Bitcoin Needs Vol, BTC vs Gold, Retail Trading Edge, 2026 Predictions | Jeff Park

I think Bitcoin will be more volatile in 2026 than it was in 2025. I say this with the hope that, of course, it comes with price gains, but I really don't care about the price gains if it doesn't come with volatility, because that's the long-term thing we need for Bitcoin to have its reflexivity wheel turning on.

Today is a good one. We've got Jeff Park joining us, the prolific Jeff Park, who's been tweeting away and writing away. We're happy to have you.

Well, hello. Happy to be here. We got to do all we can to support our networks and our bags. Avi, Jonah, you have to keep at this. No stopping here. Don't worry, guys. We've had some boring weeks behind us, I think, but hopefully you'll come away from this podcast with a little bit more optimism about the future heading into the new year.

I'm happy to be able to speak with you. It has been a little sideways, hasn't it?

1. What’s Suppressing Bitcoin?

It has, man. It's disappointing. What can you say?

It looked so strong going into H2, and a lot of things fell apart into it. Of course, gold is now reaching all-time highs here.

Well, this was supposed to be, I think, in many ways, the year of crypto, because we started off super excited. We started off with price rocketing through the roof, getting above $100,000 and touching $125,000. A lot of it was based on optimism around Trump and optimism around the DATs accumulating a ton of capital.

Now I think we're actually experiencing a new market structure where Bitcoin vol is coming down a lot. I think one argument that you made recently is that, in order for price to go up, vol needs to come back.

Absolutely. And so I guess one question is: What's suppressing us right now, and what brings volatility back?

Yeah, great question. I love to start there. There are 2 things we need to hit on. One is the belief and the projection that I have for Bitcoin to reach meaningfully new highs: We need implied volatility and realized volatility to rise concurrently. The second is, to your question, why is that not happening today?

On the former point, I've been pretty unabashed about this dynamic in support of the price narrative, because at the end of the day, Bitcoin doesn't exist in a microcosm of its own, right? Bitcoin is competitive with other relative-value assets that investors are trading all the time.

It's sometimes not familiar for us CT folks to think that Bitcoin and the rest of the altcoin index are the universe, but it's so much bigger. You're competing with what is likely the Magnificent 7, you're competing with gold, you're competing with FX, you're competing with JGBs, and it's a huge world out there.

The feature that I think Bitcoin has always been exciting for a lot of folks is the ability to capitalize on asymmetric outcomes, in which volatility is one of the unique features that makes it worthwhile for the risk-taking endeavor. Without that volatility, there are just a lot of other things that have the attention to drive potential growth stories, especially with the AI narrative that is taking hold, which has been so fantastic in H2. I think that is one of the detractors of why Bitcoin hasn't performed.

At the core of it is that Bitcoin is a movement of young people's hearts. I do think that young people are trying to capitalize on a new monetary system that they want to opt out of, given the global debasement policy that has affected their livelihood in such detrimental ways.

If young people stop participating, I think the fact that the institutionalization of Wall Street is happening on the back of their investments is also going to come to a halt. It's kind of a one-way cycle where old people will buy things that young people are going to buy because they consider that part of a generational wealth transfer, but young people are not interested in what old people are buying. That's a one-way street.

So, if you want Bitcoin to continue to perform, you want to appeal to young participants. I think what you've seen in the mainstream era of crypto, as you've alluded to, is that a lot of those things have come up for some uncomfortable discussions.

I think there is a little bit of an element of asking what the mainstream era of crypto even means anymore in 2025 and what that's going to look like 5 years from now. There are things we can be very optimistic about, and frankly, there are some things that people are idealistically maybe disappointed by in the direction of where institutionalization is going.

One example I'll throw at you is what's going on with, let's say, Ripple. Ripple has received one of the largest investments it's ever had from a very well-known entity called Citadel. I believe Citadel has actually never invested as much as it has in Ripple in its entire history of making strategic investments, never mind just the crypto vertical.

At the same time, you have the Citadel entity basically going around trying to affect DeFi regulations in ways that may be adversarial to how people have wanted DeFi to be treated. That's a really uncomfortable question: What does the mainstream era of crypto mean at the intersection of what Citadel wants to accomplish versus how DeFi protocols may not want to be called broker-dealers in their licensing requirements for providing software services?

