BULL RUN IS OVER?
- Ansem treats the selloff as the first meaningful pullback since the late-June bottom, not the end of the bull run. Bitcoin had recently retested the roughly $87,500 yearly open, a major resistance level, and was near $81,700; his key downside line was $75,000, below which “it might get a little tricky.” Rising rates and war risk are the macro wall of worry, but he still sees the structure as favorable for adding.
- The portfolio prescription is a 70/30 barbell: 70% high-conviction spot holdings and 30% speculative onchain or perpetual-futures trades. Ansem notes that eventual multibillion-dollar winners have historically suffered 75%-80% drawdowns after an initial 100x, but warns against becoming trapped in one meme through “too much intellectual capital.” The objective is to recycle exceptional speculative gains into assets with less downside.
- PUMP, HYPE and STRK were Ansem’s clearest near-term calls. He cited PUMP’s roughly $2.5 million of daily revenue, product execution and strong chart. Banks identified the $0.005-$0.0055 area as a strong spot and expected a return to the approximately $0.01 high “within a few weeks,” with a longer-term $20-$30 billion valuation scenario. HYPE remains Ansem’s preferred platform bet, while his STRK call—around $0.06—was later labeled the “trade of the week” by Banks on privacy, programmability and quantum-resistance narratives.
- His upside targets are intentionally asymmetric but explicitly conditional. Ansem thinks Zcash could reach a $100 billion market cap, roughly $10,000 per coin, and assigned about a 70% chance to Zcash reaching $2,000 by December 31; his lifetime Bitcoin target is $1.5 million, based on matching gold’s stated $30 trillion market cap. Banks also named quantum and inflation risks for Bitcoin; quantum risk is central to Ansem’s Zcash thesis.
- Ansem rejects the idea that a conventional memecoin will flip Bitcoin because “Bitcoin is the original memecoin,” though he later acknowledged that a pure meme doing so is possible. Pure animal memes now face lower ceilings because novelty has faded, capital is fragmented and traders want to buy at $100,000 rather than $100 million. Multibillion-dollar outcomes require attention and capital from outside crypto’s existing onchain bubble, not one viral headline.
- The structural bull case is tokenization plus stablecoins feeding a new “meme-fi” application layer. In Ansem’s model, issuers such as Circle and Tether turn stablecoin adoption into indirect demand for U.S. debt, while more assets and money moving onchain invite developers to build speculative protocols around them. He sees Solana already competing with centralized exchanges on volume and, in some cases, delivering better spreads.
- Turning $1,000 into meaningful capital requires a durable core, early information and disciplined rotation—not indiscriminate leverage or one-click token launches. Ansem would now auto-buy HYPE while using a smaller sleeve to front-run onchain narratives and compound momentum trades; his own first-cycle mistake was round-tripping gains instead of selling. Ansem also said his degen portfolio’s gains had fallen from almost $300,000 to around $90,000 after he redeployed shortly before the crash, including a roughly $80,000 loss in three days.
1. The bull case survives unless Bitcoin loses $75,000
Ansem’s read was constructive but level-dependent: Bitcoin had recently retested the approximately $87,500 yearly open, which he described as a major resistance spot, and traded near $81,700. The line he did not want breached was $75,000: below it, “it might get a little tricky.”
He framed the decline as the first real reset since the late-June bottom, with leveraged participants—not necessarily the broader thesis—taking the damage. “We’re climbing the wall of worry,” he said, citing rising rates and war concerns while maintaining that the market still looked structurally addable.
Banks admitted the emotional reality behind that thesis: large red numbers make buying difficult even when drawdowns are normal. Ansem’s answer was blunt: if buying weakness were easy, “everybody would be a millionaire.”
2. A 70/30 barbell prevents one meme from owning the portfolio
Ansem’s recurring allocation rule is 70% high-conviction spot crypto and 30% “degen” exposure through onchain coins and perpetuals. Salary or other income can replenish the safer sleeve; outsized speculative wins should also be harvested into positions with more limited downside.
