Are Fundamentals Finally Bullish?

I think this time, what emerges from this cloud of crap is going to be Bitcoin and a very small handful of solid projects that will probably perform for the next few years. I think retail is finally tapped out of meme-like investing.

Hey, nice to see you. I'm pretty happy today because the market's down 3%—both the Nasdaq and S&P—but gold is up 3%. That means my portfolio is doing pretty well, and Bitcoin's up, which means my portfolio is doing even better. Things are kind of heating up.

This is one of those scary moments for people who hold equities, where equities are just slowly grinding down. They're melting lower, but the market is acting kind of how you would expect it to, right? There are 2 types of equity selloffs. There's the everything selloff, where people are just deleveraging their book, and in that world, you open up TradingView and you're like, “Holy shit, why is literally everything red?”

Then there's this kind of selloff where there are things that are up and equities are down, which just means reallocation is happening. That's much scarier than just an everything selloff, for equity holders at least. In the last podcast, I said that I shifted my portfolio to gold and that I was giga-bullish on gold. That seems to be playing out.

The market seems to be terrified right now of holding equities, which I think is reasonable given the environment. But there are pockets of opportunity. I don't know, Avi, what are you seeing?

Yeah, I mean, gold is just ripping like a real alternative crypto asset, let's say. It doesn't look like a $25 trillion asset. It's not pricing like that; it's pricing like a microcap that's ripping in some sort of altseason, which is bizarre to see, because gold will put in decades where it does absolutely nothing or underperforms everything else. Then you get one of these, and, like you said, it makes you think twice about the stability of global markets.

There's this acronym called TINA. It stands for “There Is No Alternative,” and that acronym has historically applied to the S&P 500 because institutional capital is just starving for places to park cash. It's their job, and frankly, there aren't really a lot of options. So, the S&P 500 has been this fantastic place to park capital for a very long time.

When it sells off briefly and then does a quick V-shaped bounce, allocators can feel okay about leaving their money in stocks. But this isn't a V-shaped recovery that's happening. It's starting to bottom out. I don't know. We could talk about letters like L-shaped or U-shaped, or maybe it's just a freaking bear market, like you said. Maybe the bottom's about to fall out.

So, allocators are spooked. Since there is no alternative to equities, really, they're searching for anything right now. Anything that disconnects to the upside becomes an alternative in an environment like this. Gold started decoupling to the upside. You're not going to get fired for buying gold, right? So, the fact that it decoupled to the upside created momentum: a rally begat another rally, and so on and so forth. Gold has just started pushing higher.

I think gold is previewing what's about to happen to Bitcoin because, ultimately, allocators are scared. Bitcoin is the only other option. Maybe you, Avi, can be 100% in gold, but most institutions can't. Once you're maxed out on gold, what else do you diversify into that's sort of decorrelated from equities and gold?

1. Bitcoin & Currencies

Historically, Bitcoin's been correlated with equities, but now it's starting not to be. That's been really amazing to see Bitcoin outperforming. So, if you go to our favorite trusty chart of Bitcoin over the Nasdaq, I prefer IBIT/SPY because they have the same close.

Oh, I could do IBIT. Do whatever you want. I like the Bitcoin chart just because I can see the history, but I do agree that now it's cleaner to use IBIT.

Bitcoin over equities is at the highs.

Yeah, I mean, that ratio is literally at an all-time high. The only time it was higher than it is today was for 1 day—Monday, January 20—which was when Trump got elected and Bitcoin put in that crazy candle, or when Trump got sworn in, whatever. Then we started trending down for a bit, and now we're back at the highs.

The level of relative strength that Bitcoin is showing tells you a lot about what's going on. It tells you that Bitcoin is decoupling from equities because people are viewing this as digital gold right now. In my mind, there are really only 2 reasons why Bitcoin is trading the way it is. The first is that you still have idiosyncratic buyers like Saylor in the market, and that's keeping it up.

But the second is that people are done selling because of equities. Whatever happens to equities at this point, unless there's a complete and total collapse, I think it would probably take another 10% to 15% down in equities to trigger this. Bitcoin's doing just fine because the people who are selling on equity weakness, tariff worries, short-term liquidity hits, and repositioning all got out when we had that massive flush down to $74,000.

Now, the people who are holding Bitcoin are kind of just in it. There's no real reason to sell, and there's allocation happening because of this new global dynamic that we've discussed at length on the last podcast. In a multipolar world, cross-border assets not tied to a state become a lot more valuable.