2. Ads (Kraken OTC)

I think that's just one example of all the things happening in mainstream adoption of crypto assets that have caused some soul-searching for the industry. At the same level, Bitcoin specifically, with its volatility having been suppressed by some endeavors that I think are unique to its own microstructure, is perhaps contributing to that downward kind of vibe, if you will, in the air.

3. Bitcoin Competing Vs Gold

Okay, so you said that's interesting. I have some follow-up questions. You mentioned that Bitcoin competes with gold and other investments. We all know there's a finite amount of capital out there that has to get allocated, but obviously people aren't deciding between investing in Bitcoin and investing in Japanese government bonds, right? The 2 serve very different investment purposes.

Bitcoin and gold do compete. So, when you see, just looking at the gold chart, a big green candle today, fresh all-time highs, pretty crazy rally there—we're closing the year almost at $4,500 an ounce—does that make you bullish on Bitcoin? Are you like, “Wow, okay, the debasement theme is on fire. Look at gold. Maybe this will propagate through to Bitcoin as well”?

Or do you say, “Oh, shit. Bitcoin's competing with gold. Gold appears to have captured the debasement narrative of the moment. If this momentum in gold continues, Bitcoin is just going to continue to fester”? How are you looking at that?

Yeah, I think there are so many tensions here at the core, because everything should have gone the way that we had hoped for Bitcoin to outperform, right? Partially, I think why gold is doing so well is because most people got the thesis correct from a fundamental perspective, but the market just hasn't been able to appreciate Bitcoin's role as a debasement hedge the way it has with gold.

It is a moment to be humble about where Bitcoin is in its adoption journey. The reality is that gold is going up because there are real buyers, right? There are real buyers stepping in, as they have been for the past year and a half. Those structural bids continue to exist because gold has found product-market fit within our global monetary framework as a reserve asset.

I know we talk about Bitcoin ultimately infiltrating that portion of its role, but it hasn't so far yet, right? I think there's some news that the Czech Republic has just announced that it may buy some Bitcoin for its balance sheet. Of course, there's been El Salvador, but you have to be honest: Most of the flows today have come from ETFs and corporates.

ETF flows are coming because there are private-wealth investment advisors who want exposure to an asset class. Why do they want that exposure to the asset class? These RIAs are not you, they're not me, and they're certainly not our degen friends. They're RIAs because they're trying to pursue income growth with some level of capital preservation, and they think Bitcoin fits a role.

That role could, in itself, just be having decorrelated exposure to the rest of the assets. Jonah, even though you don't think Bitcoin competes with JGBs, I do think the aspect of portfolio construction makes Bitcoin relevant for every multi-asset portfolio, and that is where the flows are coming from.

It’s RIAs plus corporates. Corporates have a very different intention of what they’re trying to accomplish. But make no mistake: it’s not governments, and it’s not central banks.

The 10-year journey is that we want Bitcoin to become that thing, right? But then let’s see what happened toward Q4 this year. There’s been a lot of noise on BIPs, right? There’s BIP 360, BIP 444, BIP 4 360, BIP 110. I mean, there are so many of these proposals going around that it’s literally tearing apart its own community.

Gold doesn’t have that. There’s quantum FUD coming back, and the ways that people ascribe improbable existential risk to things like gold don’t exist. At some level, we have to be a little bit honest: Bitcoin has different kinds of risks with it, and I think people want to overcome those risks by underwriting. But you have to be compensated for it, right? You are certainly not going to be compensated for quantum risk with Bitcoin vol at 25. It just will not be something that people will wait for until they get the rug pulled out from under them if they thought something so improbable but existential could happen in the next 5 years.

Yeah, I think that’s very fair. You know, it’s funny with gold. I think the equivalent would be asteroid mining. If we really crack the key to asteroid mining, that’s the equivalent of cracking the key to quantum. There’s a lot of gold out there. Space is a big place, but it is pretty far out.