The sharp onchain decline did not surprise him because tiny-cap assets bottom earlier, run harder and then retrace harder than majors. Previous eventual multibillion-dollar coins, he argued, endured 75%-80% drawdowns after their first roughly 100x move.
His warning was behavioral as much as financial: an investor can become unwilling to sell after committing “too much intellectual capital” to one meme, then miss a 3x in Bitcoin, ETH or SOL and a potential 5x-10x in PUMP or HYPE. Concentration occasionally works spectacularly, but can leave the portfolio stranded.
3. Singapore reinforced the institutional adoption thesis
From Token2049 in Singapore, Ansem described a conference weighted toward technical builders and institutions rather than “moon boys” selling vapor. His takeaway was that many sophisticated people who remained through the bear market were now visibly bullish.
The long-term evidence, in his telling, spans tokenization, stablecoins, stores of value and perpetual futures. Several applications are already working, while others have “flown under the radar” and may emerge during the current cycle.
Solana was his clearest infrastructure example: low transaction costs let developers build trading interfaces that compete with centralized exchanges across crypto, stocks and other assets, sometimes with better spreads. He also flagged Wormhole’s role in Sunrise’s cross-chain tokenized assets, though he had not bought any and stressed its deeply beaten-down chart.
They also discussed Robinhood adding $25 million of Bitcoin to its balance sheet. Banks read the move as evidence of crypto alignment, Bitcoin bullishness and broader institutional normalization.
4. A one-hour trading contest exposed real skill—and distorted incentives
In Coinbase’s ten-trader competition, each participant started with $10,000 and could trade any perpetual on Coinbase Pro, the new or relaunched product. Ansem first went long Bitcoin and Zcash, then closed those positions and shorted ETH at maximum leverage, briefly reaching first place before finishing fourth.
The winner’s decisive move was strategic rather than random. After the field had been short, Intern recognized that staying short could not beat Ansem’s larger short; by going long Bitcoin at roughly 50x, he gained while the leaders simultaneously lost. Ansem called it effectively “2x gain immediately” when price reversed.
Banks’s pushback—worth keeping—was that one hourly candle and extreme leverage overrepresent degeneracy, even if low-time-frame trading has a genuine skill curve. He wanted viewers to hear the thesis, risk logic and relationship between a position and the trader’s worldview, not merely watch charts.
Ansem conceded that longer-term spot holdings will probably make the most money for most people, but defended perps as learnable and potentially superior for elite operators. He had built much of his own wealth trading them; in the contest, $10,000 controlled approximately $500,000-$600,000, illustrating both their appeal and danger.
5. Trading media needs personalities and story arcs, not sterile esports
Banks compared current trading contests with esports’ mistake of overprofessionalizing itself. Call of Duty was most culturally alive when competitors argued, threw controllers and built rivalries; sanitizing that behavior made the format less representative of gaming culture. His broader premise was that attention and distribution become the moat as AI makes products easier to copy.
His proposed format was closer to Big Brother: traders living together for a month, developing ideas on camera, recording confessionals and carrying viewers through a position that could end seven figures higher. The thesis formation, disagreement and social dynamics would become the entertainment.
Ansem’s distinction was that esports audiences watch people perform, while trading audiences watch people make money and immediately ask, “How do I do what they’re doing?” Both agreed that this gives trading media enormous potential, but Banks argued the existing format has not approached a mass audience.
6. Bitcoin remains the original memecoin, while Zcash is the quantum-related comparison
Responding to Morad’s thesis that a memecoin such as SPX could reach trillions or flip broader markets, Ansem said the direction was right: collective belief and social consensus should command a growing premium if AI commoditizes intellect and creates “a trillion AI agents.”
His categorical objection was that “Bitcoin is the original memecoin”—the first digital asset whose value emerged from collective belief that it could reach a multitrillion-dollar valuation, starting from zero. Its “immaculate conception” is unlikely to recur in the same way. He later acknowledged that a pure meme flipping Bitcoin was possible.
Zcash is the asset he can imagine approaching a Bitcoin-like valuation if quantum computing threatens existing cryptography. He owns Zcash spot rather than a leveraged perp and argues that it combines collective store-of-value belief with privacy and other properties he considers better than Bitcoin’s.
