Bitcoin Breaks $100k, Are We So Back?

If you cut your losses early and let your winners run, and you try to find those asymmetric bets, you can even win 40% of the time. You can lose on most of your trades and still make money. The key is finding those asymmetric opportunities, which is kind of what that tariff moment was. It was a very asymmetric moment to shove in your chips.

1. ETH Just Squeezed The Bears

It has been a fun week. I was 100% wrong with my previous call of a range. I thought that we were going to get some consolidation for a bit. It turns out everything just decided to rip up massively. ETH/BTC is sort of the huge winner here that everyone's been talking about.

I think my personal take is still what it was before. On the last podcast, I didn't expect it to happen so fast, but I said there were some perpetual shorts in the market. You just have to wait for them to rip anywhere from 20% to 60%, depending on the asset. I gave a target of 20% to 25% for ETH/BTC to rip before you start shorting it again. Guess what? It's now up 32%.

2. Shorting The Rips

With these types of moves, you kind of have to wait for a period of sideways action. After something rockets really quickly, you have to wait for a little bit of sideways and a little bit of weakness, and then attack the weakness. That's a little bit of what I'm waiting for right now. ETH/BTC still looks okay, actually. I think people were just giga-short the asset. It's been very strong. No, Jonah, what are you thinking?

I'm trying to decide if we are so back—if crypto is so back. I did not expect this either. I'm positioned for it, which is nice, but it's an unexpected surprise. I was mentally preparing myself for another drawdown and maybe another month or 3 of just painful sideways chop. But we just gassed higher, and it's not entirely clear why.

I still think that ETH is a flaming pile of crap. I do think that it is a good short, but given my experiences attempting to catch falling knives in crypto—basically doing the opposite of what you just described, where something just pukes and then you buy it—I've had such bad experiences doing that that I would be afraid to do the opposite and short ETH/BTC on this crazy rally that it just had.

Obviously, I agree with you. That's a long-winded way of saying I agree with your take that we should wait for it to go sideways and stabilize a little bit before getting short. It's kind of in price-discovery mode, that pair, but if you zoom out and look at the really long-term chart, this freaking thing has gone down in a straight line from 0.085 to 0.09—pretty much down only—with a couple of short-squeeze rallies in December 2023 and May 2024. If the thing is trading at 0.024, in a historical long-term context, it's still basically on the lows, right? Maybe not the dead-ball, absolute pico lows, but it's on the lows.

With respect to shorting ETH versus Bitcoin, just wait for the price discovery to end. Wait for people to stop covering their shorts or trying to get long on this thing. Then you probably get short again, because I know there's this narrative bubbling in the background about ETH: “Oh, the institutions are finally coming—TradFi, BlackRock, blah blah blah.”

I don't see how any of that really accretes value to ETH holders. I think all of the activity is going to be on Base. I guess maybe a few new ETH wallets get opened and some ETH gets bought to fund those wallets. Is that really enough? That's what I'm debating mentally.

ETH just seems kind of radioactive to me, and I think that other chains will continue to proliferate and dominate the L1 space. I posted takes like that on Twitter just to stress-test the idea. There is a really committed community of ETH maximalists—maybe you call them aficionados—who are finally feeling like they've had their moment in the sun and it's their time to shine. They're very upset that people out there could possibly believe that ETH won't perform over the long run.

But I'm still a massive skeptic. Ever since you kind of talked me out of my bags last summer, I'm just wondering: What's the impetus to get back in? Is ETH even a good business? Is Base going to result in this massive, multihundred-billion-dollar asset returning decent yield to investors? I think the price is still just too damn high. What do you think? You're on mute.

I think long term it's still shit. This is clearly, from a trader's perspective, a situation where you always have to pick your spots and be careful, especially if you're going to be shorting crypto assets, as you can see with ETH. One thing that was very clear is just how many people were short this asset as an alt pair.

When ETH was rallying and had that massive move up, it was outperforming so many different alts, and that's actually quite rare. I think a portion of that is because people were long Hyperliquid and short ETH, long Pendle and short ETH, and long all these other random things and short ETH. A ton of them had to cover those positions, and that ended up cascading into what we see today.