I guess where I land on it, which is a little disheartening, is that when you make the bull case for Bitcoin, you make the bull case for this fundamental shift in investor appetite for this asset coming from a new class of investors. Historically, Bitcoin does have that, but it also has excitement around it. It has a narrative that’s being pushed—namely, let’s say the Fed expands its balance sheet. You think inflation’s going to go up, Bitcoin front-runs it, and we start going up a ton.

Gold and silver seem to have just sucked the air out of that narrative. You see commodities across the board ripping, right? Palladium is ripping, copper is ripping, gold is ripping, silver, obviously, of all things.

Silver’s insane. Silver’s at all-time highs. It’s like Litecoin’s looking at it like, “Please pick me next.”

I mean, someone finally recovered this high-water mark from silver from the 1980s, right? It’s been sitting on it for literally half a century for this moment.

And so the question is: Where’s the damn excitement, right? And what’s going to drive Bitcoin higher? Bitcoin can sometimes be a little bit of a Rorschach test. Sometimes it’ll go up with the Nasdaq, sometimes it’ll go up with gold, sometimes it’ll go up with this, and sometimes it’ll go up with that. But I think at its core, it’s always been the alternative monetary system, and you need some allocation to it.

My view personally is that gold is going to catch up at some point. This move from gold and silver is telling you that the retail investor out there has an appetite for this narrative, and it tends to flow downstream. So I do think that at some point we’re going to get that push. Maybe people even rotate from gold to BTC. So I’m a little more constructive on that. But I’m curious what you think. Do you think it’s irrelevant, or—

No, I completely agree with you, too. And I think that is the long-term conviction I have, which is why I do think we should continue to accumulate Bitcoin. It is underpriced relative to where other assets are today, and there could be a reflexive upstart in the near future if there were a catalyst for it. Sometimes a catalyst really is structural and flow-driven. We don’t know exactly what that will be, but it will come.

The reason it will come is this: Anyone who’s ever tried to buy physical gold knows how annoying that process is, right? It’s actually very challenging to buy physical gold because the pricing is intransparent, the logistics are unclear, and ultimately authenticity is one of those things where you have to pay a premium to the provisioners for their stamps and marks, right?

I mean, there are all kinds of prices for gold in a way that Bitcoin still has what I call a singular clearing price for trading. And the reason Bitcoin is valuable is because it’s ultimately meant for storing wealth and preserving it in times of need, right? We know governments confiscate things throughout history when there are real issues.

Anyone who’s grown up in emerging markets doesn’t want gold ETFs. They don’t want IOUs. They want physical bars. They literally store boxes of these things at home. It just so happens that most Americans are very privileged not to really think in that mindset.

But if you do believe the world is moving more toward a direction where inflation is real, and as Milton Friedman says, it’s always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon that can’t be escaped, the reason Bitcoin will reemerge is because it is so much easier to actually store wealth in Bitcoin. It just is. It is maybe a little bit dangerous in terms of what it means to be a self-custodial owner, but if you’re able to overcome that hurdle, for the privilege of then owning it, it’s actually a lot easier. And because of that, the long-term thesis is still very much intact.

We need to revive some of that conversation. You know what will help that? One example is taxes. You see now, around the world, they’re trying to put Bitcoin capital-gains taxes in place. Japan has one out. I think Italy just tried to pass one; it failed.

But what’s happening here? When you zoom out, it’s pretty obvious. All these national borders are realizing there’s wealth creation, and they want a little piece of that pie. But guess what? They can’t do it. Why can’t they do it? Because you can’t tax my mind, Avi. You can’t tax the brain of someone who wants to just store their wealth in their head. It will never actually be taxable in the way that gold physically exists.

And once you’re able to see, man, you actually can’t tax this thing the way people want because money flows in the digital age, where there are no borders, I think things like this will help people ascertain why Bitcoin is so valuable. Then they will realize, man, this is better than gold, and it is actually self-custodial for all the right reasons.

Some of that, I think, has been a little bit lost in the age of institutionalization—in the age of ETF success, in the age of the DATs’ success. We’re forgetting a little bit: Why is this original mission from 2008 actually still here? It wasn’t so we could buy more of these things in our brokerage accounts. That’s helpful, but that can’t be the full story, right? That’s a story that needs reflexivity on the other end of its authentic use case.

