# Ansem - Never Been This Bullish & the Billion Dollar Wallet Thread Guy · 2026-07-28 · 76 min · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dukxu9OYeFc ## Transcript Thread Guy Yo, how are you doing, dude? What’s new, bro? How are we? Ansem I’m fine, dude. Glad to see you. Thread Guy New setup? Ansem Another setup. Yeah, I moved to new housing, so this is my office here. Thread Guy It seems like in the past we did one interview. I was looking through the Thread Guy story and some interviews. There are enough of them there, brother. Many. It’s like we do an interview once every six months or a year. Ansem Yes. Yes. Yes. Thread Guy Brother, how is streaming? Ansem I like it, brother. At first, it was a little uncomfortable getting into a rhythm. I had to think of topics and interact with the chat about them, because it’s different from just talking about things by yourself. I look at the graphs and the chat, see what people want to hear about, and then come up with something. I’ll say, “This is what happened this week. Here are the topics we have to cover,” and then branch out into areas where I’m not as knowledgeable and communicate in a dialogue format. That was interesting, but I like it. I’m definitely getting better at this. Thread Guy You guys have awesome streams. Ansem Yes, I know. Thank you, brother. Thread Guy Brian Armstrong—what do you think, brother? Ansem I think it was good. I feel that he’s significantly more pleasant on camera than just in a tweet, and he’s a very smart guy. I think people don’t realize, considering his position, how difficult it is to achieve success in this space. Every individual crypto exchange since 2012 is already dead, except for Coinbase in the United States. Mt. Gox is gone. Bittrex has almost disappeared. Bitstamp practically doesn’t exist. Everyone is doing very poorly. What was it—Poloniex disappeared. There are mainly only Coinbase and a couple of other players. Thread Guy You don’t even know what these are, brother. Ansem I know exactly what he says. They built up and did a great job in the United States for crypto, so I’m glad we were able to invite him. Thread Guy What do you think about BitMEX? Ansem BitMEX is closing, brother. This is heartbreaking. Arthur is like my father in Crypto Twitter. Everyone learned to trade perpetual futures thanks to BitMEX. I don’t even think people realize how insane it was. He created this 24/7 market. He truly created perps. What the hell? It was just madness. Thread Guy What do you think happened to BitMEX? Why were they displaced by other exchanges? Ansem They were the ones who took the greatest risks by not being very strict with the rules and allowing everyone to join somehow. Even now, as a United States citizen, you shouldn’t be able to trade these perps. The platform didn’t actively block people through geoblocking, so of course they got into serious trouble because of that. Then I think they lost market share when all the lawsuits and everything else started. That was the main reason. But at the beginning, they were really successful. At one point, they were tearing up the market. Asia was the dominant place where everything happened in crypto because BitMEX was in Hong Kong. Bitcoin mining was dominated by Jihan Wu and Bitmain, and all the major crypto exchanges were also Asian. All the big funds were Asian. They dominated the crypto world for a long time. I don’t really understand why China spoke so harshly against crypto and turned around against it, but I think it’s because they felt this was something they couldn’t control. They wanted something nationally regulated, like stablecoins or something similar. But yes, Asia dominated crypto for a long time. Thread Guy Yes, it was crazy to watch all these stories come out like a flood. I was thinking, “Damn, I missed the gold vein.” In any case, here we are at our six-monthly meeting. A lot has happened since we last met. This was toward the end of 2025, perhaps. I wasn’t sure where to start, because you tweet back at people and you’re easy to ask a simple question. You had this tweet from July 3rd. I’m paraphrasing, but you said that you had never been so optimistic about crypto in your life and that you perceived this as a bottom for Bitcoin. I read that and thought, “Man, thank you for those feelings,” but how is that possible? Are you serious? Is that what you mean? Ansem I really do feel this way, and I’ll tell you why. The biggest money I’ve made in crypto was when everyone else believed that crypto was dead, but under the hood, fundamental value was being created and slowly developing. For example, most people found it very hard to believe in Solana at the end of 2022, after the FTX collapse. But if you were at Breakpoint and saw all the developers there, you saw all this energy. There were a lot of people who were very excited about Solana and focused on the future of crypto. Now we’re in a similar situation where AI dominates everything. AI is driving risky assets. Stocks have soared, and crypto seems like the stepchild in the corner. It has lost in everything. But everything is becoming better and better. That’s without even considering the infrastructure side. I feel that rollups have advanced a lot further than they were a few years ago. We see what’s happening with platforms like Robinhood. I think Solana has significantly improved its infrastructure from within. Regarding regulation, I feel that the landscape is getting much better for developers in the United States. Let’s see if they adopt the CLARITY Act this year, but I think sentiment toward building in crypto is much better now than it was a few years ago. And this is happening at a time when the general mood is actually at the bottom. The reason I think this is an even better time for development in crypto is that people aren’t thinking about AI. AI makes software much more accessible for everyone, so creating applications is much easier than it was in the past. Any strong, experienced developer can create applications much faster and at a deeper level than before. For crypto startups, this is definitely the best place for instant access to liquidity. There are two different categories of startups. There are startups like Anthropic and OpenAI, whose valuations are approaching $1 trillion. They can attract an infinite amount of funding from Silicon Valley. It’s easy for them to raise money and succeed. But there are other startups—developers who are very smart but may not have immediate access to venture capital financing. For those people, I think it makes much more sense to build in crypto, where permissionless blockchains give you instant access to liquidity. Anyone with a wallet, if you can provide distribution, will see your application very quickly. You don’t need to go through the entire mess of fundraising rounds or anything similar. Those are the two main points regarding AI. I also think mobile technology will be a huge driver for crypto this time. Mobile applications are getting better. They’re becoming genuinely good. People forget the last cycle. By the way, Moonshot—I saw that funds invested in Moonshot. Congratulations, Moonshot. But in the end, we’ve come a long way, even compared with those days. We’ve come a long way in mobile technology. In 2023, we had, as they say, really big exchanges: Coinbase, Bybit, Binance, and others. But the on-chain landscape for mobile applications is much better now than it was then. If you remember, in 2023, Pepe showed very strong results. But another trading theme that took off that year was Unibot. I don’t even know if people remember Unibot. Thread Guy The boss of Telegram trading, bro. Ansem Unibot was like, “This is revolutionary. We can trade with one click in Telegram. We scan the contract address and can trade immediately.” That was revolutionary in 2023. Thread Guy Still pretty good. OG BonkBot, too. Ansem OG BonkBot, Unibot. The reason it was revolutionary is that even for crypto enthusiasts who already had money on networks, it was much better to have a professional interface where they could trade instantly, all with one click. Now we have the same things, but oriented toward retail users, even if they aren’t crypto natives. FOMO, for example, is simply crushing it. Pump.fun has a mobile application. There are a bunch of other teams creating mobile applications for trading perpetual contracts and doing on-chain trading. I think that if retail users can find these applications more easily, we’ll get the same number of people trading as use mobile applications like DraftKings or FanDuel—but trading coins and perpetual contracts literally on-chain. That’s where I think we’ll see a lot more new liquidity that has never come into crypto before. Previously, everything was like this: okay, you have an account on Coinbase. They have 100 million users, but if you had Coinbase or Robinhood, you had to wait for the coins to appear there. That’s why Doge took off in 2020 and 