michael Saylor announced that he was buying, that he bought Bitcoin at around these price levels and that he was allocating to the market. And Bitcoin didn't sell off a ton. Normally what happens is that after Saylor comes out with an announcement like that, Bitcoin will sell off because people will go, okay, well, I guess that's what was keeping us up, so we should get out of Bitcoin. That's clearly— that, that didn't happen. And so I think Saylor's impact on the market might be lessening. Over time as Bitcoin becomes bigger. I mean, we're still getting good ETF inflows for BTC. Yes, there's no immediate good news left for Bitcoin, but I don't know if I should discount the fact that the president of the United States has voiced support so often for this thing that it's changed investor behavior with respect to Bitcoin, where people are now allocating to it in the same way that they're allocating to the stock market, right? Which is that every month they get a paycheck and some of that goes into their 401, and then they buy the S&P and they buy the Nasdaq. I mean, some of that's now clearly happening with Bitcoin. And so it's possible that, you know, when I said it's rare, rare, it basically never happens for something to go sideways for a long time at the highs and then continue higher. It's possible that this time genuinely is different.

Yeah, I think so too.

I mean, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm of the mindset that now any buy below $95K on BTC is probably a very good buy.

I think so too.

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I don't buy the whole 'there's no good news coming' thing. So before we move on to non-Bitcoin, let me just give you my response and my two cents on, on Bitcoin and touch on what you just said. So Let's start with the Michael Saylor is holding up the market argument. Michael Saylor is not holding up the market. What's holding up the market is those ETF flows that you alluded to at the end, and those are only going to accelerate over time. Yeah, there may not be a headline that says like, investors now put 2% of their portfolio in Bitcoin, used to be zero, right? That's not going to like hit the front page of the New York Times. And so the catalyst hunters out there will probably be disappointed, but this is just steady inflows. So Well, first let's talk about Michael Saylor, and then let's talk about the ETFs. Every market that I've ever been in, there's always been a whale that other participants refer to and assign, uh, assign responsibility to when there's a big move, a big inflow, a big outflow. And when you're on the outside, when you're not working at that, you know, inside of that whale, you don't know, you don't know who the whale is, right? Like, so right now everybody thinks the whale is Michael Saylor. Everybody's like, all right, it's Saylor buying. Oh my God, he's gonna stop, the market's gonna nuke. I guarantee you that Michael Saylor is not the one holding up Bitcoin. And I bet Michael Saylor is just sitting there watching all these people speculating about what he's doing and assigning every big move to him and probably kind of like chuckling a little bit. And the reason why I think that is because I have worked inside of two giant whales. When I was at Goldman, we were the whales of the oil market. Every time any massive trade went through the floor, the entire market was like, oh, it's Goldman buying. Oh, Goldman's selling this option. And 9 times out of 10, we weren't doing it. And we'd be like laughing, like, oh wow, the whole market thinks it's us. Because yeah, we were fucking huge, but we weren't, we weren't even remotely as big as the market thought we were. Then when I worked at VTOL, it was the same thing. There'd be like some massive, you know, physical trade that would take place between two sovereigns. And there would be this, you know, shadowy trading house intermediary, or there would be like a huge, like a deal that would go through into, you know, gasoline or fuel that'd be like way, way, way too big for anybody else. People would assume it was us. I'd go over and ask the guys, like, nope, not us. You know, sometimes, you know, you do, you do a couple big deals and people think you're doing every big deal. Kind of like how people think, uh, you know, everything that GCR says is right, and he's probably, you know, laughing to himself about all the mistakes he's made too. So these larger-than-life characters in the market are, are, in my experience, much less relevant than you'd think. And so I do, I, I reject the fact that Bitcoin is being hoisted on Michael Saylor's shoulders the way that Atlas lifted the globe in, you know, Greek mythology. It's just not fucking happening. No way. Second, what is holding up the market is these ETF flows. So if you go to the Far Side Investors dashboard, farside.co.uk/btc, and you look at the actual ETF flows, you have a pretty decent breakdown of all the different issuers and where the flows are coming from. What strikes me is the— like, when I look at that page every day, what strikes me as the most interesting is that iBit BlackRock ETF, which is definitely where like, you know, your random 26-year-old guy is putting 2% of his monthly paycheck, right? Or 10% or whatever. Like the, the, you know, the non-Degen types who are just like attempting to keep a little bit of a toe in the Bitcoin pond, right? That's up only though. Like that's just inflows every single frigging day. Where the outflows have come from are— it's Fidelity, it's FBTC. So to me, that ETF is kind of a niche ETF. It's the second biggest. And it's possible that somebody who bought a lot of Fidelity, like one big institutional investor who bought a lot of that ETF when it was first issued last year, is taking some profits now. but like that, those are lumpy outflows. There'll be like multiple days of zero and then like $177 million gets sold. Another few days of zero, $287 million gets sold. So like, to me, the picture being painted here is we're going to see steady inflows for a long time from iBit. Uh, and the FBTC outflows can't continue. It's, it's just, it's like one or two guys that are doing that in FBTC and every other ETF is kind of like a, a nothing burger. So it's not about the news or the catalyst, it's about the flows. You have less miners selling because of the halving, daily iBit inflows, which seem to be accelerating. And that's enough. Like, I don't think that this cycle will be the same as previous cycles where you have like a despair on the lows, euphoria on the highs. It all fits neatly into a 4-year window of time, and then you kind of revert back to the middle of that, and the upward megatrend is intact. I think this cycle is going to be different. I think we're just sort of like 2 years into a 10-year upward, upward grind for Bitcoin. And, you know, what would scare me is if I started seeing daily outflows from iBit instead of daily inflows.