Yeah, I guess that’s a good point: Some of the original use cases, some of the pluses of Bitcoin, have been lost in the era of IBIT. It’s funny you mentioned fungibility—all these different stamps or authenticity marks on different types of gold bars.

Gold isn’t really fungible, is it? It’s quasi-fungible, which is a problem. But Bitcoin is truly fungible. The other thing about Bitcoin is, all right, let’s say you’re self-custodying gold versus self-custodying Bitcoin. Both have their risks. Someone could break into your house, try to steal your Ledger, hold you up, whatever. There are risks to holding both.

But I guess the thing about Bitcoin that really beats gold is that fractional spending of Bitcoin is much easier. To send a partial Bitcoin transaction out of your full wad is much easier versus, if you have a gold bar and you don’t want to spend all of it, what do you do? Get a chisel and chip off a little bit, then melt it into jewelry and sell it? It’s kind of—yeah, it’s tougher.

4. Does BTC Need More Vol?

But I guess nobody’s focused on these things, or on the cross-border movement of Bitcoin versus gold, in the era of financialization. Maybe that’s a reason why there’s been a drag.

I have another question for you. I’m a career options trader. I come from TradFi. I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to volatility. You mentioned something that’s very unintuitive to me: You said vol, meaning volatility, needs to rise before investors can feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. You posted an interesting chart, which we’re going to pull up in a second, but I’ve always had this sort of canonical view of finance, which is basically the opposite of that, right? Investors want to see volatility go down before they invest.

Volatility does not necessarily mean upside returns. It doesn’t mean that you get more bang for your buck just because something’s wildly gyrating around. So I feel like when you say that, my lizard TradFi brain, which I’ve trained for all these years, immediately flashes red flags and says, “Jeff Park’s got it backwards.”

Yes, volatility is good, but only after you own the asset and it’s volatility in the direction you want. Just like volatility, which is a directionless measure of daily variance—or annualized variance, I guess—that’s not what investors look for. They look for the opposite of that.

So can you dig into why you’re saying that investors want to see a wildly volatile asset class? Do you mean instead they just want to see Bitcoin going up before they invest? Do they want to see momentum, or do they really want to see volatility, which is directionless? I’m confused.

Yeah, let’s unpack that. It’s a great question, and I think it’s sitting at the intersection of how Bitcoin can sometimes be conflated with everyone’s pedigrees from their own investor experience.

So you come from an options trading background. I myself come from an options trading background. What you'll see is that Bitcoin is attractive to all kinds of investors, both from the equities market, the credit market, the FX market, and the commodities market. The reason is because Bitcoin is a little bit of a mirror, representing what you want to see out of it.

What I would tell you is that, with equities in particular, the reason we don't have to tolerate volatility as much is because there's this amazing thing called growth. The growth engine works if you believe you can grab a TAM that is ever-increasing and you're participating in that profit-share mechanism. Obviously, Bitcoin is not that, right? Bitcoin doesn't create wealth in the sense of creating growth from a productivity-gains perspective.

The reason you can make a separate case for Bitcoin away from a very low-volatility equity that continues to grind higher is because that's not what Bitcoin's delivery-of-value mechanism is. We have to take that low-volatility, high-Sharpe growth with a capital G, like a CAGR model that comes from actual revenue, and that stuff is not Bitcoin's comp. So what is Bitcoin's comp? It's probably closer to the FX markets. It's probably a little bit closer to oil and commodities-type markets.

Why do people invest in oil? They're not investing in oil because they think it's always going to go up. It doesn't. In fact, it's not even anchored to inflation as cleanly as other assets. People buy oil because they're trying to make some short-term trades across strategic dislocations that might happen in the supply chain, usually on the back of geopolitics that create these moments of incredible volatility.

I think Bitcoin has some of those elements because it is ultimately a microstructure that drives Bitcoin price action. When you look at all the liquidation cascades that are happening, and when you look at the diversity of participation that's coming from the on-chain world versus the capital-markets world of IBIT investors, it's basically a pretty fertile playing ground of different types of marginal supply and demand coming through different channels at any moment in time.