Yeah, right. The U.S. dollar is devaluing right now against the rest of the world, which is kind of what Trump actually wants. EUR/USD is 1.15. That's crazy; it was trading basically at par a couple of months ago.

Well, you understand that's really good for Trump because if the dollar weakens and Americans have to buy more goods from America, that's a good thing.

Yeah. Trump and his tariffs make American goods more competitive. He's all about that trade deficit, right?

Yeah. Trade deficits will go down if the currency goes down. So, if that's his metric, he's getting what he wants.

People are saying that the United States is trading like an emerging market right now. I don't know if I buy that, but is there anywhere that's not trading like an emerging market by that metric?

It's a great point, honestly. Yeah, it kind of is, but the whole world is. Maybe Switzerland is trading like a flight-to-safety market, but I just think we're entering uncharted waters. I still think that the beast that Trump created is one that he can control.

Before we get to that, you brought up a really interesting feature, which is that Saylor has been buying all the way down. What was his average print, like $84,000 or $85,000?

His average buy of all Bitcoin is now almost $70,000, which in my opinion is scary. I mean, this guy really needs to stop.

2. Saylor & Copycats

Yeah, I think he really needs to just stop. Somebody should give Saylor a call and say, “Hey, man, there's actually something called being too much of the market.”

Yeah, I mean, he's gone a little bonkers. You've been a vocal fan of his financial engineering.

I guess technically, if the underlying business that he's got at MicroStrategy is enough to service his debt, then he's not going to get stopped out. But somehow, these sorts of things always end badly. My gut feel, like yours right now, is a little bit uncomfortable.

Yeah, I don't like it either.

With that being said, one trade that, if you're not on the institutional side, you're probably missing—or you're just not paying attention to—is that there are a lot of private placements going on right now for MicroStrategy competitors, and competitors not just in the U.S. market but in other markets.

I don't know if you've heard of Metaplanet. Metaplanet is in Japan, and it is buying Bitcoin like a madman, kind of like MSTR. It is now the world's 10th-largest corporate Bitcoin holder. They've stated they want to acquire 21,000 BTC by 2026.

The trade's been going nuts. These guys have done very well; their stock price has done very well. There was a private placement, and people are up like 70x on that because they basically launched at a low, at basically a flat premium, and now they're trading at a massive premium to NAV.

I think everyone has looked at the MSTR model and they're starting to say, “Wait a second. There is a tremendous amount of appetite in the market for non-recourse leverage on Bitcoin.” That's really what I think MSTR is at the end of the day: you buy it, it accumulates more Bitcoin over time, and hopefully the premium blows out because people think it's going to keep accumulating Bitcoin and there's going to be even more demand for that non-recourse leverage.

People are like, “Wait, why are we letting Saylor take all the money? Why don't we go launch our own versions of this?” There's another one called likely Méliuz in Brazil.

There’s a Solana one that just announced that they’re launching. I personally wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot more of these projects go live, potentially even at a much larger scale. Most of these are between $50 million and $400 million. There could be a couple-billion-dollar ones launching because there’s really no reason to let MicroStrategy play this game alone. Why not? I think that’s starting to happen, which is very bullish for Bitcoin—very, very bullish.

3. Ads (Kraken OTC, WalletConnect)

I have no take on the trades themselves, especially if you’re buying them on the open market. I have no idea if you’re going to make money. But a lot of these private placements, I think, are probably reasonably good trades. You just have to poke around to try to find them. You have to put a big check—$1 million to $5 million—into them. But that’s what’s happening, because people realize, like we’ve talked about, that this financial engineering from Saylor is pretty damn good. Maybe we should get a slice of the pie. And I think that’s going to continue. I mean, you saw GME doing it now. Basically, I’m bullish on Bitcoin not just because—oh, decoupling from gold, blah, blah, blah, global macro. There’s a genuine flow dynamic here that’s helping Bitcoin out.

4. Crypto’s Decoupling Moment

Yeah, and it’s good you brought it up. I mean, there are whales in gold, too, right? Who’s the big whale in gold right now? And who started this whole rally? It’s the PBOC, the People’s Bank of China. They’re divesting U.S.-issued securities for obvious reasons. And to the whole point about TINA, there aren’t many places you can go. Gold is one extremely viable place.