2021. When it appeared on Robinhood, Elon was continuously promoting it, and everyone had a Robinhood account. So everyone said, “Okay, I’ll buy Doge for $5, $10, or $100.” That’s how it reached a market capitalization of almost $100 billion, because everyone was there thinking, “Okay, this is the crypto I’m going to buy.” But now it seems like it should be much easier for everyone to buy all these things. So that’s another part of my thesis. Thread Guy People forget how much better mobile became, and how deeply Phantom Wallet was already rooted in people's heads by that time. Here's another philosophical crypto question for you. You know, there's a guy I follow on Twitter. I think his name is Contrarian Cap or something like that. I really like him and his content. Ansem Yes. Yes. Thread Guy Does it ever occur to you, even in the worst moments, that crypto and all the euphoria around it existed as a phenomenon of the zero-rate era? They were giving out stimulus payments, there was a multitude of money, and liquidity had to go somewhere. You couldn't really invest in AI yet, meme trading made no sense, and we were like, “Damn, let's throw everything into crypto.” Maybe it was just a phenomenon of 2020 to 2024 that will never happen again. Ansem Yes, I mean, this is definitely part of it. I don't think you'll see that L1 nonsense again. ETH showed itself very well in DeFi in 2020, and everyone thought, “Oh, there's something here that grew from around $12 billion”—it was something crazy—“to around $600 billion in market capitalization in 2020.” Everyone saw that and thought, “We need to build an L1. We can build an L1 because we can get financing.” Venture capitalists invested in it as the future of finance. DeFi was the future, and everyone who wasn't lazy rushed to build an L1 from 2020 to 2024. Literally, if you built an L1, you instantly received funding from everyone. It was madness. I don't think that will happen again. The reason it won't happen again is that now, in crypto, you can immediately create real applications with real revenue and distribution. I think successful L1s will need applications on their networks. It's not enough to be faster and cheaper. Solana performed very well compared with ETH because it was much faster and cheaper to build on. But now, you have to surpass Solana, and it's very difficult to surpass Solana with an insignificant improvement in TPS. If you're doing 12,000 TPS instead of 10,000, it's like, “Dude, we don't care.” I think that's over. But I'm very optimistic about applications in crypto, because I think this space for design is still very underexplored. I think people will experiment a lot, honestly. Thread Guy You answered Imran's tweet yesterday, where he said that you can no longer just launch an L1 and hope that someone cool will come and create the main application on your network. I always liked how Dan Romero built Farcaster. It wasn't a blockchain, but it was a network of usernames and nodes based on the Farcaster protocol. Then he said they would create the main app, which was Warpcast. It didn't take off, and they either shut it down or were bought out. I definitely don't know what happened. But his thesis was correct: if you build a network, you should also build an app, because anyone can build a network, but no one can build— Ansem This point of view is interesting, because there are a few things that captivate me now. For example, we were writing off FWA [?], or something like that. Interesting on-chain experiments are appearing again. Robinhood is back, and in many ways it reminds me of 2023. There was Blast, and this feels like a reference to the past. Now you have Robin, the network. Before that, there were things like Fantasy Top and Friend.tech. Now you have FWA, Cards, and all this gacha stuff. When you think about a viral crypto application, will it always look like a niche DeFi on-chain experiment? Or can these applications become massive and achieve escape velocity? Is there enough money flowing through a niche DeFi experiment for it to change its form? It seems to me that this has already happened to some extent, even with success stories like Friend.tech and similar projects. Thread Guy The reason for this is that crypto's superpower is the opportunity to speculate on things. I think tokenization is very closely related to that. The speculative component stimulates most of the activity. I also think there's another reason. Social apps that exist outside the crypto world have very strong content, like Instagram, X, and Snapchat. Everyone lives on these applications, and they have very powerful distribution channels. That's why I've become very optimistic about X Money lately. I think X Money is one of the coolest things happening right now. They actually provide you with a debit card and a bank account through your Twitter or X profile. Now all my ad revenue goes straight into X Money. I can receive a debit card, instantly spend those funds, and they give you 6% per annum on all balances. Six percent is crazy. So, in social applications, it seems to me that it will be difficult to compete without some speculative component that doesn't exist in other social applications. That's my thesis. I think that is crypto's superpower. Stablecoins are another one. With stablecoins, you'll see a bunch of experiments. They are much better than what exists in traditional banking systems for connecting retail customers with businesses and connecting commercial companies with one another throughout the world. There are many projects being built in this area. For example, Credible, which I know just launched. Avichi [?] is another payment network, it seems. I like MetaDAO. I know you had Profit, and— Ansem Yes, I like it. I just talked to him last week. I really like MetaDAO. Thread Guy I really like it. Ansem MetaDAO, for those who don't know, is essentially a platform similar to a launchpad that focuses on combining a company's own capital with its token. There are no fears that shareholders will receive more than token holders. They do this through market-based decision-making, where every decision made by a business or company depends on what the token holders have already agreed to. For example, if the token reaches a certain level, we do this. If the token doesn't reach that level, we don't do it. These are the stages we must achieve in order to unlock our tokens, among other things. I think it's a very well-developed protocol, and serious startups being built in crypto will actively start using it. Stablecoins are cool, and speculation is cool too. Honestly, I think the gaming industry is very difficult to disrupt, but it can't exist without speculative and gamification aspects that are interesting. That's why gacha and TCG platforms show such strong results, because people love gambling. People say speculation is bad and that there's nothing good in it, but that's exactly what created a great deal of the value in cryptocurrencies. If Bitcoin were just a network where you could transfer money back and forth, it would never have reached this level of success. You had to be able to hold bitcoin and benefit from the growth in its value. So I think people criticize tokenization significantly more than they should, but I'm not sure whether DeFi applications alone will achieve success. That's also one of the reasons I'm excited about crypto. When you don't know what's waiting around the corner, and you can't predict for sure what will be new, then when something new appears, everyone jumps on it at once because you couldn't have predicted it in advance. I feel certain parallels with 2023, when these small projects started appearing. I wonder whether people started experimenting on networks because we're back, because people are experimenting on networks again. I don't know. I could never understand which way it was going to work. But the reason I’m so optimistic is that when people ask, “How can you be sure the bottom has already been reached?” the answer isn’t confirmed. If you become optimistic at the bottom, you convince everyone else that we can return, and then people start building cool things. Even if the price stays flat for a few months, I want people to want to build something on the network. If nobody wants to build on the network and nobody wants to risk capital, nothing will happen. Thread Guy I had this discussion for days. I was arguing about whether you had marked the bottom or simply guessed it. I don't know. We were talking about this with Malcolm, and I was like, “Damn, you have one.” Ansem Right. Thread Guy It doesn't really take much, but you are one of the few people who were right. Your intuition said we had reached the peak, and that created a great story, even though it was painful, if I remember correctly. It was a cruel moment, because they caught you making a fake all-time high. But you were right. You like to guess tops and bottoms, and I don't think many public traders