That's kind of the game of Bitcoin, right? The goal is that the pool just gets so much bigger, with more capital coming in than capital going out, so we do think the price trajectory is upward. But if you actually don't have that element of volatility, I don't know if people will come in at all to begin with to grow that TAM. I think that's the reflexive logic that I'm trying, as best as I can, to paint a picture for.

What you're seeing right now in the microstructure in 2026 is that a lot of the liquidation coming from holders of spot Bitcoin is from those who have held it for a long period of time and are monetizing their gains, right? That percentage is humongous. One might say the Bitcoin market is still not a totally well-developed market because of the imbalance that we see in that particular supply.

It's close to, I think, a third of Bitcoin being held by very, very large wallets. Some of this, of course, could be exchanges and not all individuals, but the reality is that it's still fairly lopsided. Until that market becomes a little bit more normalized to things we feel are comparable to the equities market, you actually have to find a way to entice new investors to come in against that tide.

If you can't find new investors to come in, let's make it very clear: Wall Street is never going to be your exit liquidity. They're just not. Wall Street knows what that game is, and they're not going to become crypto OGs' exit liquidity. Neither will the RIAs. They are very good at cutting losses early and finding new entry points. It's the exact opposite of HODL, at some level.

That's where I get a little bit more concerned about this idea that Bitcoin is going to go up steadily for the next 3 years and we're going to hit $200,000 with a volatility of 30, implying a Sharpe of 5. I mean, it's possible. It's possible, I think.

5. Crypto Merging With TradFi

It's probable, I think. If I were to put a translation on that for your average retail trader, it's that Jeff is saying Bitcoin's boring. [Laughter]

And that's sort of the major issue: I think everything else relative to Bitcoin has actually become more exciting. When people look at Bitcoin, they see something that does have innate risk. They see something that you need to be compensated for that risk in order to come in. Right now, I just don't think that your average trader views Bitcoin as something that they want to hop into.

Retail trading is huge. It's always been a primary driver of Bitcoin. That's part of the reason why we're down so much: exactly as you said, you have all these OGs selling, and you have all these covered calls going through. There's no offsetting flow, because why buy Bitcoin when your space stocks go up 80% in 3 weeks?

That used to be the crypto market in many ways. That volatility that enticed your average trader into the market has moved elsewhere. I was talking a little bit with Jonah about this before, where I feel as though, at the same time that crypto has matured and become an institutional asset and moved closer to TradFi, TradFi has degraded and moved closer to crypto.

You used to have a world in which everything in TradFi, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, was driven by spreadsheets, models, real analytics, and cash flow. Crypto was always, “Who cares about any of that? What matters is narrative and religion and the people that like your asset. Are you Chainlink? Do you have a religion around you?”

Right?

As crypto is shedding that image, it's not enough to just have a religion. You actually have to be somewhat of a useful asset; otherwise, you're going to go to zero. You see it in the charts. TradFi has said, “Well, actually, it's not enough to make money. You need to have a religion.”

These 2 worlds are coming together. My takeaway when I was talking to Jonah about this is that this type of market is really good for retail traders, in my opinion. The TradFi market is becoming more attractive to retail traders, whereas in 2017, if you were a retail trader, you weren't winning at all in traditional markets. There was just no winning for you. That's why you flooded into crypto. That's why people came into crypto in many ways: they thought that they could win in crypto and they couldn't in TradFi.

And now that distinction is not necessarily true anymore.

I think that's an underrated driver of what's happening. But that doesn't mean there's no opportunity. It just means the opportunity is moving around.

That's exactly right.

I think Wall Street is entirely in the business of volatility monetization. Sometimes it means that they're actually creating short-volatility products. Sometimes they're creating leveraged products. At the core of it is the retail consumer on the other side, who has a desire for one or the other, as well as your private-wealth channel and institutional investors.

The reason the CLO equity market works is because someone wants to fund that, so that Bank of America can come buy their CLO AAA paper at 2%. The whole business works because someone's there bearing that volatility.