When China participates in commodities markets, including gold, it understands that it has a lot of pricing power. When they stop buying, prices go down, and when they continue buying, prices go up. So they probably know full well that they’re just going to be pumping their own bags for the next 5 to 10 years as they divest from U.S. securities and roll it into gold. I’d say I feel a little more comfortable betting on the PBOC as a whale in a precious-metals market than I do betting on Michael Saylor in the Bitcoin market.

However, Bitcoin is just at an earlier stage of where gold is now, right? Gold probably started on a lot of corporate balance sheets for thousands, or maybe hundreds, of years when it was basically the global reserve currency and companies needed to stack it in order to transact and manage it in their treasuries. That’s kind of what’s happening with Bitcoin. A few forward-thinking companies are saying, “Hey, this is the non-sovereign money of the future. Let me have some on my balance sheet.”

5. 1000x Terminal

I think if you’re going to invest in one of these private placements, it’s really just high-grade, or maybe high-yield, credit analysis. You have to be able to go into the credit of the issuer of these debt securities and understand what their cash flows are. If you’re a seasoned financial analyst and you’re good at this stuff—maybe you work in equity research or investment banking, you have some background as a consultant, or you went to business school—you should be able to tell, A, whether or not these companies are going to be able to service their debt obligations for the debt they raised to buy Bitcoin, and B, whether they’re required to do so by covenants or not. You also need to know whether they can just take your money and rug you, or whether they’re legally required to service their debt with cash flows from the existing businesses.

If boxes A and B are checked, then you basically just have to—it just comes down to the valuation. Are you buying at a smart or a stupid valuation? Honestly, it feels a little bit Ponzi-ish, but then again, so is gold, right? Ultimately, we talked about this maybe 50 episodes ago, but look no further than the Money exhibit at the British Museum to see the nonsensical things that people have ascribed value to and means of exchange to over the centuries, right? Why not Bitcoin?

I think, ultimately, the real bull moment will come for Bitcoin when the asset class graduates beyond the likely Nayib Bukele and the Michael Saylor and these other debt-fueled buying instruments out there, and graduates into the world of the U.S. starting to accumulate Bitcoin on the open market for a strategic reserve, and the European Union starting to buy Bitcoin on the open market for a strategic Bitcoin reserve. That happens because it becomes clear that, in a multipolar world, sovereigns are overallocated to the U.S. dollar for global trade. And it feels like we’re getting—and I would have thought that point would have come extremely gradually over 20 years, but it’s starting to happen quite suddenly because of these tariffs. In macro investing, you really have to watch for decouplings like this. This may be the first time that crypto has decoupled from stocks in a bear market—has it ever?

You know what’s interesting is that normally the way that crypto decouples is that it bottoms first and then it sort of rallies out harder than the equity markets. The equity markets will go down a little bit more, maybe for a few days to a week, and then they’ll rebound, but Bitcoin’s already rebounded at this point. That seems kind of—actually, that’s not really what’s happening right now.

Yeah. Bitcoin bottomed on Monday, April 7. That’s the same day that the Nasdaq bottomed. Then you had that massive move up in the Nasdaq when the tariffs were reversed. The Nasdaq started bleeding out again, but Bitcoin didn’t; it kind of held, right?

Right. And that’s a little bit of a different dynamic than what I was describing before, where you still have the straight line down in the Nasdaq, but Bitcoin started to go up. This is Bitcoin showing relative strength, not bottoming first, if that makes sense. I think there’s actually a distinction there, which is a much more powerful indicator.

Yeah, because then it’s a hedge. For the trillion or tens of trillions of dollars’ worth of equity capital out there, Bitcoin, instead of just being a correlated thing that moves first, becomes something that protects your equities. Nobody wants to sell their equities. We all believe in human innovation. We all believe in the American market, right? Nobody actually wants to say, “All right, this is it. End of the empire. It’s over. It was a great experiment, but let’s get bearish on stocks until they go to zero.” Nobody’s going to make that bet because it’s just been the worst bet ever and probably will be proven terrible again. We just don’t know when it’s going to bottom out.

What the world is looking for is a hedge. If Bitcoin—the second it proves it’s a hedge—oh my goodness, Avi, this is going to get silly. It is going to get silly. There’s just not enough BTC. Gold is so much bigger than Bitcoin. Bitcoin could get silly if it becomes an institutional equities hedge.