are willing to do that. Why? Why are you willing to do it? What is it about the process of prognostication that makes you want to say that we've reached the bottom or the peak? Ansem Yes, I mean, partly it's simple because I really like being on social networks and making predictions publicly. I actually like it a lot. I mean, of course, you can just be a trader and say, “Oh, I sold everything here,” and not tell anyone. “I bought everything here,” and not tell anyone. Then there’s no one to hold you accountable. You can trade and do it very well; you don’t have to declare it out loud. Many of the best traders who are super, super, super successful don’t say anything. They’re like, “Yes, I think it’s the peak. I’m leaving,” or, “I think this is the bottom. I’m buying.” Then they buy during a certain period of time and just hold their positions until they grow. But for me, retail traders are very bad at guessing the peaks and very bad at buying the bottom. If you’re just a retail trader who doesn’t trade the markets 24/7, you’re unlikely to guess the peak when everyone around you is shouting, “Oh, this bullish trend—we’re flying to infinity!” It’s very difficult to buy on the exact day when everyone is saying, “No, this is the end. The end of crypto. Saylor is going to sell billions of dollars of Bitcoin.” When everyone around you is talking like that, but you’re not a trader, you’re thinking, “Okay, why should I buy here? Why should I sell the peak?” And that’s right. There are only a few people who are willing to risk their reputation by stating, “I believe this is the bottom.” If I’m wrong, then a million people will get angry at me because I said this was the bottom, and it turns out it wasn’t. Very few people are ready to do that, but I’m confident in myself and in my ability to read the markets. I can still help many people if I’m right. Last cycle, I finally proved myself right in 2023, when everyone was bearish on Solana. They said, “Dude, you’re totally insane. Why would you buy Solana at $20? FTX just blew up. SBF is gone.” All this crap. But there were people who listened to me. They were like, “Bro, this guy goes on every podcast and says he’s bullish on SOL for such-and-such reasons.” It wasn’t just a foolish call. I literally explained why I was bullish. Here are my technical reasons. Here are the fundamental reasons why this is the case. Many people listened to that, and many made a lot of money on the trade, thinking, “Oh, this guy knows what he’s talking about. He reads the markets this way.” The main reason is that I love helping people, but I’m also a social addict, bro. There’s nothing better than buying at the bottom with huge volume, publicly calling the bottom, making a lot of money, and then having everyone who followed you make a lot of money too. Nothing beats that. I think that’s why a lot of hedge fund guys who are very successful billionaires still tweet. All of them. They’re all still tweeting. Look at Gavin Baker. Guys like him tweet, and they go on podcasts all day long. For days. Bro, I was listening to this guy’s tirade for days. He seems like the richest person in the world who has Twitter, posting provocations every day. He’s literally the richest man on the planet, he owns the platform, and when someone says, “Hey, are you really going to play Diablo?” he gets angry and replies, “No, I’m not.” Thread Guy So, to get to this question: how do you think it has to happen, or what will the world look like, when you look at your phone, open your Phantom wallet, and there’s $1 billion in it? What has to happen for us to achieve that, brother? Ansem To be honest, I don’t think it would take that much. Not really. I think $1 billion would be about $2 billion, maybe a little more, depending on how much I give away. I think the success of Bonk and WIF in the past cycle was due to Solana’s breakthrough. Solana traded in a range from $15 to $30 for probably about half a year. Then Bitcoin started moving, and toward the end of 2023, Solana started growing rapidly. Every trader who was following the chart thought, “Oh, it’s been in this range of accumulation for many months. If the price breaks $30, I’ll buy it.” I didn’t care whether I was optimistic for fundamental reasons. This was a technical move, and I was going to buy. When many of these traders started buying Solana in the last cycle, in 2023, when it broke that level, it forced a lot of capital to think, “Maybe we should rotate into Solana. Solana is growing.” A lot of new capital flowed into Solana. If you looked at DEX volumes on Solana in mid-2023, they were basically zero, dude. There was no money online. A few people were speculating, and then a bunch of new capital came online. There was a feeling of, “Okay, what should we buy?” The reason I was so optimistic about Bonk was that it was trading at a market capitalization of around $30–40 million, and it was the most famous community coin on the network. I thought, “Well, people are moving into SOL. They’re going to buy this, because there isn’t really another choice.” JTO hadn’t done its airdrop yet. Jupiter still hadn’t done its airdrop. There weren’t many lending and borrowing protocols yet. There wasn’t much else to buy, so I was optimistic about Bonk for precisely that reason. I thought on-chain speculation would return. So, right now, if you look at Bitcoin, the upper range limit is about $85,000. It seems that’s where it reached earlier this year. For Solana, it’s probably around $100. The base level for me on SOL is the $82–84 range. That’s the key mark. But if you see Bitcoin and Solana moving up and gaining momentum, the coins attracting attention on those networks will start getting bought. People don’t realize that there’s a huge amount of money sitting on-chain simply because crypto enthusiasts don’t want to take it outside the network. Even if you’re sitting in stablecoins and you don’t believe in Bitcoin or Solana, you still keep those stablecoins on-chain. There are plenty of people with millions of dollars online, on hardware wallets or elsewhere, who are simply waiting for the time to take risk again. If you believe in crypto cycles, this four-year cycle, and you believe that the fourth quarter is the bottom, I think we’re already at the bottom. But if you think the bottom is in the fourth quarter, then there’s a window when the main assets start moving and demonstrating strength. People who were sitting on the sidelines will start buying, and once they buy those assets, they’ll also buy the beta to those risk assets. If you’re one of those risky assets that starts getting bought, and you’re a new coin—something people have never done before or never thought about, with nothing to compare it to—you can see projects perform extremely well, especially if retail investors are coming in through all these mobile applications where buying these on-chain coins was previously much more difficult. Even Coinbase is now incredibly easy to use. I talked to Brian Armstrong and Jesse, and you can understand that the Coinbase Wallet is now virtually integrated into Coinbase. The coins don’t need to be listed on Coinbase for you to buy them. They have new trading pairs now, bro. Coinbase has trading pairs for low-market-cap coins, for example. Everyone on Coinbase will have easy access. It’s worth imagining that Robinhood and the Robinhood Wallet will do the same. With all these mobile applications, it’s reasonable to assume that they’re also setting records for new users. I really don’t think it would take that much. And that’s without even taking into account that I’m going to create significantly more content outside the crypto sphere and on X, which I also plan to do. Last cycle, I benefited from traveling a lot, going to crypto conferences, and things like that. My account now has 1.2 million followers. I know many more people now than I did last cycle—not just crypto people, but people in general. My network is much larger. I have many more people to communicate with, people who reach out to me, and people who know and like me. So I don’t think it would be anything too crazy. As for WIF, which reached $5 billion last cycle, that was just a dog in a hat. That definitely brought me closer to putting another billion dollars in my wallet. You know, about a month ago, or around that time, I was hanging out on Pump.fun. One of the reasons I’m so excited about Pump.fun is that I went on DeFi Llama and looked at the trading volumes. This was after Cash Cat, after Anom, and then Cash Cat. It was the first time in a long time that I felt it—the “degen” feeling, as if there were a desperate desire to buy a coin. Then two of them exceeded $100 million, and I looked at the metrics and thought, “Wait, that doesn’t even make sense. These numbers are completely absurd.” I started pulling back a little and looking at the crazy numbers. We’ll publish the results soon. I looked at the numbers and thought, “This doesn’t