The Bear Case for Risk Assets | 1000x

Bitcoin doesn't care about XRP; XRP cares about XRP. If you look at the XRP chart, it was trading at $0.47, then ripped up to $0.95 and has sort of settled around $0.76. That's a 60% rally, or 50% rally—something in there. That's monster price action. The volatility of that asset is probably determined, at least in part, by the fact that it's far less liquid than Bitcoin, but it tells you that the ruling was spectacularly positive for crypto.

A lot has happened over the last 2 weeks since we last joined you. Bitcoin almost hit $32K and is back down to $30K as we're recording this podcast. A judge ruled in the Ripple lawsuit, and Ripple seems to have come out of that in a much stronger position than it was before. It has opened the door for other altcoins to potentially be deemed not securities if they're issued and traded in a very specific way, and the market in general has reacted very favorably to that outside of Bitcoin.

ETH/BTC is higher, most alt ratios against Bitcoin are higher, but Bitcoin is actually below where the news came out. That's telling; it tells you a lot about the type of market participant and the fears in the market. You have the Nasdaq ripping pretty hard, the S&P doing quite well, and fears around inflation coming down. The cry after the Ripple case was that we're past everything bad and that Bitcoin could only go up, and now we're back down. Jonah, what do you make of that?

That's a great intro. I think there's a bit of an issue with Bitcoin right now, which is that there are still some issues surrounding Binance and some fear about what might happen with the general liquidity climate in crypto.

Let's say you're at a traditional finance institution like PIMCO or BlackRock, or even a hedge fund like Millennium, and you want to buy Bitcoin spot institutionally. It's probably difficult for you to do so. What are your options if you want to get long Bitcoin? You can invest in one of these crypto funds—asset managers that get you long Bitcoin—and those asset managers have seen 4 consecutive weeks of the largest inflows of the last 12 months.

You can buy CME futures, which trade at a significant premium to spot, or you can buy one of these discounted ETP products if you can't touch spot, like the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, Bitwise, or something similar. If you want to buy spot, you're looking at custody issues and all the crypto-native stuff that people listening to this podcast are probably familiar with. A lot of hedge funds, asset managers, and pension funds aren't necessarily comfortable with that just yet.

I think the best way to track this is to look at CME futures basis: where do the futures trade relative to spot? Right now, the futures are trading 12% annualized above spot. That tells you there's TradFi demand for Bitcoin length, and not enough of it, and that this TradFi length exceeds the spot bottleneck that I just discussed. Call it a regulatory bottleneck; call it an operational bottleneck.

You shouldn't be able to earn 12% a year buying spot and shorting Bitcoin futures against it. That's a riskless trade, but clearly there aren't enough arbitrageurs out there able to do that. So it shows you that there's demand for Bitcoin, but there's a bit of a liquidity and market-structure problem that will ultimately get solved but hasn't been solved just yet. I think Bitcoin would be higher if it weren't for the fact that you have market-structure issues getting worked out right now.

That makes a ton of sense, Jonah. Some practical advice here: if you want to go look at the CME futures curve, where can you do that?

If you have a Bloomberg Terminal, it's very easy. I haven't actually tried doing it on TradingView, but ultimately, you can go to the CME website. Anyone can do this. Pull up the contract specifications for Bitcoin futures, and the CME will publish what's called an end-of-day report. It's a little clunky, but you can look at all the different futures prices at the end of the day relative to Bitcoin's spot price at the same time. That should be helpful.

I think your point there is very clear: people can't come in. There are a lot of people that can't come in and actually buy spot and perform the trade, and you have to assume that the trade leg that's difficult to access is the spot leg, right?

I'm sure there are a lot of market-neutral funds out there that would love to come in and capture that 12%, especially because it's levered. You only have to post something like 35% on the CME futures in order to trade them, so it's quite capital-efficient from that perspective.

I guess the one thing that really stands out here is that, for the last year, we haven't really had any contango in CME futures. I do think some of that is a lack of accessibility to spot, and I assume that the spot market has gotten harder to access for a lot of people. But a portion of that is definitely, I would assume, people betting on the ETF—at least some amount of that—and just general demand for crypto.

In a bear market, when the market's selling off, nobody's getting long futures. They're using them as a liquid instrument to short Bitcoin as it's going down. One of the things that always worries me is when you have really good news and you can't get higher, and it doesn't bring in the capital that you were expecting it to bring in. That's generally a pretty bearish sign. So I think it goes both ways: if bad news can't bring the market lower, that's bullish; if good news can't take the market higher, that's bearish.