6. Bitcoin Tails Are Mispriced

I 100% agree with that. The takeaway, because I want you guys to always think about trading and how to make money, and not just pontificating about macro, is that I think the tails on Bitcoin are really underpriced right now. If you want to—I don’t trade options a ton because I only do it when I really have an edge—but Bitcoin IVs for the end of the year are sitting in the mid-50s basically all the way up to $170,000.

What’s the December 31 $170,000-strike call cost?

It’s $3,000. Oh, that sounds cheap, right? That’s kind of what I’m saying. It’s not—I mean, maybe. I personally think that this happens sooner rather than later. So it’s kind of a now-it-happens-now-or-it-doesn’t-really-happen situation: We get, at least from this particular decoupling moment, a really big boost in the next 2 to 3 months.

So really, I’d be looking at $100K. I’d be looking at June 27th $100K, and you’re looking at $3.5K. If it goes to $100K–$120K, I mean, that’s a solid 6x for you.

Well, it’s more that the vol would rip.

Well, yeah. I mean, I’m talking at expiry, right? If, at expiry, it reaches that terminal value, you would 6x.

I think you could probably make more if it obviously happens very quickly. I think you would 6x your money if it hit $100K. Let’s say that in a month it’s trading at $100K. I think the vol would be so high that you would have 6x’d your initial investment.

That’s my options trader intuition, and that makes it a very attractive play in my mind. That vol is like 50 vol, which is pretty damn low.

Yeah, 50 vol is—I mean, that’s somewhere between oil and natural gas, just to compare it to real-world assets. Equity vol tends to be—I guess the VIX is trading at—what is it? That’s pricing in a 2.6% move a day. I just did the quick math.

Yeah, which is pretty low. I mean, if today we’re up 2.5%.

Yeah, but VIX is at 34, man.

Bitcoin options are a really nice trade right now. If you want to express bullishness on BTC, I really love BTC options.

7. Selective Alt Season

I agree with you. I’m not disagreeing with you, Avi. And I think that if BTC options are a little bit tough for you to access, or you feel uncomfortable trading on—

That was what I was about to say. Yeah, go and trade some IBIT calls. I think those are super liquid.

Honestly, the way that I’ve been looking for my optionality is in alt beta. I think that some of these altcoins are—I think we may have a selective alt season if Bitcoin starts to rip. I think certain assets will drastically outperform Bitcoin. Most alts won’t, but I’m looking for a couple that will.

My heuristic—basically, you and I talked about Hyperliquid on that awesome podcast we did with Felix on the lows. I bought some, and ever since I bought it, I’ve been kind of pacing around my office trying to defend or trying to poke holes in the idea that a project like Hyperliquid, which takes 95-plus percent of its fee profits and divvies them back to users in the form of token buybacks—

I’m trying to understand why that’s any worse than owning equity in a great company, and I haven’t been able to. It’s almost better than owning equity in a great company. It’s like owning equity in a company that gives you a profit share, that basically takes its net income every year and just divvies it out pro rata to the equity holders in a profit-share-style fashion.

I think fantastic businesses that are antifragile and benefit from volatility—like, the best business in crypto is an exchange, and this exchange’s token is linked to the project via buybacks. If we get a crazy Bitcoin move—let’s say you’re right, let’s say we get a volatile move up past $100K—people will be trading their balls off on Hyperliquid and fees will go through the roof.

I think there’s sort of a reflexive buyback mechanism in there that will help pump your bags, in addition to just the general rising tide lifting all ships in crypto. So I think one way to play a rally is to buy IBIT calls or call spreads, probably just calls because the vol is low.

Another way to play it is to take projects that are showing relative strength to Bitcoin right now for good reason, like HYPE. I hung out with the Chief last week. He shilled me again. TAO’s TA is looking good. It looks like some good trading potential, so I think that one might be a good one.

Solana, maybe. I mean, really, I’m looking at Pendle, HYPE, and TAO.

8. Ads (Kraken OTC, WalletConnect)

Yeah, those are—I think you might get an options-like move in those. Short ETH, long these things, and just wait 6 months and be up 100%. I think it’s the right trade. I mean, ETH—again, I won’t beat a dead horse. It’s [__].

9. Options Strategies

Back to options for a second. A great trader once told me, “I spent most of my career trading options. That was my bread and butter. You’re never supposed to buy options unless you expect the market to move fast,” right?