Obviously, in crypto, price is fundamentals in many ways. Not legitimately fundamentals, but it's what drives people to buy an asset, right? If you have momentum off the lows from an asset that's been lagging for more than a year at this point, you get a lot of people chasing that move. Once all of the shorts are completely cleared out—and I don't think we're actually done with that clearing yet—and ETH kind of stops going up for 2 to 3 days, I think you see a pretty radical reversal in ETH/BTC.

Whether that's maybe another 20% to go before that happens, basically what you should be watching for is 2 to 3 days of red candles from ETH, and then you can start to attack it a little bit. Then you're like, “Okay, we're back to—short squeeze over, position repositioning over,” because the reality is the fundamentals have not changed.

Usage is going everywhere else but ETH right now, and that to me signals, “Okay, there will be a time to short.” Now, if we saw a tremendous amount of usage cropping up on ETH and a lot of new people dropping projects on ETH—and hell, if we even saw MSTR competitors surrounding ETH—you know what's funny? We're seeing all these MSTR competitors pop up. We saw one for [likely Solana]. We saw one for TAO come up. Where's the one for ETH?

I think at some point it's probably going to come, but I just think people realize there's not that much appetite.

[likely Solana] is looking interesting. Hyperliquid's looking interesting. I think we might finally be in the midst of an alt season. What do you think?

Look at pricing, dude. Virtuals is 5x—or, sorry, 4x—since the lows.

Just one point on that, though: you never buy the lows. You can be long on the lows if you've gotten DCA'd all the way down from the top. I see a lot of this on Twitter. People are like, “Oh my God, this thing is 10x from the lows.” Nobody bought the lows. That's why they were the lows. It's a 1-in-a-million chance you actually bottom-ticked it.

What's key is that there has been sustained performance. It doubled off the lows and then doubled again, right? Plenty of people bought the double after the lows doubled. What I'm saying is that there has been a lot of opportunity. AI coins have actually done reasonably well, TAO leading the charge. Things like AI16Z are 4x off the lows, and AIXBT is 3x off the lows, which we're coming for. Likely AIXBT is about to get flipped by 1000x.

I don't understand why. I would not have expected that. I thought Virtuals was going to be one of those projects that was—what's the line in Tropic Thunder?—a white dwarf that got consumed by a black hole, something that just blew up for 10 seconds and then imploded on itself.

I thought it was going to be like what happened to ARC in fast-forward. It kind of ripped. Everybody thought that no-code agent platforms were the future, and then it just tanked in a straight line. I thought it was dead. I thought it was over.

Basically, what happened is that people were up so much on these positions that, once it started getting a little wobbly in terms of usage and narrative, all these people were exiting because Virtuals had an insane run. The average cost basis on Virtuals positions had to have basically been zero for most people relative to current pricing, and that, to me, is always a very dangerous sign.

Now it's a lot healthier, right? The average cost basis of all of these AI protocols for the people that hold them is so much lower than it was before, which gives them a lot more room to run.

That's a good point. I guess on Bitcoin, you can actually track it. There are all these different metrics on CoinGlass you can use to see what the average entry price is, and I wonder if there's a tool out there where you could see that for other chains.

I don't really know exactly how Virtuals' blockchain works, but that would be a good thing to track. Maybe for an enterprising listener, that would be a cool dashboard to build: the average entry price, or the average long-term- or short-term-holder price, for all these different coins. Your heuristic of, “Is the long-term entry price far below current levels, kind of at current levels, or are holders underwater?” is probably a good price signal in a rapidly appreciating market like this one.

I think you're right: those markets have to be healthier. Also, I don't even know what half of these other AI coins do. Likely Zerebro is the most confusing one of them all to me. I never really looked into that one, but I guess we're now at the point in the bull market where there's going to be a temptation to FOMO into projects that you don't really understand—projects that are rallying quickly and have a lot of narrative and hype, but you don't really understand why.

After having been through a few of these by now, I'm doing my best to avoid FOMOing into stuff like TAO, for example. I kind of missed that one. I still don't really fully understand it. That's okay.

I think TAO is a trade, right? All these things are trades, right? At the end of the day, they are.