That's a great point. Just to interject one quick thing there before you continue: normally, when good news comes out and markets don't rally, I agree with you—it's bearish. But you sometimes just don't know why, and you have to respect the price action and be cautious. Here, we actually have a working hypothesis as to why, so maybe the market structure just needs to untangle itself before this asset class can rally, and you'll have lower prices to buy in the near future.

Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think people are just too worried about what the DOJ may or may not do to Binance and what the SEC may or may not do to Binance. There's just a lot of hesitation in the market right now.

You really have to believe that if you're buying at $30K, you've got to get to at least $40K. For an asset as volatile as Bitcoin, you want good returns. The issue is that if you're buying, let's say, $2K ETH or $30K BTC, you want $40K or $3K for ETH. If those 2 prices are not reasonable in your mind, then you're not going to deploy at those levels.

What ends up happening is that the only people who buy those breakouts—the people buying $31K, the people buying above $2K—are the FOMO buyers, who are very weak-handed. What you really need, I think, is to clear the air. We're really only going to go higher once we get a resolution for the market players that we just talked about. Once that comes to an end, whether it's positive or negative, then the market can go higher.

One thing that's useful for viewers and listeners to appreciate—and I've seen this happen over and over—is that, because there isn't new money coming into the market in a substantial way, one of the best ways to track the validity of a move is to go to CoinGlass and look at how much open interest was opened during that move.

For example, there was a move to $31K 3 weeks ago that was 1-to-1 correlated with an increase in open interest. To the downside, every time we get lower, what you see is a lot of shorts pile in. As I'm speaking right now, a lot of shorts have piled into Bitcoin below $30K. Once you go above $30K, they probably close, and so this has just turned into an extremely PvP market—player versus player.

It's not that you're buying from retail that's selling to you, or selling to retail that's buying from you. You're not even buying from institutions that are there. There's none of that. You're buying from other people who are looking to play you for the greater fool, and you're looking to play them for the greater fool.

There's no genuine accumulation or acceptance at this moment in time, and what you're left with is a lot of very choppy price movement in the market. You get a 3% move up and then a 3% move down, over and over, until people quit. Generally, what I've seen is that this type of price action is not bullish; it's generally bearish.

My bets are that this range—$30K to $32K—absent a positive resolution from Binance or Tether, likely resolves lower because there's a lack of interest in the space right now. You really either need—I guess I should add another caveat—an ETF approval. Genuine approval could do that, but at this point, the probability of an ETF getting approved isn't likely to go up or down. It's likely to stay the same over the next few months. So it's really a resolution on the other fronts.

Just a quick comment on that. When I was a kid, I played Street Fighter. I went into the woods and played Street Fighter with people of equal talent to me, just to give you a sense of the date range between Avi's video-game life and mine. I think Street Fighter is pretty awesome, though.

I have a slightly different take on it from you. Just looking at the chart, looking at the daily candles, what really ripped the market was the BlackRock ETF news back in June. Bitcoin doesn't care about XRP; XRP cares about XRP. If you look at the XRP chart, it was trading at $0.47, then ripped up to $0.95 and has sort of settled around $0.76. That's a 60% rally, or 50% rally—something in there. That's monster price action.

The volatility of that asset is probably determined, at least in part, by the fact that it's far less liquid than Bitcoin, but it tells you that the ruling was spectacularly positive for crypto. Ultimately, though, I think what the price action is telling you is that the thesis for altcoins is an entirely different marketplace from Bitcoin right now.

Bitcoin is a macro asset. It's digital gold, de-dollarization, peer-to-peer money, and potentially a threat to dollar dominance in global trade over a 50-year time horizon. You have all these overarching narratives for Bitcoin that don't really overlap with the narratives for altcoins, which are more like: Can projects issue math-based instruments? Let's just call them instruments for now. Are they securities or not?

Ultimately, ETH/BTC, which you brought up earlier, should be the barometer for this dichotomy. It didn't rally that much on the ruling. It rallied from 0.061 to 0.063. If you look at some of the alt L1s, they popped a bit versus ETH, but then they're drifting back off again.

I think what all of this tells you, zooming way back out, is that the market just cares about an ETF. The market doesn't care about whether these things are securities or not right now. If there's an ETF, then you have probably a universe containing trillions or tens of trillions of dollars that can easily click and trade Bitcoin, whereas right now your universe is probably under $1 trillion.

I think all of that is fair. I think the one asset that actually cared about what was going on is Ripple, or XRP, and you can see that in its pricing.

One thing I was thinking about that the ruling didn't cover is: What are the criteria for determining whether something is genuinely a security? What are the actions and behaviors of the people who issued the token that make it a security versus a non-security? You basically need to make the case that all these other assets have acted in a similar fashion to the Ripple management team with regard to their interaction with the token.