7. One viral event cannot manufacture a multibillion-dollar meme
Banks’s Super Inu trade captured the puzzle: he and his group bought around a $23 million market cap, made about $20,000 and exited before it peaked near $55 million. Four days later, the pair discussed Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Jensen Huang being shown together in what Ansem described as a rebranding of AI to “SI” or superintelligence, yet the token still failed to explode.
Ansem rejected that muted response as proof that onchain memes were dead. A viral event merely redirects the finite capital already onchain; a token reaches billions when attention spreads outside “our little CT bubble” and brings in people who previously had no crypto exposure.
Accumulation matters because months of two-way trading create a durable holder base. A one-hour spike is exciting, but Ansem argued it cannot substitute for aggressive buyers absorbing sellers in a range before price finally expands.
Banks countered with the earlier Peanut example, which reached billions after Trump discussed it; Ansem conceded that present ceilings do look lower. His explanation was saturation: animal memes are no longer novel, choices have multiplied, and “everybody wants to buy something at 100K market cap” while few want to bid at $100 million.
8. Tokenization turns the next speculative cycle into “meme-fi”
Ansem’s “meme-fi” label joins two forces: memes create crypto-native objects for speculation, while finance supplies the exchanges, games and protocols built around them. The likely winners combine culture with utility or mechanics that did not exist in earlier cycles.
The monetary plumbing is stablecoins. His thesis is that the U.S. government benefits when dollar stablecoins expand because issuers such as Circle and Tether hold U.S. debt; every new user therefore becomes, indirectly and perhaps unknowingly, part of a larger Treasury buyer base.
More real-world assets and stablecoins onchain should attract more capital, which attracts developers, which creates additional venues for speculation. Banks’s practical endorsement was simpler: moving large sums through USDC feels “leagues better” than banks in convenience and, when operated correctly, safety.
9. PUMP, HYPE and STRK led a broader but selective trade list
STRK was Ansem’s under-discussed call for the coming week, trading near $0.06. He tied the project to a technically respected team, Zcash lineage and a rare combination of privacy, quantum-resistance and programmability; the wreckage across Ethereum L2 tokens is what made the chart interesting. Banks later labeled it the “trade of the week.”
PUMP remained one of Ansem’s least worrying bags. He cited roughly $2.5 million in daily revenue, competition from Bonk, STOMP and FOMO, rapid feature shipping and vertical integration from launchpad to PumpSwap DEX to mobile app. Banks identified the $0.005-$0.0055 area as a strong spot and expected a return to the approximately $0.01 high within weeks.
HYPE was the easiest conviction call: Ansem described Hyperliquid as crypto’s best perpetuals platform and highlighted its U.S. partnership with Kraken. Asked for a target, he refused—if it can “consume all of finance,” a fixed number risks forcing either a premature sale or stubbornness when conditions change.
The unowned watchlist included Grass and LayerZero. Grass’s case is access to web data through individual devices for AI labs that need training and inference data, while its marketing is constrained by NDAs; LayerZero’s Atlas launch also interested him. Ansem also spoke positively about Ethena, but did not say he held any of these positions.
10. Huge targets require flexible exits and a repeatable compounding system
Ansem’s explicit scenarios were $100 billion for Zcash—roughly $10,000 per coin—and a 70% subjective probability of Zcash reaching $2,000 by December 31, versus the market’s displayed roughly 30%-33%. For Bitcoin, his lifetime target was $1.5 million, matching gold’s stated $30 trillion market cap. Banks named quantum and inflation as the principal risks to that thesis.
Banks put PUMP’s longer-term valuation in the $20-$30 billion range from about $2.5 billion. Ansem tied that case to tokenization expanding coin creation, social trading and mobile distribution expanding participation, and the team monetizing adjacent products. He compared the opportunity to 2021’s L1 trade shifting into today’s application layer.