I agree with you, Avi. If you look at the general trends of the tensions that are even existing between the CFTC and the SEC, their own regulatory oversight is blending, right? The CFTC used to be more concerned with regulated, sophisticated markets. We're talking about CME futures and that world, versus Bitcoin ETFs in the SEC world, which is really more for investor protection of the individual investor.

But they're merging. You know they're merging because the CME also now wants to let individual retail traders trade futures. This was unimaginable 5 years ago, that they would have opened their arms to let retail individuals come trade futures with leverage. But that's the direction it's going. Likewise, the SEC is going more toward wanting oversight on markets beyond just traditional securities as well.

This kind of merger is also happening across the Y-axis, between public and private markets. You've mentioned, obviously, that the retailification of finance is at the center of some of this trend. The other part of it is that so many things are becoming publicly tradable in ways that historically had a dividing line between private assets for institutional investors and public assets for retail investors.

6. Finding Trading Edge Today

Now, as a public investor, you can buy SpaceX. Maybe it's not the right way to buy it, but you can, and they give you exposure to it in different formats.

You can pay 30% fees on SPVs as well. One question that I've been grappling with is: What does that mean for the approach to trading that you have to take now versus what you had to do 5 or 10 years ago?

7. Ads (Kraken OTC, Katana)

I do think that it's becoming easier for retail investors to actually trade and make money. But what are you looking at? What are the drivers? If you had to go to somebody and say, “Hey, this is how you're going to make money in the next year,” you're not building spreadsheets anymore. Maybe you're reading—you're just reading articles.

Maybe you’re spending more time on Twitter. You’re trying to make connections between, okay, Trump buys 10% of Intel—that’s a signal; you buy, right? You buy Intel. So, if you had to tell somebody, how would you shift your trading? What would you say?

Yeah, I think the market’s gotten so competitive over the last decade-plus that the way older investors used to make money is just not really practically possible anymore. I would even say the world of options trading that I’ve been so familiar with has changed so much with the advent of zero-day expiry options, and the ways that, sometimes, these levered ETFs are becoming the dominant consumers of options markets to begin with. What that means is, to survive, you kind of have to find an edge that the machines won’t come for you. That’s, I think, the big meta story.

The business of Citadel and Jane Street is so powerful and so good, and you will not outcompete those kinds of technical edges that maybe CTA models 10 years ago could have had a slight leaning to. You won’t be able to outcompete the D. E. Shaws of the world as the market’s gotten so much more fragmented and faster. On the other hand, you can’t win markets where you have to have size as retail investors, because size moves the market. If you can be a bully, the way you can beat Citadel is you can actually just bring size and crush them.

That’s kind of the spectrum. You either have to have huge size, or you have to move really, really, really quickly and have a turnover that’s 100 times the biggest investor. Anywhere in between, you’re fighting against these 2 behemothic models.

So, Jeff, what’s your edge? Tell us what your edge is.

This is the punchline. This is why I wrote this piece on my Substack called “The Rise of the Ideological Investor.” The rise of the ideological investor is actually the trend that’s happening underneath, where we’re seeing the religion of crypto meet the religion of stocks. The narratives you’re able to create around ideology can’t be beaten by machines as easily. It might be possible one day, but today it’s a lot harder.

What’s also not possible to beat is the ideology behind national strategic priorities. I don’t think it’s enough to now buy stocks thinking that they’re going to grow based on an Excel-modelable revenue profile, because computers can do it. So, you have no edge. You just have no edge outperforming things that are modelable because of consumer growth. What you can’t model is random government acts. That’s really hard. That’s actually much harder.

The idea of quantum becoming a national strategy, where capital is going to flow in, and that’s going to create a different Excel model than the one that you had 6 months ago, is much harder. I think part of why people are so focused on trading news flow today more than ever is because that’s still the 1 edge retail can have. You can do a little bit better than the machines if you’re able to trade on—I don’t want to use the word “inside information,” because that’s not what this is. It’s not MNPI around accounting gimmicks.

It’s really intelligence at the highest level: Where is capital going to flow, and is that capital going to be durable? Is it strategic? Is it big? Watching how those things have developed around AI, I think, is a particular thing that, if you were just a regular retail investor, you could have actually gotten ahead. You could have gotten ahead of most of the investors that have come in.