They weren't promotional. There are all these different criteria that go into it. It's not that the ruling says XRP sold on an exchange is not a security. It's very clear that the criteria are not simply that if it's sold on an exchange and is a token, then it's not a security.

Obviously, if Apple were to come out and say, "Hey, guys, we're going to take our equity, and you give it back to us. We're going to give you a token, and that token is going to trade on Uniswap, and everything else is going to be the same," that doesn't make that token not a security. There are other criteria that go into it that may or may not fit with these other altcoins, which I think the market has started to realize and sober up to.

That being said, I do think the outcome is helpful in that it sets up some vague guidelines about what you can do to potentially not be a security if you act in these certain ways that the Ripple team has acted in. Maybe you also can be deemed a non-security if you take that path.

What that means for the rest of the alt market is that funds can use their judgment to allocate in a way that they couldn't really before, because there were no criteria for using that judgment. In general, I think this is bullish for the market, and I do think that we've seen a top in Bitcoin for parts of the alt market.

I think that this will cause a dispersion trade. Tokens like Ethereum—Vitalik never did a deal with IBM to try and generate PR and issued them a block of ETH. It was all just an ICO where you paid Bitcoin, sent Bitcoin to an address, and got some ETH back out of it. Pretty amazing trade for anyone who did that, by the way.

Then you have tokens like—well, I don't want to name names—but tokens that have literally just taken massive chunks of value out of their foundations and sent them to wallet addresses of Web2 companies to try and generate PR. Maybe that's not kosher according to what this new ruling has laid out in terms of what could potentially be lawful and what's not.

Ultimately, I think some alts should rip, like ETH. I'm very bullish—very, very bullish—on ETH. I think ETH has probably underperformed the ruling, but with other alts, I would be careful. I don't think this is a trade for the entire top 100.

Yeah, I would agree with that. There are some altcoins that I really like. Again, this is not financial advice; it never is. These are just altcoins that seem to be doing a good job generating traction for themselves.

Optimism is one of them. They’ve done a phenomenal job—better than most other assets out there—coordinating with other participants that want to build L2s and managing to extract value back to them. A project that didn’t do this well was Cosmos. Luna was built on top of Cosmos; it got to a $100 billion market cap, while ATOM only got to $20 billion. Cosmos did a terrible job, despite providing the base layer for a lot of different applications and protocols, of extracting value from that.

Optimism has done something different. They’ve actually gotten it in writing that they’re going to get 10% of the sequencer fees generated by Base, Coinbase’s L2. Worldcoin is also building on Optimism, and there may be some economic agreement there. Now there can be economic agreements built into using the Optimism-based stack, so that Optimism holders benefit if the stack built by the Optimism Foundation actually gets used in other places. They’ve done a very, very good job with this, and I really like what they’ve done.

I do think that Arbitrum benefits from this knock-on effect as well, despite the fact that they’re competitors, which we can get into in a bit. One thing I’ve noticed is that LINK has been performing quite well today and yesterday, and I think a portion of that is because they finally released CCIP, the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol—their layer-to-layer communication protocol. That was expected in Q4, and it came out a little bit early, so that’s been good to see.

In general, what I’ve found is that there are select altcoins that are doing well from a fundamental perspective, actually building the right things and tackling the right areas. These have tended to do a lot better than the aggregate altcoin market, and I think that will continue.

You just mentioned doing the right things. Let’s talk about what the right things are, because we haven’t talked about altcoins for a while. They’ve just been this basket of obscure tokens in the world we live in now. Maybe we’re in the first innings of a new bull cycle for altcoins, and maybe we have to figure this out and think through it, as every trader does.

We seem to agree that some altcoins are amazing, or at least have potential, and others should be avoided. It’s not an all-altcoin market like it was in 2021. Let’s try to examine this for the listeners and get your opinion, obviously, as a crypto native, on whether we’re still moving to a multichain world, or whether it’s really going to be all about Ethereum for on-chain computing over the course of the next cycle.

I tend to think the latter. I tend to think that your Solanas, NEARs, Polkadots, and all these other ecosystems are dead on arrival at this point. You look at DefiLlama, and there’s no TVL. You look at the user counts and wallet addresses, and they’re all sort of plateauing. Meanwhile, the ecosystem and the 2 altcoins you just mentioned—which are part of it, not LINK, obviously, but Arbitrum and Optimism—that’s the only ecosystem that seems to be flourishing in this bear market.

Is the multichain thesis still alive for the next cycle? I vote no. I think it’s time to write it off. What do you think?