Starting over, Ansem would auto-buy HYPE as his core and use the remaining capital to catch early alts and onchain narratives. He began trading with $100 and entered crypto with roughly $3,000, regularly bought Bitcoin from paychecks, then compounded rotations across assets such as SOL, Luna and AVAX; his first-cycle error was failing to sell and round-tripping gains.
Banks’s counterpoint was that trading is a high-risk PVP game—he cited the “90-90-90” rule—and that people can create value without trading. They also discussed how creator fees shifted incentives toward launching coins, though Banks stressed that profitable creators rely on fast infrastructure, bundling and distribution rather than simply clicking a button.
Ansem said his degen portfolio had been up almost $300,000 before its gains fell to around $90,000. He had stabled up, then redeployed two days before the crash into two or three positions, including Zcash and meme coins, and said he was down roughly $80,000 over three days.
Full transcript
And welcome back to Market Bubble, a show about investing in yourself, where we feel an overwhelming majority of young men today are in a losing position. How are we positioned? Find out today and every Thursday live everywhere: Twitch, Twitter. Oh, wow. Look at that overlay. Sexy as [__]. Amazing. Whoa. I didn't know we had—we did that. You guys [__] with this? It looks beautiful. Completely threw me off. Yeah, we're live 1 p.m. PST. I know it's 5:00 p.m. PST. Spread super thin right now. We got Z. We got Z here with us. We got a [__] show for you guys today. What's good?
What’s good?
Yo, what’s good? I’m back. Where are you right now?
You’re almost back. You’re hanging on by a [__] thread. I can see that it’s super bright where you are. What time is it, bro?
It’s like 8:57 where I’m at. I’m in Singapore for Token2049. I had about 5 different events I had to do yesterday and the day before that, so I’m running around. Singapore is cool.
Korea one day, back in New York, then Singapore the next, [__] LA. I can’t believe your brain hasn’t exploded. It could be—
What the [__]? I think I hit 4 countries in the past 3 weeks. I’ve been in the air for about 2 and a half days total flight time.
That’s absolutely insane. Are you excited to get back home, bro?
I cannot wait. It’s [__] football season, it’s Q4, the markets look good. I am ready.
Do the markets look good, brother? I’m down—I don’t even want to say, bro.
I know. People are down a little bit right now. I think this is the first real pullback we’ve had since the bottom in late June. It definitely liquidated some people who were in leverage positions, but I think we still look good across the board.
I hope so. No, listen: drawdowns and pullbacks, this shit’s normal. You can really tell the people who are new to crypto when this happens. It’s a [__] 5% retrace and people are freaking the [__] out. You guys weren’t here in October last [__], 2 years ago.
Yeah, you weren’t here when [__] $10 billion got liquidated.
Insane.
Before we get into it, we’re going to run a quick little hour program, catch up, update these guys, and talk about the market. Do you have any personal updates for everybody? You’re there with Coinbase, you’re at Token2049. What’s on the horizon? What have you been working on? What have you been up to? Where has Ansem been?
1. Institutional Crypto Interest Returns
The energy here in Singapore is really good. I think there’s a lot of institutional interest in crypto, and a lot of the smartest people who have stuck around during the bear are here. Crypto conferences are interesting because you typically see 1 of 2 things: you see all the moon boys trying to sell you vapor, or you see the more technical and institutional people who really believe in the foundational and fundamental value of crypto long term.
I think this was more so the second thing. I’ve definitely been to conferences where it’s all the first thing. I think both kind of drive the speculation in crypto, but I would definitely say that people are feeling bullish and excited about crypto right now.
We’ve made a lot of big strides over the past few years on the tokenization front, the stablecoin front, the store-of-value front, and the perpetual futures front. There are a ton of applications of crypto that, as we know, have been doing really well, and some that I think have flown under the radar and are going to continue to do well this bull market. I’ve been working a whole lot and networking with a lot of important people—doing a lot of things at once, for sure.
2. The Pullback Becomes A Buying Opportunity
The question I have for you is: Is it time to buy? Is it time to add to the positions that we have conviction in?