Same thing with likely Palantir as a comp of that, right? There are people who are zealots about Alex Karp, and they do not care. The revenue has no foundational basis for its stock valuation, but they believe military spending is going to be humongous because we’re going to have giant kinds of technological warfare that we can’t comprehend. We think there’s going to be an infinite budget to support that from the government in the future because it’s a national priority.

That alone is ideology enough to make a bet, but the computers can’t make that bet as easily because that’s not what you pay advisers for, right? I think this is the world we’re entering, where, if you can have an awareness of trends and ideology at some level, that’s where you can start putting money to work with an edge as a retail investor.

I think you make some very, very, very assertive arguments here. One thing that’s interesting to me is the change in the strategy that you have to take as a retail investor now. I think it’s actually easier in many ways. For example, SpaceX comes out and says that we’re going to go public soon, and then suddenly every space stock on the face of this planet is ripping. It rips over the course of 5 days, and that’s kind of the exact same strategy that people used in 2021 to make a ton of money in crypto. You would have a market leader come out, and then everything else would rip alongside it.

This is happening across the board. Another example of this is the rumors that Trump is going to reclassify marijuana. If you just read that headline, believe it, investigate it, and maybe go look at Polymarket and say, “The odds of this are pretty high,” you can make some good bets. Then, guess what? Marijuana stocks double over the last week.

I actually think that, for some reason, these funds, because maybe they have such a good business already, don’t feel pressured to make these types of trades. This leaves open a huge gap in the market for people like me.

I struggle with that idea. What do you guys think Citadel and Jane Street are doing? Maybe their market-making arm doesn’t care about that, but DRW—there’s a whole natural-language-processing, news-interpretation, data-ingestion trading business that does exactly that. So, I don’t know. I’m a skeptic.

It seems to be working, though. That’s it.

These moves are not instantly repriced.

That’s true. Maybe what we should do is look for events where I think my edge as a retail investor is to look for events where the writing is all over the wall. You can see it from a mile away, but, however much front-running Jane Street and Citadel and everybody else have done, there’s still more to come because the event itself is so momentous that it will bring in capital into a certain sector that just can’t come in until the unlock occurs.

I don’t know. I don’t want to ramble too much. We only have Jeff. This is a fun 1, I think, to double down on a little bit, and maybe we can take some learnings from the innovations of DeFi and how concentrated liquidity was once a model that people were thinking about for liquidity bootstrapping in a different way that current Wall Street does not.

I think what that is alluding to is that the Citadels and the Jane Streets, the Cumberlands, they’re happy to provide liquidity at a certain point of the spectrum of outcomes. If the market is 50/50 or 40/60, they’ll be there. When the market’s 90/10 or 95/5, I don’t know if they’re going to be there.

Actually, a 95/5 market is the kind of market you want to bet on in prediction markets, because that’s really where, as a retail investor, you don’t have to worry about size and can flex that optionality. People really underestimate this, but a 5% event going to a 10% event is a double.

And so you don't really need to play for a digital outcome when the odds are that skewed and there's no liquidity—or there's not as much liquidity as you might think from the professional market makers at that point. That's why sports gambling is actually an individual business, right? The most profitable investors in sports betting are professional sports bettors. It's not that the house isn't winning; they're of course winning, but it's a redistribution of profits where the house edge is still maintained and the best performers are outcompeting the rest.

8. Jeff’s 2026 Predictions

That's the market structure in which market makers can win, but it doesn't mean that all individuals fail, right? There's a spectrum of outcomes in which a positive-EV experience can be had if you know what you're doing, especially with low-probability event betting, which is where I think most of the wealth-creation effects will come for retail investors that are ideologically driven at some level.

I like that framework. Thank you. Before you jump, we want to do some predictions for 2026. Jeff, you're a prolific writer and predictor of things. Given that we have limited time, should we focus on 2026 predictions? Is there a list you put out? Should we do a lightning round? What do you want to do?

I've been working on this, so I guess we'll get a quick preview here. Maybe, based on the Crypto Twitter supporter-troll activities, I'll have to revise my predictions.

We'll make sure to clip these predictions and try to make them as viral as possible here. Where do you want to start?