I think what ends up happening is that you get projects that are willing to build on things like Solana, Avalanche, NEAR, and all of these other protocols because, if they’re competent and have a good team, they can win that space. When the bull market comes back, there are probably still going to be incentive programs that these protocols run.

But incentive programs—that’s been the only draw so far. That doesn’t last forever, right?

Right, but here’s my perspective, Jonah, to clarify: I don’t think these ecosystems are dead. I think they’re going to experience a renaissance at some point because of that novelty factor. I don’t necessarily think they’re going to be long-term successful, but because they have the ability to onboard people through the mechanism I just described, they do have the potential to reach escape velocity and become real projects.

What computational ability is possible on Solana that isn’t possible on Arbitrum or Optimism at this point? Does the technology matter?

Yeah, it does. I think right now there’s a decent amount. I think the issue is that it’s a use-case fit. I’ll give you an example. It’s almost always a use-case fit, not necessarily a technology fit. There was a large effort, maybe a year or 18 months ago at this point, to get real-world assets onboarded into crypto. There were all these different protocols that were trying to do it.

There were protocols at the base level. Some protocols launched and wanted to introduce KYC at the base level. They were Layer 1s saying, “We’re a fully KYC Layer 1, and that’s our edge.” If your application has KYC, they argued, it doesn’t matter—you have to have KYC at the base level. Some of the applications said, “We’ve got KYC at our level, and that’s all you need. You don’t need anything more than that.”

Others said, “You need composability, so we’re going to build that first.” Some would say, “You don’t need composability, so we’re not going to worry about that. We’re going to focus on the ability to let people aggregate and invest at scale.” There were all these different approaches to bringing real-world assets on-chain.

Some of these projects had good technology, and some had bad technology, but the reality was that the people issuing these real-world assets didn’t know what to issue, how to do it, what would be useful, or what wouldn’t be useful. The one thing we’ve seen over and over again is that the constraint isn’t always the technology. The constraint is figuring out what to do with the technology and starting small.

What I’m trying to say is that there aren’t that many things today that aren’t building on crypto because it’s far too slow or the technology isn’t there. You first have to start with, “What are we actually building?”

By the way, on real-world assets, I think we’re getting to a point where Figure is a really interesting project that has been doing well and generating revenue. They’re a large issuer of mortgage-backed securities now, and they’re actually issuing things directly on-chain. That’s very, very important, as opposed to another area where people take assets, put them in an SPV, tokenize the SPV, and then trade the token.

There’s a big difference between doing that and issuing directly on-chain. Now there are real assets being issued on-chain, which I think is great. But to bring it back, I don’t necessarily think the technology is the bottleneck. It’s figuring out what to build with the technology.

I think your point is correct, but I think it kind of proves my point. If it isn’t about the technology, what’s the advantage of one shiny alt-L1 versus another, versus ETH? ETH gives you everything you need right now for today’s limited slate of use cases.

If ETH were buckling because too many people were trying to use it, or if it couldn’t process certain types of ultra-high-definition AAA video games that Solana or NEAR could, then you would have an alt-L1 thesis right there. But we aren’t even at the point where ETH has problems, let alone these other chains.

I do think your point is valid. On every episode, I talk about commodities because that’s how I was educated. To your point about real-world assets, let’s say you created something like a tokenized carbon credit. That would be a fantastic use case for a real-world asset on-chain.

It’s carbon, so it’s real, but it’s not like a house where you need the legal system to link the token to the actual real-world asset. You could have a centralized entity that everybody trusts, like Shell or ExxonMobil, issue a Shell Carbon Coin. If you buy a Shell Carbon Coin and burn it, you can trust that Shell will plant a tree or capture another ton of carbon on top of one of their refineries in Europe—or remove carbon from the atmosphere in some other way.

I think real-world assets, as they filter on-chain, will have to start off as fungible or kind of fungible commodities—global commodities. That’s easier than one-off things like real estate. If I own a digital, tokenized mortgage and then default on it, how does the government get it back from me? How does it get auctioned off in my default? You need the legal system to arbitrate, and that’s too complicated.

Meanwhile, if a single centralized entity does what it promises to do and issues a token to represent that in a math-based way, that’s probably easier than having to register a new commodity with ICE or the CME, get it listed, and trade it all over the world. It’s slightly easier and more logical. I don’t think you need Cosmos or some wild app chain to do that. You could just write that smart contract in Solidity and plop it on the ETH mainnet or an L2.

I would agree with that, although a large portion of this is just because of the way these things are traded. You should know this about carbon credits—you’re in that world. There’s only one place you can trade them, and there’s one place that custodies them that has about 70% of the market, so it’s a little bit tougher to break into.