Yeah, I think that you're spot on, and that dynamic is really important, especially on weeks like today where everyone's a bit nervous, you know, shifting the discussion to the alt market. Everybody's very nervous about alts. And the reason is because they've underperformed, I mean, tremendously since Bitcoin sold off from, from the highs. Now, in this market environment over the last 2 weeks, what we've seen is we've seen that headlines are driving a ridiculous amount of price action. I mean, basically every 2 days, if not every day, something comes out about something Trump is doing. That is causing the markets to gyrate. And I think that's led to people assuming that we need some sort of positive headline in order for the market to start going up again, because they're so used to the market gyrating on these, on these headlines. Now, what I— the point I'm trying to make is that it's exactly as you said. Sometimes it's just about flows and it's not necessarily about news, despite the fact that there's no good news quote unquote, left for the market. If everyone is done selling, because everyone has been so thoroughly panicked out by these headlines, then that means that the market can start to recover and go up again. And that we've already exhausted all the selling. I mean, think about this. Okay, we had a massive alt nuke, in which a lot of people got liquidated, a lot of people got washed out. And then we had after that, in the next 4 days, a retracement where I think from the high to the low, you know, you know, like something like AAVE went down another— like it bounced and then it came down 20%. So a lot of sellers on that. And I think at this point, you know, Bitcoin goes sideways for a long time. Tariff news comes out. We've got CPI coming up. On Wednesday, it seems to me that for the good assets that are fully unlocked, that includes Bitcoin in this, that the sellers are kind of done. Like, they're— they might, they might be out, at least for now. And I think that assets tend to bottom not when buyers show up. Assets tend to bottom when selling stops. Right. And it's actually the opposite for the upside. Assets tend to bottom when— or assets tend to top when there's just nobody left to buy. Right. And so the question is like, who is left to sell?

Right.

Like, who is, who is selling at these, at these levels? And my answer for some assets, like, okay, let's, let's look at Worldcoin and Aptos. The answer is the team. They're going to be selling a lot. And they're constant sellers, and they seem to never run out of tokens. And so maybe you don't want to go buy those things. But for things that are fully unlocked, and that have actually potential catalysts coming up— so AAVE has the fee switch. And then I have my little favorite basket of LTC, SOL, XRP, and DOGE. So I call it my ETF, like my high probability ETF basket. It's like, okay, well, I don't know if there are that many sellers left for these things given that we have potential ETF coming up. So I mean, those are at least my high conviction trades right now. Um, and the way that I'm thinking about it is who's left to sell at these prices after, after they've come down a ton.