It’s very rare for markets to move fast, and usually they move fast to the downside because everybody’s long and then there’s a panic. Those panics are very difficult to predict, and so buying puts—puts are expensive. Put skew always trades at a premium to call skew. It’s kind of a loser’s game. I don’t like buying puts.

I really like selectively buying calls in scenarios like this, where, for once in a blue moon, both of us do expect the market to have a reasonable probability of moving fast to the upside. That would be because of institutional investors piling into Bitcoin and sovereigns piling into Bitcoin as a hedge against their U.S. equities. I think if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen in the next 3 to 6 months max.

Yeah. Basically, I agree with you. I personally think that $88K, which is where we are right now, is just an unstable price. It doesn’t make sense for Bitcoin to hang out here.

Either we’re both completely off base—it’s possible—and Bitcoin is just being supported by Saylor and one other player. Once they’re done—I mean, Saylor announced that he was done this morning—but once the other guy’s done, or whoever is buying is done, then it just collapses.

Or there’s a genuine repositioning happening here, which is more of the camp that I lie in, and there are genuine flows coming in. Bitcoin is much higher very quickly.

One way to play this is maybe you buy some $74K puts and buy some $100K calls. If you were weak and a scaredy-cat, you could do that. If you’re strong like an ox, you could just buy the calls, but it’s up to you.

I prefer not. I’m so allergic to buying options. I spent most of my life selling them. I think theta is the silent killer. You shouldn’t bet on too many things happening at the same time. Vol’s not that cheap. Cheap vol in Bitcoin is like 30% or below.

But I do think that the market’s mispricing it right now—to the upside, for sure. The upside is mispriced. You could also buy some puts on ETH and some calls on BTC. That’s another fun trade.

If I bought a strangle, I would be looking to actively, dynamically hedge the puts and leave the calls naked in the bottom drawer. If the market shanked to the downside, I would be either buying delta or selling out of my puts and leaving the calls on.

Yeah, that’s smart. I think that’s right. Maybe the market will gift us with another run at $80K, $85K, or something like that, or $83K, and we’ll be able to scoop that.

I was reasonably caught off guard by how little we moved while the equity markets were tanking and going all over the place. From Saturday, April 12th, to Sunday, April 20th, we moved in something like a $2,000 range on BTC. I can’t say that was expected. If you’d asked me on that Saturday, “Hey, is Bitcoin going to move in a $2,000 range for a week?” I would have said, “No, you’re nuts.”

But now we’ve broken out of that tiny little mini-range, and I think we’re going to see some vol pretty soon.

10. Alt Seasons Are Over

Yeah, a 5% day. I was going to say, I think we’re both wanting to talk in the same direction, which is about alts. I think if we do get a rally, this next rally will finally separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to altcoins.

Last summer, we had people investing billions of dollars in different memecoins. Pump.fun was the only long-term beneficiary. Most other people probably lost money on it. I think this time, what emerges from this cloud of crap is going to be Bitcoin and a very small handful of solid projects that will probably perform for the next few years.

I think retail is finally tapped out of meme-like investing, and we'll finally buy into our thesis that you have to have some financial linkage between genuine project revenue, business revenues, and underlying tokenomics. What do you think about that?

I don't know, man. I think you're just stating what's already happened. I actually had a conversation earlier today where it struck me: we're done. The dot-com boom era of crypto is over.

This is the part where Amazon takes its lead and never gives it up in crypto. I'm sorry to say it, but I think alt seasons are over. They're just not coming back, because everyone—let's put it like this—ETH kind of took the wool out of everyone's eyes and took the shade off. People realized, holy crap, if ETH can be a 7-year-long pump and dump, I really can't buy anything unless it makes money, unless it's an actually useful product.

Even if it makes money, I have to stay on top of it, because ETH made money for a bit and was deflationary for about 3.5 seconds. Then it stopped being deflationary, stopped making a good amount of money, and promptly basically went to zero.

I think this is shocking to a lot of people. I think crypto is going to stop being that casino, in a sense. The only thing that brings it back is the world having to start feeling really wealthy again. You kind of need a COVID-like dynamic where people just want to punt on things left and right, or you need GDP growth to be 5% for some reason, everyone feeling flush with cash, and the stock market up 30%.

Basically, until you see that already happening—and even then, I don't know—or you need a $150,000 Bitcoin and all the incels feel rich and start hyper-gambling again.