3. RWAs

Okay. Well, what is the narrative flavor of the moment?

One thing that's done really well, that we've talked about previously, is if you followed our “not financial advice” and accumulated some of the RWA assets we've been talking about over the last month. RWA has done extremely well over the last month. If you look on DeFiLlama, Pendle's up 60%. Curve has done very well, also up about 60%. Syrup, which is Maple, which we've talked about, is 2.5x up over the last month.

I do think that what I'm seeing today in the markets is a convergence between TradFi and crypto that I have not seen. I've not seen anything like this ever. That's just by virtue of the regulations being decreased. People are moving with full force, and it's not just these MSTR structurings.

I don't know if you saw this Nakamoto thing that just went live by David Bailey, or the SPAC that Republic just launched. There are a lot of traditional companies that are sort of reversing back into crypto. They're doing these weird little reverse mergers, or they're saying, “We're going to diversify into a Bitcoin treasury.” There's an emerging trend happening right now that I think RWAs are primed to capture.

Trading AI coins is kind of just trading the beta of the market. When it comes to alts, it's like, “Okay, when I think the market feels safe—Bitcoin over $100K—let me just go buy these scam assets.” But RWAs feel like something I can allocate 10% of my portfolio to and just wait.

I agree. You mentioned Syrup—well, Maple Finance. I was looking into that project, and forgive me if my numbers are stale. I'm on a weak internet connection, so I don't want to open up other tabs and jeopardize this video call. But if memory serves, the market cap is roughly $300 million. What is the FDV of Syrup now?

Yeah, $300 million.

Okay, so $300 million. See, like you said, there are basically 2 trades to do right now.

Yeah. Go ahead.

Trade number 1 is narrative: “Okay, alt season. Let's see what's about to pop off. Let's be in the Discords, watch the Telegram channels, be all over Twitter, see what coins are going to get talked about the most, and try to buy some on hype”—not Hyperliquid, just hype.

The other trade is, “Are there actual real businesses going on, like we've discussed in previous episodes of this podcast, that I can buy into at a decent valuation?” As far as that second narrative goes, Maple is extremely interesting. The market cap is $300 million. If you go on DeFiLlama and sort by 7-day revenue, it's number 12 or 13 in the world right now. It's earning $2 million a week.

So that's $104 million a year if you annualize it and assume it just doesn't grow. The P/E of this thing—the price-to-earnings ratio—is 3.0. Hyperliquid, I think, is 50. To me, while you're talking about this emerging convergence between TradFi and crypto, if we're going to do some TradFi analysis on interesting crypto businesses that earn money, Maple is number 1 on my list. I'm accumulating some of that one now.

I do want to be fair when it comes to statistics. They're making $30 million annualized in fees, and their annual operational expenses, according to DeFiLlama, are $8 million. So let's say they make $20 million a year. That's a 15x P/E, which is still—

I thought it was $2 million a week. I'm seeing $30 million annualized.

The 30-day fees are $2 million.

So I misspoke. Good. Thank you for correcting me.

But still pretty ridiculous. 15x is still pretty damn good.

Yeah. I think if you look at TVL, dude, TVL literally 5x’d in the last 3 months. It has not been the best performer off the lows; it has lagged some AI coins. With all of that said, I can sleep through the volatility of something like that.

If AI coins go down 15% in 1 day, I go, “Okay, I’m fucked. Let me get out of this thing.” I can’t hold that. AIXBT, I don’t fucking know. I’m not holding this thing. I’m not holding AI16Z if it’s down; I’m trying to catch the momentum on it.

Whereas when you look at Maple, this is what I get excited about in crypto. It’s projects like Maple that I get very excited about because of the real revenues. We’ll add it to the bucket of my HYPE, Pendle, Syrup, and Plume. I mean, we talked about it before; we’re just going deeper today.

Plume, I’m hoping that it’ll get there. It’s not quite there yet, but these things that have a real path to generating revenue are good, and you can hold through them. With that being said, obviously trade the other stuff. At some point, let me just pull it up, these are going to be phenomenal shorts.