That's a great way to think about it. So I mean, I would have phrased it differently. I would have said like, oh, the news is priced, right? Like more bad news isn't setting the market lower, but I think your phrasing is more elegant, which is like Have the sellers been exhausted for, you know, a given token? Yes or no? And for many tokens, I do think the selling— the sellers have been exhausted. They've either been liquidated or they just don't want to sell at current prices because the project is too promising. Um, for others, like, here's another actionable, uh, item. If, if, if you're looking at a meme coin or something that's kind of traded more on-chain, uh, just go to DEX Screener. For your, you know, pull up your token in DEX Screener and look at the liquidity number. Also look at the FDV number. So if there's like, if the FDV is like $100 million and there's like $5,000 worth of liquidity in there, you know that the next person who sells that thing is going to knock the price down a lot, right? Because basically there's not a lot of dough left in the pool to bid the asset. You know, maybe, maybe what I should do, I've been a bit lazy about this. Maybe I should like, just try to figure out a way to automate a liquidity to FDV ratio and then pull up a screener of like all the different crypto assets on DexScreener and just see like, where is that ratio the lowest, right? Where is there like, where's the least amount of liquidity relative to market cap? And then, you know, those are probably good shorts, right? Those, those are tokens that could probably get absolutely annihilated in the next down move, or even if nothing happens and people just slowly start to, to throw in the towel on these tokens. Like, um, I continue to like being short WIF and SUI. Um, you know, you talked me into a small SUI short, I talked myself into a large WIF short. I think these tokens just continue to go down, um, because even though you can't see it quite as cleanly because these tokens are traded mostly off-chain now, you kind of feel that there's a lot of selling left relative to the buying power out there, the liquidity out there. So I think there's a real opportunity to remain short vaporware projects or projects that are just valued. I'm not calling SUI a vaporware project. I think WIF is a vaporware project. It's probably got some crime fi rumblings attached to it. SUI, still too expensive for the number of users it has. And I think the theme of this, this conversation is dispersion, Avi. Like, there, there are good projects at good prices, you should be long those. There are good projects like SUI at overvalued prices, you should be short those. Bitcoin is a good project at a good price. SUI is a good project at a bad price. WIF is a bad project at a bad price. Like you have your spectrum there. Um, like, and don't invest in bad projects regardless of the price. So, uh, that's maybe, maybe you just sort of like put it into quadrants like that. Good project, bad project, good price, bad price. And the heuristic you attach for price is like liquidity to FDV ratio on DexScreener.

Yeah, that, that's great. That's great for on-chain, for on-chain alts. I mean, just like going. Going down the list of tokens, it's like nothing is, you know, nothing outside of AI and then the ETF flow tokens are particularly compelling to me. I think that on-chain requires— in order for on-chain to come back, I think we require a little bit more euphoria in the market. I think that people need to feel safe, safe to gamble again. I mean, that being said, a lot of what's going on right now are people chasing tweets. So like this Dave Portnoy thing going to $200 mil, people are still aping when they're— when there's a reason to ape or when they can at least construct in their mind a reason to ape. But outside of that, I think a lot of people are on the sidelines because they're, they're very scared. I mean, just surveying, you know, my analysts and a lot of people that I talk to, nobody really wants to touch altcoins right now, which could actually be a pretty good opportunity for the ones that, you know, have catalysts coming up and that are still good and don't have foundation sales. Uh, yeah, I mean, I think now is a good time, especially, you know, as the market's going sideways to just look through what is upcoming and then make bets on, make bets on what's, what's upcoming. Other than that, I mean, really CPI is the big, is the big thing here. Because for alts to do well in a sustained manner, like across the board, like if you're looking for, hey, when do we get a big mean reversion across the entire alt space, what people like to call alt season, I think you need— and you need the Fed to be comfortable cutting because you need easy money to come back into the system. And so I think for alt, CPI is really important. I genuinely think for Bitcoin, it just doesn't matter. Like, this thing is probably going to end up higher in 2 months regardless of what happens in the market, just because of the change— the change in dynamics. And again, that doesn't mean that we're going to get alts going up. And I think a lot of people have degrossed. A lot of the hedge funds that I talk to, a lot of the traders that I talk to, they're just super, super, super, super heavy in cash and sort of waiting for that moment that gives them the go-ahead to buy, which makes me think the upside is a lot more asymmetric than the downside at this, at this level.

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I agree with those hedge funds though, Avi. Like, you're— I, I don't— I cannot— I've never had success trying to catch a falling knife in crypto. I've tried too many times and I've always failed. Um, usually what about a sideways knife?

You know, easier to pick up a sideways knife. You know, the knife's already fallen, it's just nobody's picked it back up.

Yeah, it's just lying on the table.

It's just, yeah, it's just there.