make any sense,” so I started checking their Telegram groups. But what impressed me most was TikTok. I started scrolling through TikTok and thought, “Wait a minute.” All these videos had 30,000–40,000 likes: Kimchi, Malone, Zack, XPTT, Orangey, Anom, Pump.fun, Incent, Ethan Prosper. I didn’t feel that this existed in the past cycle, where there was this crypto folklore around traders. It’s almost like Mount Rushmore. The impression is that day trading has captured all the attention. If you want to become a trader, you have to engage with funded accounts and prop firms, but in the end, no one makes money from that. It’s simply the law of averages. These kids who trade memecoins on-chain have really made a lot of money, and the content is created by the people themselves. Ultimately, one of them breaks out and becomes a leader. In many ways, I feel that on-chain trading can attract the attention and fame that day trading had, simply because people were more familiar with it. Thread Guy Aha. Aha. Now look at Kimchi. He’s doing something new, brother. This is madness—30 million views. His tweet has 30 million views. Ansem I didn’t know it was that many. Thread Guy He has 30 million views. So my question for you, brother: last cycle, in my opinion, the most viral moment was when—I don’t even know if this is true—you must have been hanging out with Kanye, bro. Ansem Yes, brother. Kanye posted a photo of your passport and asked, “Does anyone know Ansem?” He tweeted a photo of your passport, bro. Thread Guy I know, bro, I know. So my question is: do you really think you can become more popular in this cycle than in the past? What would it look like, in your opinion, if that happened? Ansem Bro, I think so. It’s even a little scary, because I really think I can become more popular in this cycle than in the past. During the past cycle, everything happened by itself. I had nothing planned; my account just exploded through conversations about crypto. I was never public and didn’t do many other things. I just kept tweeting about coins. I definitely agree that TikTok is a completely different market segment from Twitter. I think part of the reason people on Twitter don’t believe the numbers from Pump.fun is that those aren’t the people trading on Pump.fun. They’re simply not the same people who are there trading and watching. They trade stocks, perpetual contracts, and everything else. But yeah, bro, I really think I can become more popular in this cycle. It seems like it’s already happening. I’m walking around New York, and people are coming up to me and saying, “Hey…” Thread Guy How often do people recognize you? Ansem Quite often, bro. Almost every day. No, I wouldn’t say every day. But if I go out on the weekends somewhere with people—like a club, a bar, or something like that—they’ll definitely recognize me. Thread Guy What do you think about the intersection of trading and a culture of bragging? In my opinion, you’re one of the few famous traders in this group who actually knows how to trade. You lit up on Twitter and went viral, but you weren’t a TikTok player or an influencer who then started trading. You weren’t a mainstream streamer who later started trading, either. You literally gained a million followers by being a trader. What do you think? Is a culture of bragging bad for trading? Is it good for you? Is it part of this? How do you think about it? Ansem I think it’s bad when the most famous people aren’t very good traders. That’s bad because they teach people to trade even though they themselves can’t really trade. Then everyone loses money because they don’t know how to trade, and eventually they lose the desire to trade because they learned from someone who doesn’t really trade. I think that’s the situation. Although I do think there are certain advantages to it. Bragging culture works because it’s perfect brain candy for the average person. Someone has a huge wheelbarrow of money, shows it off, and that attracts people to trading. They think, “He did this and has this because he’s a trader.” Whether that’s true or not, it still attracts people to trading. I really think the ability to trade is a very important skill that everyone will have in the future—or that people are already beginning to have—because markets are one of the few ways to multiply your capital and break out of your current social status. Therefore, I think many people will come to trading precisely because of this. But I’ve never particularly liked bragging culture. It was never my thing. I just like writing on Twitter and trading. This content appeared because people said, “Dude, you have to do this, because if not you, then who? Who else is going to publish quality information, interview people, and communicate with people?” I felt pushed to do it more often, so I wrote a lot on Twitter. Even in 2020 or 2021—especially in 2021—I just wrote on Twitter. I had a private diary called “Consent”[?]. Now there are 40,000 subscribers, and in 2021 there were maybe 100. I had a diary for a few close friends from Crypto Twitter. I would write about every trade—basically, everything. Early each month, I analyzed my thesis for the month: my biggest positions, what I was watching, where I was wrong, and where I was right. I did a whole bunch of posts with charts at the beginning of every month. I updated the account with what I opened, where the risk was, and what the reward was, so people knew how much I earned and what positions I was in. Then someone said, “Bro, you need to run a Substack. You need to write longer texts so people can read and better understand your analysis.” I said, “Okay, I’ll write a Substack.” I wrote a Substack and posted it to the private account. People spread it around and said, “Hey, you have to read what this guy is writing. Here’s the Substack link.” I thought, “Okay, cool,” and posted the Substack and reposted it from my private account to my main account. It seems that after that, Cobie invited me to “UpOnly” and said, “Yo, come on the show. Let’s do an interview.” Then I gave the interview. It was an adventure—an anti-adventure, literally in the basement of my old apartment building, with a laptop and bad Wi-Fi where the power kept going out. That was my path to content creation. In reality, it happened only because I posted my trades and people said, “Yo, you need to post more information about your trades.” That’s how it happened. Thread Guy How many positions do you hold simultaneously? It seems like you’re constantly in every coin. Ansem Not so much anymore. I’m trying to keep it to fewer than 10. But in 2020 and 2021, I just did a goddamn lot, bro. I did a bunch of everything. For example, I lost a lot of money in May 2021. I don’t know if people remember that candle, but when Bitcoin seemed to have support at $40,000, it just punched straight through it, and every altcoin fell by 60% in about 24 hours. It was completely insane. I lost a lot of money in May 2021, and after that I didn’t miss a single trade until the end of the year. It was incredible. I really didn’t miss a trade for the rest of that year. I was in longs, shorts—whatever was the best trade of the day or the week. I was trading every kind of position: longs, shorts, and all this directional [expletive]. I was very aggressively bearish on Bitcoin because I thought it would collapse at the end of 2021. But then I saw AXS and LUNA start to grow and thought, “Oh, I need to get long.” I made money on AXS, made money on LUNA, and made money on Solana. My biggest trade at the end of that cycle was tripling my capital by going long on Solana at the end of 2021. Thread Guy Yes. I thought that was the moment. From what to what? When it broke its previous all-time high? Ansem It was somewhere around $50, it seems, before it went to $200. And it just took off, bro. It took off. I remember my friends from school writing to me while I was locked in an apartment trading nonstop. Some of my school friends wrote, “Yo, come with us to Vegas on Labor Day. Come rest with us.” At that time, everything was going very well. I thought, “Okay, cool. This is the time for me to take a break.” That’s when I closed a bunch of positions, right when everything was happening. Thread Guy That was a crazy time. What do you think about that? I want to ask you about stocks. How do you think about the optimal portfolio allocation at this stage? Ansem It’s a strange situation, especially if you have a lot of cash. We’ll talk about stocks in a minute, but right now they’re just horrible. Crypto was disgusting, although maybe it doesn’t look so bad now. There are some promising on-chain projects. Thread Guy So how are you thinking about the optimal portfolio? If you’re optimistic about next year, would you concentrate in crypto? Only crypto, or crypto, stocks, and everything else? Ansem I do everything. I do it all. Honestly, I’ve received a lot of good advice from Flood about this. I want to give Flood his due—I love