4. Ads (Kraken OTC, WalletConnect)

I’m not exactly sure when yet, but basically, the best way to do this is just once they start breaking below some shorter-term moving averages. Let’s have a little fun with some charting here. We’ll go look at Worldcoin.

We see here, okay, Worldcoin’s now at $1.26. This is going to be a phenomenal short. Everybody has to short Worldcoin because it’s going back to the lows at some point. The question is, how do you short it without losing your shirt?

I’m going to throw on a 30-day moving average. It just crossed above the 30-day exponential moving average. It had a touch point at $0.76. It had a touch point at $0.90, and now it’s far above.

At some point, that moving average is going to catch up to Worldcoin. Then it’s going to start to go below that moving average, and once it goes below that moving average is when you can actually short it. Right now, the moving average is at $1.

If, let’s say, in the next 30 days, that moving average comes up to $1.20 and Worldcoin breaks below $1.20, and you see that match, okay, go ahead and short. Basically, just find where it has lost momentum and short the hell out of it.

These things bounce because they’ve been so heavily shorted, and you don’t want to be one of those guys who’s caught shorting the lows and then it comes up against you. Then you’re like, “Okay, I’m fucked,” because those guys can get blown out. Once all of those people are blown out, and the momentum buyers have stopped buying because the market’s not pushing forward as strongly anymore, then all the sellers come.

They get, like, $30–40 million of Worldcoin a month, and they’re going to push this thing back to the lows. Likely SEI is another great example. MOVE is another great example. Just have a list of all these coins.

Whenever you’re thinking, “Okay, I should probably sell some Bitcoin. Let me go sell some Bitcoin,” no—just sell these things against Bitcoin.

Exactly. Using my little framework, I think it’s a great framework, and I think it helped me during the previous round of chop to reduce exposure to crypto as a whole by shorting things that I thought were crappy instead of selling the things that I believe in long term.

We’re never going to time the market. Time in the market beats timing the market. Truer words have never been spoken about an asset like Bitcoin. We both believe that it’s going to the moon over the next 5–10 years.

It’s hard to dance between the raindrops and try to trade Bitcoin super actively and beat the robots on that one. But there are definitely times when crypto as a whole looks shaky and prices look extended, and I agree.

I think especially now, we’re past the 2017 and 2021 cycles where everything pumps regardless of how stupid it is. This time, yes, certain stupid things will pump. Yes, Fartcoin will probably go up, but let’s say we get to the point you just described, Avi, where the shorts have been squeezed out, the FOMO buyers have bought Worldcoin, and Worldcoin is sitting on local highs.

Let me just articulate the ridiculousness of the thesis that needs to play out in order for Worldcoin to go higher after it’s been short-squeezed. By higher, I mean outperform broader crypto. The lizard Illuminati people literally need to force us to scan our eyeballs.

That is what you’re betting on. You’re betting on some totalitarian Fahrenheit 451 outcome that’s so absurd that even speaking it makes me feel like I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Again, in order for Worldcoin to go up from short-squeeze valuations, you need people to feel compelled to scan their eyeballs into a giant orb.

I definitely think that’s a short. It’s not going to happen. It’s just not going to happen. I totally agree with that short. That’s a way better bet than ETH. Why? Because Syrup is worth $300 million and ETH is worth hundreds of billions.

Just check the price before you buy. That’s kind of how to play this alt season, I think. Beyond that, I don’t know. Should we touch on macro? Stocks are almost at the highs.

Yeah. We’re like 5–6% off the highs. Things are looking pretty fucking good, actually. Nobody gave Trump any grace. I felt like I was the only—or maybe you and I were 2 of a very limited number of people—who didn’t immediately come out publicly saying, “We’re convinced that these tariffs are terrible and that American exceptionalism is done.”

The whole world was so convinced that everything was going straight to zero. It didn’t feel like a very difficult contrarian bet at the time. I, like Trump, continue to believe he’s going to pump our bags.

You’re on mute, by the way.

Do you remember when we were screaming, “It’s time to buy hand over fist”?

Yes.

At 60, just buy. Just fucking buy hand over fist. Shove in. Don’t be a pussy. Just buy this thing. That’s what we were screaming.