It's just a knife. It's just a nice-looking knife just sitting there. Yeah, okay. I guess my point was like, some altcoins are just steadily spiraling to zero, again, like WIF or, you know, WIF-like charts. And I've never, I've tried to buy many of those charts in my career as a crypto trader. And a retail trader, and I've just always failed. It doesn't fucking work. I think that, yeah, sure, if you're like all over the catalysts, maybe you can, you can get ahead of one of them and buy something that's going down right before it reverses and you pick the bottom. But the odds of doing that are so bad that, or so thin, that maybe it's better to like wait till it plateaus or, you know, bottoms out, and then you buy. And usually what I do is I don't even buy it when it's bottomed out. I try to buy it once it's starting to rally. Like, I try to have an itchier trigger finger than the hedge funds you refer to and get in ahead of them. So like I try to catch the U-shaped recovery while it still looks like a J, you know, like before you get this, the big up move. And so I'm not, I hadn't really thought about buying the ones that have just bottomed out and are going sideways, but I take your point on that. I mean, just to talk about alts for a second and then we'll get onto macro and CPI, you know, There's this guy on Twitter, Root2Fi, who wrote, one thing I hate about this cycle is that no one believes in anything. I feel that even most founders don't believe in their own tokens. Last cycle you had founders in the forefront incentivizing the community to buy, hold, and believe with a positive feedback loop. Basically, I, you know, then this tweet goes on. Basically, I kind of, this is the meta right now. Everybody's just super disenchanted because casino-style meme coin gambling on farts is not what you know, smart contracts were supposed to be about. And so there's, there's like really bad sentiment and pain and anguish out there about the alt market. Like, I don't think that's bearish. I think that what that means is that people are going to get complacent that crypto is just a shitcoin casino, and they're going to sleep on the next big, the next big up move in alts, which I think won't necessarily— like, I think, I think low inflation sets the stage for it. But I think the stablecoin bill that David Sachs said will get you know, pass in the next 3 months, I think that will set the stage for the legitimization of, like, let's call it smart contract crypto, non-casino crypto, uh, in a way that we haven't seen before. I think it'll just, like, lay down foundations that can get where all sorts of exciting projects can build again on top of those foundations. And so I think that, yeah, I guess if some alts have bottomed out or they're starting to rally even now despite this, like, dire fucking sentiment, then we could see some pretty explosive price action. And then just moving on to the macro backdrop, I've been following some, you know, just the macro people that I talk to as well as some, you know, decently interesting accounts on Twitter that tend to get it right. There is some talk that Bessant is trying to convince Donald Trump to change his metric of success from what it currently is, which is higher stock market to lower 10-year yield, basically saying like, I want the US to be able to borrow more cheaply, higher stock market. Like it's soared under Biden, but Americans still suffered. You know, Trump's a populist president. He's trying to appeal to Main Street, not Wall Street. So monitor that one closely. Like if Trump shifts the goalposts, from higher stock market to higher bond prices, lower bond yields, get out of everything. Like, get out of the way of that rate train. You could get ironed out by that. I think I'd put the odds of that at like 15%. Um, to me, that's the most important thing to look at. And like you said, Bitcoin has kind of graduated. It'll probably perform pretty well regardless of what happens. But for altcoins, oh man, if the stock market is no longer his, his focus. He used to tweet, record high stock market, the Trump bump, you know, Trump. If he stops caring about that and starts just like focusing on our borrowing costs and, you know, balancing the budget, like, oh my God, it's going to be carnage out there for stocks and even worse for crypto.

Do you still buy the argument that it— net, like, Trump is good for risk?

Yeah, I can sum it up in a very short non-ranty way if you want, and then pass the ball back to you. Um, yeah, go ahead. Trump is good for risk for several reasons. Reason number one is deregulation. That is bullish, you know, equities and crypto. Regulation stifled equities and crypto, especially crypto, under Biden. Um, uh, cutting out wasteful government spending if the DOJ is actually successful at that, that's going to be massively bullish for productivity, right? So that's also bullish for risk assets. Number 3, I don't think any of the things that Trump is jawboning about, which are bearish risk, like, you know, huge, like detrimental trade wars, like pain-causing, you know, like basically the type of trade war that nukes economies. I think it's posturing. I, I think that he's just like coming in with a hard negotiating stance so that he can leverage it for something that's better for American companies, which is bullish American companies, and crypto is highly correlated with American technology companies. Um, the fourth reason is, uh, his administration has taken a very, uh, pro-business stance on crypto and AI. Which, like, if you're trying to promote AI in America, uh, as— and you're not trying to, like, overregulate it, you're trying to just, like, promote a Cambrian explosion of that technology in the United States. That's very bullish for American technology companies, which are highly correlated with crypto. Um, you know, don't need to get into the reasons why, but, like, It's kind of obvious that if you just shower Nvidia, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, all these companies with a golden path to deploying AI at scale globally and no roadblocks, that's bullish those companies. And those companies are like 60% correlated with Bitcoin, their stock prices are. So all of that I think is like, I think all of that is, is pretty damn bullish. Yeah, I don't— I don't know. Am I missing something?