I got 3. I try to do these in 3.

My very first prediction is not surprising to people here. I think Bitcoin will be more volatile in 2026 than it was in 2025. I say this with the hope that, of course, it comes with price gains, but I really don't care about the price gains if it doesn't come with volatility, because that's the long-term thing we need for Bitcoin to have its reflexivity wheel turning on.

I also hope that it'll be more decoupled from traditional assets, where the RIA channels will find a use case for Bitcoin in ways that they will continue to underwrite low-performing assets as long as it's decoupled from the rest of the portfolio. So my number-one prediction is that Bitcoin volatility will be higher in 2026.

My second prediction is actually about prediction markets. I think I saw lately that the volume of prediction-market bets year to date has been about $45 billion. I think it'll more than double. My prediction is that prediction markets will trade over $100 billion in notional in 2026. This shouldn't surprise anybody who's been paying attention to the news. Gemini is coming in, Coinbase is coming in, and Robinhood's coming in. Everyone wants a piece of this pie.

Why do they want a piece of this pie? Because it's very natural within all aspects of humanity that people want to bet on events. Betting on events is ultimately tied to a mindset that I think will be less about financialization and more about the autonomous world that we're anticipating will come. The marginal benefit here that I'm hoping for crypto is that we'll really help people think about self-custody again.

When you buy assets like bonds and stocks and stuff, it's easy to think about there being a need for a custodian and all that stuff because they're safeguarding something. But if you start betting on prediction markets, I do think it'll change the DNA of your own perspective on finance, where it's like, yeah, I don't need anyone to custody my view on XYZ. I don't need someone to actually custody any of this stuff.

These are all just financializations of events that actually don't need an intermediary at a custodial level. At a settlement layer, yes, but not at the custodial level, which I think will be huge for crypto.

The third thing I have a prediction for—and a hope, perhaps—is that privacy will become a more important meta once again. I think it's one of the core tenets of crypto that, at some level, was a little bit compromised in the institutionalization. But the reality is that people want privacy, and it's very natural to have privacy.

It's really important that we talk about privacy in a healthy way and understand that there's a spread between nondisclosure and full disclosure. There's a thing called selective disclosure, and I do think when things like ZK tech become more palpably useful, it'll solve a lot of the world's problems.

A lot of the world's problems are about people wanting to show something without actually showing the how behind it, right? Think of all the regulatory-compliance burden that comes from, “Show me XYZ,” when you actually don't want to show the things behind it beyond just attesting that XYZ is true. All of those things are at the core of making the world a little bit more interesting for access, and I think we have to root for that.

My hope is that privacy will become more important. I don't mean to say that Zcash is going to have a run-up. It might, who knows? But I do think it is one of the metas in 2026 that people are going to revive, and I find earnest interest worth backing.

I sure hope so, too. One thing I'll say on that topic, though, is that if you look at the best-performing crypto assets over the last 5 years, Monero is up there now.

And it's because there's a real, genuine use case for privacy. People—you're right—have completely forgotten about this with respect to crypto. I'm actually very heartened to see this narrative come back because it's almost like going back to the roots of what we were all here for.

100%. Volatility, gambling, and privacy. I like that. It's a good way to go into the new year.

I just want to live in the wild woods of my upstate home and gamble on random events with no one knowing. That is—

Sounds like the life, Jeff.

Sounds awesome. I think Coinbase stock is the most obvious trade if you believe in those 3 themes going into 2026.

Yeah, I think Coinbase is a good one. I would not discount Robinhood either. I think they've made such a great—

That's what Avi likes.

I was going to say Coinbase, you guys.

Coinbase just bought my angel investment in the clearing company, so I'm feeling very bullish on Coinbase at this point. It wasn't a huge return, but it was a small one. Small one.

Is it in stock? Because I would dump that stock and go buy some Robinhood.

Flip it into Robinhood.

Well, in defense of Sean, who I think is brilliant and super smart—and I'm happy for you, Jonah.

Nice. Thank you. All right, Jeff, this was awesome. I'm super happy that you made it out. This was a fun one.

Yeah, this is great. We'll do it again.

See you soon, Jeff.

Adios. Take care.