Flood. But I think, at a basic level, you should always have some money in reserve, regardless of the situation. I think 20% is probably a good cash reserve. You really shouldn’t go below that level. Regarding the rest of the distribution, I think the higher the cash allocation, the more risk you should take in terms of risk exposure. You should never have zero risk. You should always have 20% risk in one form or another. You must always have some exposure to the market. I consistently said throughout last year that it made more sense to have more stocks than crypto. Now I’m starting to change my opinion because I think that if crypto unfolds as I expect, you’ll get a much higher return than from stocks right now. It will be difficult for Micron to rise another 100% after the 100% it has already made. That seems unlikely. Therefore, I would probably divide it like this: 20% stocks, 20% cash, and about 60% cryptocurrency if I were allocating capital now. Of course, the situation is different if you have a very high net worth, but I don’t think that matters. I’m not addressing those people. I think crypto is in a very good position right now. Fairly speaking, I really do. I think it’s very underestimated because many people have already sold their crypto, chased stocks, and made decent money there. So I think it's up to you. A favorable tailwind awaits if money starts to return. As for how I would distribute crypto exactly, in the past cycle my thesis was this: you need to have 70% in safer crypto assets and 30% in riskier ones. I still think that's right. I think that's exactly how you should manage your own crypto portfolio. Of that 70% in safer assets, you obviously have the majors. If you're bullish on Bitcoin, ETH, or SOL, those are the obvious choices. I think you can add hype coins there now, honestly. Among those safer assets, you want something you have the most conviction in—perhaps a mid-cap asset that you think will be the basis of your portfolio's profitability. Something a little further out on the risk curve, but something you're very sure of, and that isn't one of the majors. The other 30% is in on-chain assets, such as perpetual futures. Perpetual futures are for when you see an impulse trend. For example, Telegram—I don't think Telegram is bad. It flew to the moon a while ago. It was a trade caused by news, and that kind of news is very good for futures because you can come in with leverage and your time horizon is shorter. If your time horizon is shorter, you can use leverage and earn the same profit as you would from holding something safer on the spot, where you have to wait longer. So those are good trades with perpetual futures—trades where you're not looking at a 12-month horizon. And then there are on-chain things like FWA [?]. I think those are cool. Obviously, there are microcaps, meme coins, and all kinds of high-risk shit where you can lose a lot of capital, but you can also get a 1,000× return. You think, “Okay, if I can get 1,000× or 100× on this, I'm willing to risk X% of my portfolio for it.” Of that 70%, midcaps are the most interesting to me. That's the best thesis you're trying to find in crypto, because these are usually places where there is no consensus but there is a good fundamental thesis. Then you're looking and waiting for the best technical setup to enter. Those are exactly the trades that usually bring you the most profit. In the past cycle, for me, it was something like Solana. I had Coinbase and Solana as my main positions. They were my two most convincing bets, but Solana at that time had a market capitalization of about $10 billion. It wasn't that big and eventually reached about $100 billion. Right now, I really like Pump.fun. I think it's one of the few places where the technical indicators line up. It just returned to a very important support level and hovered there for, I think, 9 months or something like that. Fundamentally, it's stable now and earns good money. If you think on-chain crypto activity will warm up again, where do retail investors want to go, and where will they do it? I think Pump.fun simply benefits from all that activity. If you look at what they did at the peak of the last cycle, they just printed money, bro. They printed, they printed, and they're printing now in a bear market. I wonder what will happen when everything turns around. I think this is a really good setup, for sure. You had that tweet from Bitcoin Charlie where he said that people underestimate how long something can keep going. Then you're like, “Wait, wait. Pull back to October 10th.” Move it, bro. Drag it to the October 10th lows. On October 10th, every altcoin went to zero. Everything—absolutely everything—went to the bottom, really to zero. Since October 10th, every month people have said, “Crypto is dead. It's not coming back. Why the hell are we holding it? You could hold stocks or AI.” Every month, for 8 months in a row, no change. He started talking about this a week ago, and I said, “Bro, what are you talking about?” It's madness because the chart really went sideways and down all this time, starting on October 10th. A lot of altcoin charts—I just don't see what could still push altcoins below the October 10th level, considering the current negative mood around crypto. How can they fall lower than they are now? Do you understand? Thread Guy Okay. Since October 10th, you know, you write a lot about stocks. I spend a lot of time paying attention to stocks, for the first time in my life, if you don't count the crazy options I traded in high school. One of the craziest things I've observed is how stocks take off and how they fall. I call this the “cryptoification” of the world. I think I saw you reply to that guy who went viral after turning $1 million into $27 million, making $3 million per month. These charts are insane. DRAM stocks have fallen by 50% or 60%. For example, SanDisk—SNDXX, or whatever it is—even with 2× leverage, fell 85% in a couple of weeks. This is madness because these charts are moving like crypto. Even the Nasdaq is currently moving 2% daily. It's crazy how this has evolved. As someone who has been in crypto for so long, does it feel like stocks are trading like altcoins now? What do you think about how prices are moving in the biggest assets? Ansem Yes, that's why technical analysis works. People constantly criticize technical analysis. Fundamentalists say, “No, it's just lines on a chart.” That's complete nonsense, bro. Technical analysis really works because all of this is driven by emotion. These are all people who first make a bunch of profit and then lose a lot of profit. That's why people buy at the peaks, at the highs, when the chart is literally vertical. It's euphoria. Everyone puts as much money as they can into it at that moment because they couldn't possibly be more bullish on the market. That's why everything flies vertically upward. But when that happens, everyone has invested all their cash. Obviously, if everyone does that, how much more money can enter the market? That's why I made that thread in 2021 about how to spot parabolic tops, how to identify them in time, and how to make money from them. The reason they look the same on every asset is precisely this: it's literally the same buyers and the same people panicking at the bottom. These are just different stages of vertical growth. If you open the Micron chart—look at the graph. Micron, brother, if you open the Micron— Thread Guy Do you want to turn on screen sharing? Let me check if it works. Let's see. I'll be very upset if it doesn't. It might work, or it might not. Share… share. Oh yes, I think I have it. It says it works. Come on. Ansem Ah, it works. Hold on, I have your thread too. It seems like this is the one. I'll throw it in the chat. Thread Guy Yes, that's it. See that? Let's switch cameras. Ansem Yes, that's right, dude. Just look at this graph, brother. It's flying upward. It's vertical. Even if you put it on a logarithmic scale, it's still vertical. Thread Guy Wow. This is so obvious, I don't even need to draw anything. You can see it happening. This is disgusting. It's just insane. Where the hell does this curve go? Let me find it. Here it is. Ansem Yes, that's it—the very definition. How does this curve work, brother? Look, it just repeats the same shape. If I tried to draw it, it would look like this. Here you have this thing, and here you have this. Thread Guy I can't even draw it because it moves so damn far away. It's disgusting. This really looks disgusting. Ansem But essentially, it's just a step-by-step division showing how much more vertical the chart becomes. Thread Guy Got it, got it, got it. It's becoming more and more vertical, and then it— Ansem Okay, I see. Understood. I see the situation like this: here it is growing. It's becoming more aggressive, but it goes vertically upward. Then, after the peak, there is usually a pullback to the level of the previous high, and that's your chance