Yes, I take your point. I just have 1 issue with how you framed it. I'm not describing what already happened. The likely SOL/BTC ratio is 70% off the all-time highs, right? Solana is as legitimate a project as any in crypto.

I think there will be a very selective altcoin season, limited to, let's say, 2 dozen tokens or fewer, during the next rally, where those tokens actually outperform Bitcoin. Both of us have been saying alt seasons are over, and yes, the dot-com boom is over, but I still don't think I'm describing a boom that's already occurred.

Yeah, the boom part hasn't occurred yet, but I guess what I was trying to articulate is that we're in the process of the wheat being separated from the chaff right now. The chaff is going to zero and the wheat isn't. The wheat isn't rallying yet, but it will rally.

Hyperliquid did well since I told you to get in on it.

Good trade, man. Thank you for cluing me into that. Going long Hyperliquid. I should just retire now. I haven't sold any Hyperliquid. I think I'm probably going to take some profits around $20.

Think about it, Jonah. Don't even think about it. Last episode, you were saying to think about it at $30.

$30?

$30. Okay, $30. $20 to $25 to $30—you can scale out of a little bit.

We're too close to $20. We've spent 5 days in this $17–$18 range.

I think that we punch through $20.

I can neither confirm nor deny if I've used Hyperliquid.

Yeah, I can't confirm or deny either, but I've heard from folks who have that it's pretty freaking amazing.

The UX is—

11. Ads (Ledger)

No, it's great. It's great. Honestly, it's a top-tier product all around, and I'm hoping that we find more.

12. Researching Profitable Projects

One thing I've grown to appreciate is that if you're in crypto and trying to figure out this space, it's very difficult to do all of your own work. Basically, my entire day is spent reading research reports. Blockworks Research, Messari, and Delphi Digital are also very good. Messari is still good even after the departure of our beloved leader, our dear leader.

Oh, wow.

You kind of need to be reading a lot and actually diving in. You have to go on DeFiLlama basically every single day, and you have to talk to people who are in all the different ecosystems. The dTAO thing is a great example of this. If I didn't know dTAO and you didn't know dTAO, there's no way in hell I would know that dTAO was popping off, that people are actually using it, and that even though there's a ton of friction, it's growing and there's TVL coming to the chain. How would I know?

What's your favorite metric on DeFiLlama, by the way? I'll tell you mine. You tell me yours.

It depends on what I'm looking at, but I don't really look at TVL. I just look at fees and unique users.

Fees is my favorite. 7-day fees is my favorite metric on DeFiLlama because, like I said before—and feel free, this is your chance to disagree with my thesis, by the way—I think we're past the dot-com moment too. I think only real businesses will survive. Because it's all on-chain, you literally have a dashboard telling you, in as granular a format as you like, how much money these businesses are making. Even Amazon stock didn't have that back in the day. They reported quarterly.

So I just look at fees to see, okay, Tether 7-day fees: $130 million. There's no way to invest in that. Damn. Circle is next; can't invest. Pump.fun is next; can't invest. Jupiter is next: questionable tokenomics, but that's cool.

I don't know, man. If Jupiter starts passing back revenue—

The thing about fees that's kind of difficult is that revenue and fees are different, right? Let's look at revenue, then. Revenue for Jupiter is $240 million annualized, and fees are almost $1 billion, because they have to pass back—when you're looking at a DEX—

You've got to remember fees are also paid out to liquidity providers.

Yeah. Fees can give you the full picture, but for DEXs they don't.

Well, for Hyperliquid, fees equal revenue because it's a—

For Hyperliquid, fees equal revenue.

Yeah, for Hyperliquid, fees equal revenue. For Jupiter, they don't, because liquidity providers get—

Because it's an AMM.

Yeah, correct.

Now, revenue is still pretty good. Hyperliquid's 7-day revenue is $7 million, so they're making $1 million a day. Freaking crazy. Obviously, Tron is up there too. But Hyperliquid is the 6th-highest protocol in the world when it comes to 7-day revenue. The ones above it are Axiom, Tron, Pump.fun, Circle, and Tether. So basically, Hyperliquid is the most investable, and I think the price-to-earnings ratio is still kind of in line with what you'd see in the Nasdaq, not what you'd see in a mania-style environment for tech. So it's probably okay here.

I love that metric. That ratio is pretty solid. But, I mean, go on DeFiLlama, read research reports, and try to find the things that are actually making money and performing well. Curve, I think, is going to be a winner as well, generally.