I mean, the one thing that I’ll say is I could have done better. After Liberation Day, I let go of all my equities, as you know. Then I bought substantially on that crazy liquidation day when everything was down, and gold was down, and equities were down.

Then I rode it back up until it reached the level right before the major breakdown. I basically rode it back up to 485. If I’m looking at the Qs, I’m looking at that 485 level, where it kind of went sideways in March before Liberation Day just puked it all. That’s kind of what I offloaded—basically everything around there.

When I said that Bitcoin was going to be chopping for a bit, I followed my own advice and basically reduced my positions a lot. I missed the latest 6% from Bitcoin and the latest 6% from equities, but overall, my portfolio is looking healthy.

I’m telling you guys this on the podcast as a reminder: you can’t ever do anything perfectly. It’s not like you buy the exact lows and sell the exact tops. Overall, my personal portfolio is outperforming pretty substantially. However, could I have done better? Absolutely.

Did I make the wrong call last week? Absolutely. I saw a great clip—I think it was Federer. He was giving some speech at a college campus. He goes, “You know how many matches—what percentage of matches—I’ve won? 80%.” I still lose 1/5 of all the matches.

That’s so crazy: he’s won 80%. But if you sum up what percentage of points I won across all my matches, he goes, “54%.” Wow. Okay. That’s it. What a legend. He won slightly over half of all the points, and he is the GOAT. What a legend.

So don’t beat yourself up too much when you have losses. Sometimes a lot of those losses can be strung together. Your goal is basically to win 54% of the time, and you can be a GOAT. It’s true in trading, too. If you cut your losses early, let your winners run, and try to find those asymmetric bets, you could even win 40% of the time. You can lose on most of your trades and still make money.

The key is finding those asymmetric opportunities, which is what that tariff moment was. It was a very asymmetric moment to shove in your chips. Whereas selling—the reason that I sold at that $480–$485 level in the Qs and at that $96,000 level in BTC—is because I didn’t see the asymmetry anymore. I was like, “Okay, it could go up 10%; it could go down 10%.” Right now, I don’t have an edge in the sense that I don’t see why I should be holding that.

Why am I holding the same amount today—actually, more, because it went up—that I was holding when the world was collapsing? It just doesn’t really make sense as a trader. You shouldn’t be doing that.

5. Defining Success In Trading

I mean, it depends on your time frame, right? First of all, I appreciate your honesty. We like to own our Ls on the 1000x podcast. We’re vulnerable on the 1000x podcast. That’s what we do here. No trader is right all the time. If you follow people on Twitter who seem to be only putting on winning trades, they’re full of shit and you’re deluding yourself.

So, yeah, my big L of this last month was talking myself into a bullish frenzy about TAO when it was trading at $180 a token and not buying a single penny worth of it. Can we walk through that? Why didn’t I? I mean, I bought Hyperliquid, sitting pretty there, feeling great about that. Then I was really looking into TAO.

We put out this podcast episode a couple of weeks ago called “Only the Real Businesses Will Survive,” and I looked inside of TAO and thought, “This is an incredible ecosystem.” It basically rewards models that do—you know, I could start Shutterstock on TAO and have the best AI generative model for image generation win a competition and be rewarded with TAO. It’s a very good ecosystem.

It even, in a secondary or tertiary way, rewards distributed compute, which was what Render tried to do. There are a lot of good ideas and value inside of TAO. The tokenomics mimic Bitcoin. Everything is very interesting, and there’s a lot of potential, along with a lot of really intelligent influencers screaming from the rooftops that it’s the next Bitcoin.

I looked into it and a few of the subnets, and I had some interesting conversations with people who are in the know. The reason why I didn’t buy TAO goes back to the earlier framework that I discussed on this episode, where I was saying that there are VC bets, which are kind of narrative-driven—you’re betting that a business will develop in the future. Then there are businesses like Hyperliquid, Pendle, and Maple that already make money and distribute that money to token holders in the form of buybacks.

I was a lot more comfortable holding the second category. I’m not a venture capitalist by trade; I’m a trader. Even though I’m okay with narratives—day trading narratives or weekly trading narratives—I looked at TAO and thought the reward mechanism inside of TAO isn’t dollars. It’s just more TAO, more of this memecoin called TAO.