I do want to spend a little bit of time on something because it’s really fascinating right now. There’s been so much talk about how we’ve reached a point where we’re looking at clear skies in the macro world. Things are starting to look quite rosy, and people are saying, “Okay, the Fed is going to be done now. Hikes aren’t coming through. Markets are performing very well, people are going to get reallocated, and there’s a good probability of a soft landing.” Recessionary talk has gone away a bit.

One of the things that was kind of interesting to me is that, outside of the top 7 performers in the S&P 500, the P/E is only 14x or 15x. I think 75% of the performance this year has come from the top 7 performers, which have done very well on sort of tech. What you see is that the rest of the world is still reasonably cheap, and we’re being driven by these top performers.

If you had to battle that, do you think you could construct a bear case?

I could construct a bear case for risk assets. The bear case for risk assets, including non-Nvidia and non-Meta equities—things that aren’t just benefiting from this unique AI boom—is that, out here in Los Angeles, you’ve got writers’ strikes. I could see new disruptive technology starting to accelerate, plus a higher cost of capital starting to accelerate layoffs.

Again, back to commodities, my sort of spiritual home: High rates take a long time to filter through to the macro economy. Bridgewater says 6 to 24 months or something; it’s not immediate. The rate hikes all just happened, so that doesn’t mean that we’re poised for liftoff here.

What that means is that, if you’re producing commodities, suddenly it’s way more expensive to find capital to go and dig for those commodities and pull them out of the earth, so you’re going to dig less. If you’re building houses, it’s much more difficult to get a construction loan. If you’re any sort of business, it’s just tougher in this environment.

If anything, the rate hikes just happened. Now wait for all the cracks to start emerging. I wouldn’t be shocked if, in 12 months, because there’s been less digging, there are fewer natural resources and commodity prices are higher. That’s painful for everybody.

You get a stagflationary environment where businesses can’t function and profit the way they used to, people can’t afford things, and mortgages start eating into everybody’s savings accounts. The prolonged impact of where we are hurts risk assets. I think the delay effect would be my bear case, but frankly, I don’t know.

I think the Fed is looking like it might have pulled a rabbit out of a hat here. I don’t have enough experience with rate-hike environments. What was the last big one? They tried in 2018; maybe sometime in the early 2000s this happened. I just wasn’t a trader. When was the last time this environment was taking place?

The reason I asked is because I also think they pulled a rabbit out of a hat. I always try to figure out where an opinion is incorrect. One of my favorite exercises is: You have an opinion, so let’s figure out where that opinion is wrong. You make both arguments, and then you go with the one you find most compelling.

I’ll be honest: I didn’t find that bear case super compelling. I think the effects of high rates taking a long time to filter through is a reasonable argument, but things are still relatively cheap across the board right now. When I think about crypto in that context, especially as inflation is coming down, I do think people are primed to come back at some point soon.

The reason this is important is that the last thing you want is for the news we were talking about earlier to come out, for Bitcoin to trade at $28,000, and then for the macro environment to suddenly shift in your face. You bought at $28,000 because you thought that news was a great buy, and then everything started turning on you and you were suddenly in trouble.

One of the things that’s really important is to place this in context. If you want to be a dip buyer in this environment, what are you looking for to make sure that dip buy isn’t a bad one?

It depends on your time horizon. If you’re a short-term dip buyer looking to sell into pops, I think you’d be crazy to buy it here.

Ultimately, what drives asset classes over the long run—what drives trends—is real end-user demand for the asset. If you’re looking to get long human productivity and capitalism, you buy the S&P 500. If you think the world fundamentally needs more hydrocarbon-based transportation, you buy oil futures.

Why would you buy crypto with a 2-year horizon? This may still be the dip to buy for that, but ultimately, at some point, you need people to need Bitcoin. You need people to need ETH. You need ETH to be settling millions of transactions, either in the digital or the real world, or both. That has to be important to the economy.

For Bitcoin, you need some portion of global trade to be denominated in Bitcoin, so that there’s always demand from sovereigns, corporations, and merchants for Bitcoin. We’re not quite there yet, but the possibility of getting there is real. If you’re looking on a 5-year time horizon, that’s why you’re dip-buying crypto here.

We covered a lot of topics in today’s conversation.

Indeed we did. It was great to see you, Avi. It was good that we caught up in London for a bit and had some really good food and really interesting conversations that I’m glad we didn’t record. I’ll chat with you soon, Avi. As always, none of this is investment advice. Crypto is risky; do your own research.