No, I think the only argument against it is that he's so unpredictable and will continue to be unpredictable and the markets hate uncertainty and we don't like— we just don't know what he's going to come up with. I mean, I'll give you an example of a scenario that could end up really bad. Uh, Doge continues to fire people left and right and does in fact shrink the size of the government substantially, and those people don't enter back into the workforce, and suddenly you're looking at rising, rising unemployment. Now you can make an argument, okay, well then the Fed has to start cutting, uh, but I, I don't think that the initial reaction to that would be Okay, wow, this is great. Economy's doing well, you know, up, up we go. I think market, market would get a little bit nervous about that, uh, nervous about that fact.

Yeah, I don't know how you feel about that. Like, if, if the government just like mass fires millions of people and they're all out on their asses and they can't get jobs, um, labor force participation tanks, how is that bearish asset prices? Like the assets that— I don't know, like to me, I guess they're just spending less money.

Like, yeah, the idea would be that these people—

one, it would have to spark a recession. It would have to— it would have to catalyze a recession. Like it would basically have to take a chunk that, that, the reduction in consumer spending would have to take such a chunk out of the economy, um, as these people like retrace into their, you know, into a lower, uh, cost of life that the, the economy goes into like a little mini recession. And then I think rates go to zero, and then I think it's off to the races again. So like you said, maybe it's a dip to buy.

Yeah, I think that, I think that's fair. I think, yes, it would 100% have to catalyze a recession. Which isn't out of the picture, but I do like, as I'm making the argument with you, I kind of buy it a little bit less.

Yeah.

For crypto, one thing that's kind of nice is that nobody seems to be calling for alt season right now, even though alts are bouncing.

Which alts are you looking at, Avi?

Which is— I kind of, yeah, I kind of talked about them, but Litecoin, Solana, XRP, Uh, Doge. What else?

You know what I like? The AI coins. AI-16Z is up 15-16% today. Like, that's a sneaky little face ripper. Litecoin up 11%. Uh, Fartcoin up 33%. Like, some of the crap is really bouncing.

I'm like, I'm like really debating whether I should be adding to Virtuals here. I think the answer has to be yes.

Virtuals held in like— that was a crazy like they're— I don't know, I like virtuals.

Yeah, I like, I like the idea of— oh, TAO has catalysts coming up.

DTAU.

DTAU. I think hype remains solid. And then Pendle is having a lot of upgrades soon. So I just— I have them written down here. Boros tokenizing any form of yield, starting out with funding rates, and they're tokenizing funding rates. They're launching permissionless yield pools. They are non-EVM expansions to Solana town and hyper liquid vaults for institutional access. Not bad.

You know what else is just jackknifing higher is Venice.

The hell?

Yeah, I wouldn't have expected that, but like, we're— it's literally It's literally almost— the low tick was $2.36 and now it's trading $8.53. Like, that's— we're approaching a 4x here, um, in the last week. So there's some, there's some like some green shoots here. It's, it's a little sneaky. Um, yeah, back to the recession thing for a second. Here's my take. The idea of like the government firing a bunch of people and that causing a recession with, with interest rates currently at 4%, that doesn't compute for me. Like, that's so foreseeable and the Fed has so many tools at its disposal to mitigate that, that it's just not going to happen. Like, to me, the idea of like, if you can think of something that would cause a recession, that looks at all similar to any of the recessions that have been caused in the last 25 years or 50 years, that recession is not going to happen. The Fed is aware of it, they're monitoring it, and the tools— you know, it's not like interest rates are at zero and QE is at max. Like, the Fed has plenty of tools left to mitigate that particular type of very foreseeable recession. It looks just like the one that— the last one, COVID. Something happened, a bunch of people lost their jobs, and the Fed like handled it. Like, same thing would happen if you reduced a bunch of government jobs. Um, to me, a recession has to get caused by something out of left field that the government is just like totally unprepared for. And I, you know, by definition, I struggle to come up with those scenarios. Um, but like maybe one potential example would be, uh, you know, like a war in the Middle East metastasizes, uh, into a global energy crisis, an oil crisis, and the government hasn't bought back the SPR that it sold during the Biden administration, you know, to mitigate the Ukraine crisis. Like, there you're missing slack in the system there. So like, if I'm just like really trying to think outside of the realm of possibility, You know, that's something that could cause a mini recession, is an oil shock. Highly unlikely. Just, you know, again, that's a, you know, use me using my imagination. It would have to be something crazy. So absent any of that, if inflation continues to moderate and we get a decent CPI print, maybe some of these AI coins will run. Maybe I should be looking at like a Venus token or a Virtuals right now while I'm sitting here. Since you bring it up, maybe this is the like J-shaped recovery before the U-shaped recovery that I was alluding to. Maybe I should be aping here.