None of these subnets are generating real Hyperliquid-type money yet, but the valuation is big. It’s not like an early-stage VC bet. It’s like it’s Series D or E already. It’s kind of a large-cap thing.

I basically got to this point where I told myself, a thousand times, not to buy ecosystems that have no actual revenue and reward activity within that ecosystem with basically newly minted shitcoin. I’m not calling TAO a shitcoin, but that’s with a memecoin or whatever it is. After mid-curving it like that for a while, I just said, “You know what? I’m okay if this token goes from $190 to $10,000 a token and I don’t make a penny. I’ll make my money somewhere else.”

I want to keep following TAO because I think it’s so interesting, but I couldn’t get myself comfortable with putting a dollar into TAO when I had the opportunity to put money into Hyperliquid at $12. That’s what I did. I missed out. I could have taken more dollars out of my checking account or savings account, or whatever you call it—basically T-bills for me—and put it into TAO.

I could have been long both and probably achieved similar returns. Ultimately, what you’re trading when you’re trading TAO is like 4x-levered Bitcoin. When you’re trading Hyperliquid, you’re trading 5x-levered Bitcoin. Anybody can go on CoinGecko and denominate the token they’re looking at in terms of BTC or ETH and see just how similar the 2 charts are.

Hyperliquid USD versus Hyperliquid BTC: if those 2 charts are trading on top of each other, then you’re not really trading the project. You’re trading something basically 𝑥-levered Bitcoin. I guess that’s how I end up feeling okay about missing a trade.

A lot of cope coming from you, Jono, right now. The generational 2x, 2.5x from $180 to $450—it’s over for the non-TAO holders.

No, I think it’s very fair. It’s a trade that I took personally. I did take the trade, but I took it with the mentality of, “This is a trade. This is short-term. It looks like there are short-term tailwinds for this thing. Let me go buy some, trade it, and get out of it.”

It’s not like the HYPE, Pendle, or Syrup trade, where I’m saying, “I’m sticking in this for 2 years, or a year, or until I see the data change.” It’s a stylistic thing at the end of the day.

That’s good. We’ve had some Ws and some Ls. We told you guys about them. It’s been an interesting week.

6. Will We Continue Ripping?

Yeah. Do we keep pumping? That’s the question. I got that tingly feeling. I think it keeps going. I think macro is going to drive us there.

I think so. My hot take is that we’re going to see a decoupling. Macro is going to go up and BTC is going to come down because I’m seeing a lot of open interest open up on Bitcoin.

I don’t like that.

Yeah, fair enough. I think people are getting levered long Bitcoin, preparing for a rip up to $125,000 or $150,000. I think other people have that tingly feeling, too.

The reason why I think we’re more likely than not to get that in the near term is because I think the stock market will propel us there. I think the news is only going to get better, not worse. As we’ve talked about a million times, it’s the second derivative of the news that matters.

I don’t think the trade war situation is going to regress into a scenario where suddenly the economy looks like it’s going to deglobalize and we’re all just going to be living in thatched huts making Nike shoes onshore, which was kind of the prognostication a few weeks ago, when it was an excellent buy.

I think it’s just going to be deal after deal after deal that gets announced. I think the stock market will pump because a bunch of deregulatory measures are about to get announced. There are rumblings now about eliminating capital gains taxes.

Oh my God, what that would do. Can you imagine? So you’re giga-bullish.

I’m a little more reserved. Let’s see next week. Our time frames are different, right? You’ve been, for very good reasons, on a short-term horizon. You’ve lightened up because, like you said, the risk-reward looks much worse here than it did when the VIX was trading at 60, which I fully vibe with.

I think that's a very prudent decision. I'm still as invested, from a total number of tokens perspective, as I've been since I bought the lows. I'm not trading with a week-long perspective. I know that the medium term is my blind spot, and I still deeply believe in higher prices over a 3- to 6-month time frame. So I'm just trying to stomach the volatility and not do anything stupid.

I think that's a good note to end on. Yeah, don't do anything stupid. Guys, that's what you tune in for. That's exactly what you tune in for. We'll catch you next week. See you next week. Great seeing you, Avi. Thanks.