to get out. Thread Guy I pointed to the peak here, around 10. I thought that was the peak. Oh my God. It looks like the same chart, but I pointed to a peak somewhere here, around 1800, and said, “Bro, this shit is just vertical.” Then it jumped up a little more. It fell, and then it went up again and made an even higher high. That was actually worse than the pullback because it encouraged even more people to celebrate. They said, “You're still growing.” Let's begin with the tweet that QQQ will make 3× by the end of the year. Ansem Yes, this is madness. But I still think they're probably close to some bottom. They fell by 40%, which is quite a lot. Thread Guy The madness in all of this is that SPY—SPX—is only 3% below its all-time high, right? The Magnificent 7 are still quite strong. Apple, for example, is at its all-time high. I really like Apple. The reason I like Apple is that they avoided the high costs of distributing AI models that many other companies have tried to take on. Their attitude is basically, “No, we have distribution. Let's just wait while you figure out this damn thing by yourself. Then we'll take the best model we can get from open source.” They did their own thing with hardware, which is great. They're smart in hardware. They also have a new CEO. I think their focus will be on implementing these models locally on the device as much as possible. So Apple and Google—I don't really worry about these big guys, honestly. But anything that has increased 10× in a year, from $100 billion to $1 trillion, is obviously going to cool down. But I’m not very bearish on stocks. It’s funny how people say technology doesn’t work, although it always works. Thanks for the screen demonstration. You can close this if you want. I have one more question for you regarding the Apple topic. I saw that you quoted me in the thread, and I really liked it. Was that the avocado toast thing, or something else? One of my thoughts was this: the latest idea—or excuse—for Bitcoin was that everyone who made so much money from metals would collectively buy Bitcoin. I thought, “Okay, not a bad idea,” but that didn’t quite work. Then the second justification appeared: the stock market is so correlated with artificial intelligence that maybe you should buy Berkshire, or something like that, so you wouldn’t be influenced by AI. Even the Magnificent 7 are dependent on AI. Then you have Apple, which avoids capital expenditures and reaches an all-time high. And then you have Bitcoin, which potentially exists as this scarce asset that is completely independent of AI. I think that’s probably the essence of what he was talking about in this thread. I’ll add something from myself, but what do you think? Is this a justified bullish argument for BTC at the moment? Because it seems to me that this is the only thing that doesn’t have enough going for it. You have on-chain activity, DeFi, and hype, but then you have this big “gold” Bitcoin. What has to happen for our new narrative to emerge so that the price finally takes off? Ansem Yes, I think so. I have in mind—I think this is very accurate—someone else wrote a very, very good tweet about it. Damn, what was their name? I forgot who it was. Someone else wrote a very good one. I’m trying to remember who it was, but I’m not sure. I think this is a good thesis. Bitcoin is like digital gold: a scarce asset that is worth investing in so you can diversify your exposure to risks outside of AI. I think that makes sense. Bitcoin has absolutely no relationship with AI, brother. None. Thread Guy Well, even miners switched to AI. Mara, literally—was it CoreWeave? It seems it used to be a Bitcoin miner. Mara definitely was, right? Ansem Yes, Mara definitely was. And I’m sure Riot probably does exactly that. Um, yes, no, this is exactly true, undoubtedly. If you’re one of the new technology elite, you’re rich as hell, so you’re definitely buying real estate. You’re definitely buying gold. I think this is one of the reasons why gold flew so high this year after 10 years of stagnation. Thread Guy You traded at least a little bit of it? It seems like gold went from $2,000 to $4,000. Ansem From $2,000 to $5,000. Not particularly. I caught a little somewhere in the middle, around $3,000, but not very actively. Thread Guy It’s a pity you didn’t, bro. The rotation from memecoins into metals was simply epic. Ansem That was brilliant, bro. If you look at when WIF peaked in 2024, gold was literally at a minimum. Selling WIF and buying gold is madness. It’s unreal. It’s completely insane. Thread Guy Who could have predicted that? Ansem I don’t know. Maybe I could have, but honestly, very few people could, because who was watching both things simultaneously? I think gold getting ahead of Bitcoin became a headwind for it in 2024. But this is good, because gold was in a unique situation. Gold had been stagnant for an entire decade—literally 10 years without updating its all-time high, maybe even 12 years. This breakthrough must have been the most important thing for commodity markets in the last decade. So I don’t think this should refute the thesis that Bitcoin is digital gold. It doesn’t mean Bitcoin isn’t digital gold. It’s a somewhat selective perspective. Thread Guy That’s right. It’s selective, because while gold was standing still, Bitcoin took off by a billion percent. Ansem I think the thesis that Bitcoin is digital gold is still relevant. This is just a situational lag in the short term. People like Paul Tudor Jones still publicly support Bitcoin, which was cool. Thread Guy Right on the spot, bro. Ansem I think Druckenmiller is another one. Stanley Druckenmiller also publicly advocates for Bitcoin. So you have a lot of these quiet people from traditional finance who simply say, “Yes, we don’t care what’s happening there. We still consider Bitcoin the main part of our portfolio, and we’re going to keep it.” I think that’s why we didn’t break through $60,000. I really thought we were going to break through $60,000 the first time. Thread Guy Who supported the price? Because it wasn’t the ETF. Who? These weren’t crypto people. Ansem No, not them. These weren’t the ETF people. The ETFs were selling. Crypto people sold, the ETFs sold, and Saylor was selling. Even Saylor sold. He was dumping at $60,000 each time. He sold $200 million at $60,000, right at the most important support levels we were supposed to hold. Thread Guy God, he’s mixing it up. He drains, and someone buys. Ansem Someone bought it anyway. That’s why I really don’t think we’ll break through $58,000–$60,000. Thread Guy How would you react if we updated the lows? If we dropped to $40,000? Even $55,000 would start to break recent lows. I think a breakdown below that on the weekly chart, followed by a return above $55,000–$56,000, would already be crazy. And if we break below it and stay there, going to $40,000, I’d say, “Okay, maybe we should wait a while and stop looking at crypto. Maybe I’ll take care of something else for some time.” Ansem I don’t know if we’ll go to $40,000, because I thought that’s exactly what would happen. I would have to wait, because then you’d probably have to wait another 4–6 months. I think if we go to $40,000, and Bitcoin is at $40,000, Solana will probably be $40 each. If that happens, it’s probably another 4–6 months of waiting. I’d be like, “Okay, I have a lot of time. I don’t need to worry about this or carefully follow this nonsense.” But yes. Thread Guy What do you think about the “everyone is a trader” thesis? How do you think this will develop over the next few decades? Retail trading and the democratization of trading? Ansem I’m optimistic about this thesis. The only smart person I’ve seen who contradicts it is Chumba. I love Chumba—Chumba-Wumba. I love this guy. He thinks this is cyclical. Thread Guy Yes, he thinks it’s a cyclical process that only happens at market peaks. Although that’s partly true, the greatest interest in trading is usually observed near the peaks. Ansem That’s true, but over time I think more and more people will learn to trade—crypto, stocks, or commodities. I really believe the future is that you’ll have a mobile app, like a social network, where you check the market. I think that’s the real future. Just like people open X to scroll through the feed, TikTok to scroll, or Instagram to flip through, you’ll open something like Pump.fun or whatever other app and think, “I trade too.” It will work the same way. I think that’s literally the future. Thread Guy I think so. Perpetual contracts will become much more popular. If you look at the volume that options have now, especially short-term options, you have to be optimistic about perps. You have to be bullish on them. In the long run, they will definitely become more and more popular. Ansem I agree with Chumba that at market peaks, interest in trading becomes much higher. That’s true. But even when the market cools down, I think the base will continue to get taller and taller. I’m