Dan, I think I, I'm starting to think we should be aping. You know, what's funny is I've gotten so much pushback from so many people about being bullish. Uh, you know, just have been talking to people over the last, call it, 3 days about, hey, maybe now is the time to start being bullish. I mean, let's, let's just think about this in terms of, you know, one, one trick that I like to use to challenge my bias is I'm going to think about a time that I was really long and what was I thinking then and how does it compare to today? So like, I was unfortunately pretty long in December And then Bitcoin sort of, you know, I got, I got long alts in beginning of December. I think it was maybe mid-December because Bitcoin went up to $108,000. And I was like, all right, now's, now's the time to get, get long alts. I think that they're ready for a follow-up. And then we just nuked straight down for like a week. I mean, obviously closed out of that. But if I was that long then, how How can I not be that long now? Like, either I made like a horrific mistake then, which is possible, and I mean, obviously it was wrong, but like, was it a process mistake, or am I making a huge mistake now, right? And I think the answer is, if, you know, if you were bullish on your favorite assets at any point in the last month and now you're bearish on them, I think you're probably making some sort of mistake because I don't think that much has changed. You know, I called after the bounce, I called for another flush on alt and we got it right. Like, ETH bounced from $2,150 to almost $3K. And that's— I think I tweeted it around like 2,900 ETH. I was like, okay, still, still kind of bearish here. That, by the way, that's when our agent started arguing with us. Arguing with me that the agent, which is getting really good— all of you guys should go check it out, and we will be launching a terminal for it soon— it started getting really good, like good enough to argue with me over things, and it was bullish. And then from the time that me and the agent discussed our bullishness, ETH went down 13%. So screw you, agent. It's still good because it's, it's, it's, it's good. It's good to have somebody that you can talk to that's smart. But I was like Agent was wrong. AI is not taking over anytime soon.

Definitely not. Isn't it amazing how ChatGPT just sucks for trading? Claude, all of the Perplexity, like you can't talk to these chatbots about trade, um, trading. I think this is, this is an opportunity for, for our community. I'm not talking about, I'm not like trying to shill our token. I'm just trying to say like If we could build a chatbot that acts as a debate partner for various trades, I think it would be valuable. I already use the agent for like a source of news, but yeah, once we get that terminal up and live, shout out to our dev who's frigging machine. Actually, it's devs now.

He's so good. So good.

Yeah, I think we'll have a terminal shipped in a month or less, like, and then it's just going to— we're going to plug in a bunch more sources. Like, I want to be able to sit here. Trading is very lonely, right? Trading crypto is very lonely. You're not on a big trading floor where you can like go over and have lunch with people and do water cooler talk and hear noise when something's active. Oh, the AI guys are screaming a lot. Oh, let's talk to them about why there's flow or volatility in their sector. It's kind of lonely. I guess you can just sit there refreshing Twitter all day, but that's psychologically unhealthy. It might be nice to just like have more of a natural chat with traders. Like, Avi, you and I are in tons of Telegram rooms chatting with each other and other people all the time about crypto anyway. It'd be nice to have like a bot with, you know, sort of like a 30,000-foot view of all the news and price action and sentiment and technical indicators to talk to as well. Um, and hopefully it'll be able to include some visuals in the responses as well, uh, like relevant charts. So we're gonna have to do some partnerships, but I think I think there's something there. I really do.