I bear-posted Curve, which is sometimes what I do when I'm undereducated on a protocol. I was like, "They're not really doing enough to compensate their users." Then somebody replied to me, "What are you talking about? Look into their tokenomics." They sent me all the white papers, and I did my research. It does indeed seem like Curve is passing a lot back.

The problem with Curve—so I was wrong—the problem with Curve is, I'm just looking at this dashboard, they make $159,000. Fees are $300,000 a day, and revenue is $159,000 a day. Not too shabby if you're just a couple of guys who created a protocol, but if you're trying to invest in the token, what's the FDV right now? Let's see here.

I just think that as stablecoins heat up, people move to Curve as a play.

Yeah, it was really useful during the last sort of 2022–23 crisis. FDV of Curve—sorry, not TVL—is $1.3 billion. So $150,000 for 7 days times 52 weeks gets you to $7.8 million a year. So $1,300 divided by $7.8—that's a—hold on, my cell in Excel can't show me that many digits. That's 167 P/E. I'm not sure that's necessarily the greatest entry point, but who knows? I'm not an equity investor.

13. Ecosystem Opportunities

Maybe we need to pivot. Maybe we need to start hiring equity analysts to value crypto companies the way equities work, because that is a direction we're headed.

Yeah, the game has become a lot harder. If you're not getting good information from good sources and talking to the right people, it's basically impossible to make money now.

I wouldn’t say impossible, but it’s very hard. In the alt world, it’s pretty freaking hard, especially if you don’t have a finance background. I guess the thing is, markets never get easier. But crypto is still, relatively speaking, a lot easier than, say, the US equity markets, where you’re just going head-to-head with Ken Griffin on every trade. That’s an uncomfortable place to be.

We’re still kind of pre-rails. The rails aren’t really there yet for institutions to actively trade altcoins. And if you want to get even deeper into the weeds, since we were talking about TAO and dTAO, let’s just use TAO as an example. One layer removed from altcoin trading on liquid crypto exchanges, one level of sophistication below that is trading subnets on TAO, right?

A tweet will come out about some subnet. Barry Silbert will pump one of the subnets in a tweet or an interview, and then it’ll rally a couple of hours later. It’ll rally a lot, and you have to have TAO to play that game. So obviously, you can’t really trade these versus dollars, but if you’re inside of that ecosystem, it’s even more inefficient.

I can’t say that I’m invested in TAO right now. I’m not. I kind of wanted to enter last week, got lazy, and now the price has pumped by 20%, so I feel a little bit worse about it. I’m still just mulling it. But if you want to actively click-trade something that’s quote-unquote easy, you have to search for these ecosystems within ecosystems that are going to perform.

If you end up doing well there, you stack more TAO. And if TAO performs, then, to quote the chief, it’s kind of like DeFi summer: stacking ETH using DeFi, just good trading on-chain. You stack more ETH, and then ETH would rally and your returns would compound. So maybe there are some opportunities a few layers below the surface of the onion there. I’m just spitballing here. Any other ecosystems you’re looking at, Avi?

No, I need to start deep-diving into a few. I need to do a refresh of the Solana ecosystem to see if anything is out there.

I think that could be kind of fun. This podcast—we always offer ways to think about the market and trades, and right now the way to trade and make money is to go deep and then express it through pairs. We can talk all day about directionally trading macro and BTC, but there are other ways to make money.

With the exception of not having top-ticked Bitcoin at 108—I’m just speaking for myself here; maybe you did—I’m pretty proud of our general macro, long-term analysis. We’ve had the call right since the lows, and we haven’t really suggested that people stop out of their long-term core long, even on these pullbacks. This asset class is showing all the signs of performing versus the dollar over the long haul, and it already has performed versus equities.

It’s at the highs versus equities. So if you’ve been in Bitcoin, you’ve performed admirably versus your peers in the equity markets. To give us a little bit of credit, I am quite proud of the way that we’ve foreseen Bitcoin’s performance. Going forward, I haven’t lost any conviction in that macro thesis.

But aside from just giving up on most memecoins and most altcoins, I do feel underprepared for the microanalysis that allows you to replicate compounding returns in a DeFi summer—or maybe this next one is TAO. I don’t know.

Good stuff, man.

Likewise. I’ll catch you in another week.

Yeah, see you next week. Who knows what’s in store for us? This market’s crazy. I can tell you: BTC up, ETH down. That’s all I’m saying.