quite sure of that. I’m flipping through Hyperdash like it’s a social network. I had a conversation with the Hyperdash team, and they asked me about features. I asked them to add wallet tracking and things like that. I was like, “You don’t care about order tracking?” I told them, “Let’s be honest, guys. For me, it’s a social thing. It’s like a social network. It’s a TikTok replacement.” I think that’s right, but I read the other day that, allegedly, years ago—maybe 10 years ago or something like that—retail investors couldn’t even listen to earnings reports. Maybe it was a little while ago, around 15 years ago. Thread Guy Really? Ansem Yes. It’s a fairly new thing that earnings reports became public. If I’m wrong, someone correct me. Maybe it was 20 years ago. But even if it is cyclical and happens at the peak, thanks to tools like Robinhood and FanT 2000, which is 26 years old, things like Phantom and Robinhood have put trading applications in the hands of ordinary people. Even if it’s a peak phenomenon, there’s a group of people who could have been interested but didn’t have access. Because of that alone, I imagine you’ll see a surge in the number of people who trade. I don’t know. I agree. Let’s see what happens. This could work. Thread Guy But it seems like these traders are becoming new celebrities. I don’t know. Kimchi got 25 million views, bro. There are many rich people in Maybachs. That’s a lot. There are many, many “children by fraud” in Maybachs. You understand what I’m talking about? He’s not the only rich one who’s showing off. It’s not simply because he’s rich; there are plenty of people who can amass wealth quickly. The thing is, what did he do? He did it, he laid it out, and people were like, “Oh, damn.” That’s why I think you hit the nail on the head when you said traders are the new celebrities. You’ve probably been saying that for several years. I think you’re right. The reason I think you’re right is that people like celebrities because they’re very good at what they do and they’re rich—athletes who are very good at sports, or actors who are very good actors and have a lot of money. Traders are the only group of people about whom you can say, “They made a lot of money trading, and they can teach you how to become a trader.” Athletes can’t teach you how to become LeBron. Leonardo DiCaprio can’t teach you how to become Leonardo DiCaprio. But Kimchi can tell you how he earned his money trading. He can tell you what he did and why it worked. For example, people who use technical analysis, trade thinly capitalized assets, or trade on-chain can literally teach you how to earn $40 million in a couple of years. I think that’s the key difference between content celebrities and financial-content traders: listening to these people really can be worth it, no matter what you think about other stars. Ansem Wow. I never thought about it that way. That’s why the topic of courses comes up so much, bro. Think about it: the courses that many influencers sell don’t really bring them profit from the training itself. Everything relies on the idea that you can earn money through those courses. Bro, full-time trading courses were so popular. They traded forex. Forex moves by 1% per week. They trade in pips. Pips, bro. They need pips. This isn’t the same as doing 1,000x on-chain. It’s not even close. People still haven’t reached the level of popularity those courses had back then. It’s madness. The only reason those courses were popular was that people thought they could make money. It was simply the idea that they could earn money. Thread Guy Do you feel like an exile among the old-school crypto groups because you’re so addicted to memes online? Do you feel that? Ansem Yes. Some people are really mad at me. Some people have called me a swindler and every other piece of crap. There were people I considered real friends, and they were like, “No, we don’t know each other,” because I’m too bullish on memes, tokenization, and all that. They’re not my close friends, of course. That’s not true if we’re talking about true friends. But it’s strange to see it. I’m like, “Bro, I was here with you all this time.” I haven’t changed or done anything crazy. I was here in 2017 on BitMEX, Bittrex, Yobanii, Cryptopia, and all those exchanges. I was here in 2020, when DeFi took off. I’ve been here all this time with the same people. I’ve publicly earned and lost money many times over. I think I was able to evolve in a certain way and see where the crypto market was moving, while many people couldn’t. As you know, I was very pessimistic about ETH. I think ETH looks good now. It’s a bit of a strange situation, because ETH really looks okay now. But I was very pessimistic about ETH. The last time, I believed much more in Solana and the network, and of course I believed in memes. I think many people couldn’t make that reversal. Thread Guy That’s interesting. I’ll let you go soon. I have two more questions. I’m wondering what you think. Do you know Ryan Watkins? I love Ryan Watkins, and I know you do too. These guys just broke up. He tweeted the other day about how people are becoming too pessimistic about memecoins, but not optimistic enough about a rebound. You talk about this often. Even the moon-dreamers are pathetic. The perpetual dreamers suck, right? He made this post that was almost a call to action. He asked, “When was the last time you saw a post about decentralized identity, or a bullish post about DePIN, or DAOs, or all the things people came here for in 2021?” I suppose most onboarding will happen through trading applications for on-chain meme trading rather than through DePIN. Do you think that’s bad for crypto? Does it affect you in any way? Do you feel like the vision was abandoned, or is this just a natural stage in the evolution of the space? What are your feelings about this? Ansem The other day, I made a good comparison. I said blockchains are like cities. L1s are similar to cities, and if you’re a city, then you have a mayor. That’s Brian Armstrong, right? I think I said that. Thread Guy That’s right. Ansem They’re like cities where there are different types of businesses that earn money and attract visitors. You have restaurants that work well. You have banks that work well. You have tax services and all that. You have real estate that works well. But you also have bars that work well. You have clubs that work well. You have casinos that work well. They also bring profit to your city. If you’re the mayor, you can’t say, “We’re going to close all the bars, clubs, and casinos because I don’t like them.” I think the comparison between memecoins and DePIN or financial applications is very similar, because people spend a lot of time on social networks. Retail users understand memes perfectly. You won’t see the same thing with financial applications. If you look at Instagram, there are about 3 billion users, and Meta shareholders number only about 30 million. Many more people simply spend time on social networks and do business online than spend time in their banking applications. When you make that comparison, it becomes clear why people are more interested in memecoins than in analyzing stocks. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad that people are focused on speculation. Part of what I want to do is highlight real crypto businesses that work well and solve real problems, because first they need to be noticed by crypto enthusiasts before institutional capital starts investing in them. That’s what you want to see. For example, something like Credible. You need institutional capital to see that this startup solves a real problem for international businesses by using cryptocurrency and stablecoins. Institutional capital can see that, but it doesn’t want to invest at the seed stage because it doesn’t want to take that risk. We, as crypto enthusiasts, are the ones who will take that risk ourselves. Then, when it becomes clearer that tokenization makes sense for the business, that the company has real revenue, and that it’s developing successfully, I think you’ll see institutional capital come on-chain. That’s why I think this is important for on-chain stocks. Projects like Backpack and Sunrise, as well as Hyperliquid and TradeXYZ, are important because they attract institutional capital. If institutional capital comes into the network for these things, you’ll also have institutional capital coming into the network to support the startups that tokenize themselves. So I don’t think it’s necessarily bad that people are interested in memecoins. Just as you can’t force people to stop flipping through TikTok, you can’t force people to stop buying memecoins. It simply isn’t going to happen. Thread Guy That’s a very apt thought. It leads me to what I said about Base and Robinhood. All these stock exchange networks launch and say, “We’re doing RWA. We’re putting real-world assets on-chain. We’re an exchange. We have users.” And then