Yeah. Yeah, it's going to be— let's put it like this. I think it's going to be a good month or so, month or so here. Let's see. Let's see how it plays out. I mean, we can, we can, we can make that call now. Let's say we can check. We'll check back in next week. I think BTC dominance is going to be down. A lot of what people are nervous about— I'm getting this message a lot. Is, you know, problem is we get one single Trump headline and boom, we're down 20%. But I think that's already baked into the positioning. So if you look at the tariff headlines, right, they just— they don't have the same impact anymore.

What matters, as we've talked about on this pod, is the second derivative of the news. Everyone freaking knows there's going to be tariffs. Everybody knows that the tariff thing is happening. Like, is basically— we have to ask ourselves are the tariff wars going to escalate or de-escalate from the current, like, perceived amount of tariff war? And I don't think it's going to get worse from here. I think it's going to get less bad, which is probably— and the market probably agrees, which is why it's not nuking anymore on these headlines.

Yeah, that's fair. But, you know, maybe, you know, maybe the argument is be patient because the market can be choppy, right? So like like be ready to step in on any small dips. I mean, this week specifically, hopefully we get this out quick so that people can pay attention to this. Uh, Trump signing executive orders today— you listeners, that's already happened by the time you hear this, so it won't really matter. Tariff updates at some point in the next coming days, blah blah blah. We know that that's probably not going to impact the market substantially. That's been absorbed. Powell congressional testimony Tuesday, Wednesday could cause some volatility. And then CPI Wednesday could cause some volatility. I think if there's a sell-off with CPI, I mean, unless something is like really bad— I mean, no, unless something is medium bad. Uh, if it's really bad, then that's good. If it's medium bad, then that's bad. If it's good, then that's bad. Or neutral, probably. Um, it's kind of just looking for that medium bad scenario. Yeah, I think, uh, like, will, will there be, will there be a chance to buy, you know, a percent or two lower? Probably. Will there be a chance to buy 20% lower? I don't know. I don't know. Things are looking good. The more that, the more that I look at, like, I progressively talked myself into being more bullish throughout this whole podcast. It's kind of funny. I mean, that's what I love. That's why I love these things. Also, it kind of looks like Bearish Chain has bottomed. Oh, by the way, I'm an investor in BearChain. Everyone got very mad at me for not disclosing that, despite the fact that I've talked about it hundreds of billions of times that I invested in BearChain.

We had Smokey on the podcast.

We literally had Smokey on the podcast. I've tweeted it. I don't know how much more I can tell. Like, do I have to every tweet that I mention I have to say? I guess so. Like, I mean, that's what I'm going to do from now on. Like every tweet I'll just say, by the way, I hold positions in these assets. I mean, maybe I'm complaining, maybe I should just like, maybe that should just be standard course. Like maybe I'm complaining for nothing. But yeah, I thought that that reaction was really funny. People got very upset with me over saying that, hey, bear chain actually like looks reasonable.

Obvious Teflon. You can't, you can't shit on him. He's having the, he's feeling the pain with you guys.

I mean, like, I'm not going to pat myself on the back too much because it's all locked up, but I could have sold staking. I could have sold staking rewards. I didn't.

You could have sold perps.

I could— yeah, I could have sold perps. I didn't. I didn't. Yeah, that's true. Fair. Yeah, all good. All good points, Jonah. All good points.

Well, thanks.

Thanks. Thanks for backing me up here.

I got you, Avi. This has been a great podcast. One thing I value about this is that it's like rare actual market chat in a sea of just like online Twitter garbage. I learned. So maybe, maybe I'm gonna go and ape some stuff after we hang up the phone here. This is— I'm just sitting here ever since you talked about it. I was like, what, alts are up? I haven't even really noticed because I've just been too— I've been too caught up in this, uh, swoon on Twitter of negativity and sadness. You just— there's no way the cycle is gonna be over if we're base— if Bitcoin's on the highs or basically close to the highs. All-time highs and sentiment is this bad. No, cycles end when you run out of buyers, not when you have a bunch of like depressed, uh, people who are like on the sidelines. No way this thing's gonna keep running.

Yeah, this was awesome, Jonah. Thank you so much. Thank you for spending your time with me. Let's get this one out immediately. Yeah, for the boys.

We'll have the producers ship it quick. And again, as always, none of this is financial advice. We're just two guys, we don't know what we're talking about.

All right, see you, man.

See you later.