it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. Then, boom, Cash Cat. Everyone, including their mothers, starts switching to Robinhood. Then you get some GME coin backed by GME shares, and there are $30 million of volume in minted GME shares. It’s like, boom, that’s it. This is how you should take a strip club together with JPMorgan. You need both in one city. I think that’s one of your best analogies. Here’s why I think Ryan wanted to come on after reading this. He was like, “Damn, I think he’s right. I have to come to the stream. Maybe this guy knows what he’s talking about.” In any case, I’m grateful that you came. Ansem Market bubble is straight fire. This is cool. You go live once a week, and I don’t know—I have many of the same theses as you, or at least I feel that reading your tweets helps me refine my own. This is at least an interesting place for crypto. Thread Guy What do you think? Are you bullish? I have a lot of coins now. I have a lot of coins, and I’m stuck on whether it’s relative strength or a delayed dump. The funny thing about this is what I talked about today: why I’m still holding Pump. For me, I’m holding Pump because the numbers are crazy. Pump, Zcash, and Hyperlane have formed their own small communities separate from Bitcoin. It seems like every month someone new from Silicon Valley starts talking about Zcash. Now it’s Chamath. Before that, it was Balaji. Before that, it was Naval. I think this thing simply serves a purpose that will exist separately from everything else happening in crypto, with or without a law on transparency. For example, if Navalny buys Zcash, that’s great. This thing will survive. Hyperlane is the same. And then I understood this with memecoins and Pump. I like this. You wrote this tweet the other day. Someone asked, “Where is the 10/10 candle on the Pump chart?” And you were like, “Brother, they don’t even know what happened. They’re guessing. There wasn’t even an event.” For example, Ethan Prosper buys 7% of 10,000 coins, and he doesn’t even know what happened. It doesn’t mean anything; it isn’t a real event. So I started becoming optimistic about Pump, and then crypto hits you with this. You know, this is probably irony. The market is like, “Okay, Bitcoin looks as if it has reached the bottom, or at least a local bottom,” and it begins to grow. Inflows into ETFs increase, and then on-chain experiments appear. We have things like Farcaster, there’s a Robinhood network, Vlad says something, experiments begin, Lighter starts to grow, and, damn, everything—Uniswap—just begins experimenting. And at that very moment, when everything looks okay, it begins: “Okay, war will raise rates. Ukraine is hitting Iranian oil company tankers.” This is a fact. Oil is rising, and Treasury yields are flying higher. Then, you know, SanDisk falls by 50%. I find it funny, but I’m ready to sell all my coins, although I feel that this is just as beautiful a point as any other. And I’ll tell you this: I just love on-chain experiments. I was just talking to Tulip King on the phone before this. I came into crypto through NBA Top Shot because I was involved in sports cards, and everyone hated Top Shot. I was like, “Damn, what is this? Top Shot? What kind of NFT is this?” Then the Bored Apes appeared, and so on. For the first time in a long time, I’m seeing protocols launch that seem to satisfy my interests. Even something stupid like GME, backed by GME, makes me think, “Oh, that gives me something. This is interesting.” It’s interesting. It somehow awakens excitement in me again, and I think about crypto. I no longer have the feeling that I’m just praying. You know, I felt like I spent 9 months praying. So, to some extent, we’re following your example in terms of price movements. I’ll be frank: we’re following your example, but it seems that for the first time in a long time, my expectations are justified. For me, that’s at least enough to devote a lot of time to this. We’re holding a big part of our stream discussing crypto again, but we haven’t done that in a long time. So this is a long way of saying that I’m probably tuned optimistically. Ansem No, you just did a great job, bro. I was watching you, and I think you’ve become much deeper in your understanding of everything. You’re involved in stocks, you study macroeconomics and cryptocurrency deeply, and you make deals in real time. It’s cool, bro. Fairly saying it was cool to watch. It was simply incredible. Okay, last question to finish. I asked Rhino about this, and he gave a good answer. You mentioned this a little bit, but regarding building an audience, growing your subscriber count, and publishing: do you recommend teaching people your ideas and consciously trying to gain Twitter followers? How do you feel about that over time? Ansem Publicly, I think it’s difficult to do without it affecting your psyche. You need to be very strong mentally to express your ideas publicly and not depend on what other people say. It’s difficult because usually, when you’re teaching something publicly and receive a lot of criticism, you’re actually in a good position, not a bad one. That’s what determines the top or bottom of the market: consensus must be bearish at the bottom, when pessimism dominates, and excessively optimistic at the top. When you present ideas on Twitter, you get many negative responses, often precisely at key moments when you’re really right. That can negatively affect your trading approach if you don’t stick to your initial ideas. So I would say this is difficult. If you really want to be someone who teaches and helps others trade, then I would say it’s worth it. But for many people, it’s probably better just to keep a personal diary and keep your thoughts to yourself, discuss them only with people close to you, and consider them that way. This is hard, bro. I feel that I’ve already been doing this for a long time, and it affects me too. I just said that once I was like, “My intuition says this is the top.” I was sure that it was the top, and then you were like, “You were mistaken.” Then you played a trick on me. Every green candle, I’m like, “Damn, to hell with your intuition. Your intuition hates you.” Also, Phantom 100 was given as a gift. Respect Phantom. Every green candle, I’m like, “Damn, to hell with your intuition, bro. Come to terms with it.” Ansem Yeah, I know, bro. Thread Guy Then, when the price reached an all-time high, I was like, “Okay, I’m buying Bitcoin here.” It literally reached its peak an hour later, or whatever it was. It was crazy. So it’s not easy. I mean, it’s worth it if you really want to create content about trading over the long term. As we said, I really think that people who do this well will be in a winning position thanks to years of practice. I really think this is a segment of social media and content creation that hasn’t been occupied yet. If you become one of the first in this space, then obviously you’ll make a lot of money. So, if you really, really want to do this, I think it’s worth it. But if you’re just doing it for the sake of the process, then no, it’s not a good idea. Ansem Yeah. Good idea. Thread Guy You’re the best, bro. Who will be there on Thursday? Ansem I don’t really know if I have the right to say that. Thread Guy No, don’t say it. Don’t say that. Ansem But that’s good. We have good things coming on Thursday. I think we’ll announce it tomorrow. It’s not 100% yet, but I think it will be cool on Thursday. Thread Guy Okay, no more words. Hey, dude, see you again in half a year. You’re the best, bro. Ansem Yeah, soon. Full Sun Run. I hope you’re right. I hope you checked my stomach and everything there works well, brother. Thread Guy I’m cooked. I’m concentrated. I’m concentrated. Oh, the last one: 6 SOL, $600 by January 15? Ansem Really? That was aggressive. Thread Guy It was aggressive. Ansem Good. It was aggressive. Thread Guy January 15 is my birthday. Ansem Oh, what? January 15? Thread Guy Yeah, it was aggressive. It was upgraded to $450. I think $600 is the goal. I just don’t think it will happen that fast. I really think that’s the target. Ansem Yeah, it was a little aggressive. Thread Guy But $600 is the goal. Ansem I don’t know if it will happen quickly, but yes, I think $600 is the target. Thread Guy Okay, bro. You’re the best. Do you want to advertise something? Ansem Most people already have me on X: X BK NIZ06. Subscribe to me on Instagram: BK NO YZ_06. My TikTok is actually covered now, but there’s a fake Ansem on TikTok, bro. He has around 200,000 subscribers. It’s BLK N O Z. I probably like those tweets, bro. Each has a separate clip there. They kill. This is a lot of my content. Thread Guy Let’s take his salary. Ansem Bro, I know. Thread Guy Of course we can arrange that. Ansem Yes. He has a fake Telegram too. It’s a little difficult, but yes. Thread Guy This won’t work. Bro, you’re the best. Talk to you soon, bro. I appreciate you. Thread Guy With love. Ansem I appreciate you, brother. Let it be so.