Yeah. I think this is a decent pullback right now. I’m pulling up—let me see. I have my Bitcoin chart up. The low that we had before we did this pop to $87K means we just retested the yearly open on Bitcoin, which is $87.5K—a really big resistance spot. I think once we flip that, we’re probably going to run really hard.
We pulled back a little bit, and we’re at $81.7K right now. The low that you don’t want to see us go beneath is that $75K low. I think if we go beneath there, it might get a little tricky. I hope we’re not affected by any of the macro stuff that’s been going on. I think that’s people’s main concern right now: rates have been ripping, and people are concerned about the war.
We’re climbing the wall of worry, but I think structurally everything looks good right now to be adding to positions. This is the first real pullback that we’ve seen. I still like PUMP a lot, and I still like HYPE a lot.
I’ve been adding and holding my position there, but Zcash and some other random onchain degenerate [__]—it’s tough.
The onchain stuff has gotten hit really hard. People have to remember that onchain everything starts at a super-low market cap and actually bottoms before majors bottom, so it makes sense that it would pull back a bit harder.
All the coins last cycle that ran to multibillions had these 75% to 80% drawdowns after their first 100x run-up from launch. That’s normal and that makes sense. You just have to be careful about not getting your entire portfolio stuck in these things because they’re super volatile.
You don’t want to be in a position where Bitcoin, ETH, and SOL all 3x, and HYPE and PUMP do 5x to 10x or whatever, but you’re not holding the best mid-cap and you’re not holding any major. You’re all in on whatever meme you decided to go all in on. Sometimes that works really well, but sometimes it can work against you, and you’re going to be down in a position you don’t want to sell because you’ve committed too much intellectual capital to it.
I hammer this every single show now, and I’ll continue to say it over and over so people get it through their heads: You want a safer portion of your portfolio. I say 70/30, which is your spot crypto holdings. Whatever your highest-conviction spots are, 30% is more degen—perps, onchain, all those spots.
If you do it right and you have whatever income comes from your job, you’ll be able to add to those safer positions and then add when you’re taking profits on the more degen stuff. If you hit a meme and hit a 100x, you have a lot more capital now, and you can allocate that to safer plays that have limited downside compared to things that can go down 80% in a couple of weeks.
I think the onchain pullback makes sense. I still think the—
I think you had a tweet about this pretty recently: Expect some sort of pullback, expect some sort of drawdown. It’s normal, it’s to be expected. Don’t be alarmed by that [__].
Yeah. I do think that those plays, if you pick the right onchain plays right now, are definitely the ones that pay out the most. I still agree with that point. That’s why it’s more difficult to do, because the payout is so high if you’re right. This is definitely the time to be adding to those spots.
It’s difficult when you see that big red number and it’s just [__] down only. It’s tough. But if it was easy, everybody would be doing it, right?
Yeah. If it was easy, everybody would be a millionaire.
Facts. There’s a Venice update. Venice is live on Solana, which is pretty great.
Really? Like spot, I guess.
So, yeah, look.
Oh, wow. That’s big. Damn, that’s sick. Yeah, Sunrise is crushing it, by the way.
I think one of the most underrated trades right now—Qwerty has been talking about this a little bit—is Wormhole. Wormhole kind of powers all the cross-chain stuff for these tokenized stocks and other crypto assets through Sunrise, and it’s one of those charts that’s really beaten down.
I haven’t bought any yet, but I think that’s an interesting shout because the chart does look pretty good. It’s down a [__] ton, but they actually solve real problems in crypto and are getting used by a ton of different things. It’s actually still under its 10/10 bottom wick, which is pretty crazy.
The Sunrise stuff is crushing it. Backpack is also crushing it. I think an underdiscussed narrative this cycle for Solana so far is that Solana is actually competing with a lot of the centralized exchanges on spot trading volume in crypto, stocks, and other things.
Because Solana is so cheap and easy to transact on, you can build really good infrastructure on top of it. In some cases, people are getting better spreads on Solana than they’re actually getting on centralized exchanges, which is pretty crazy.
3. The Trading Competition Goes Live
Epic. You’re in Token2049 partially for this trading event. You want to talk about that?
Yeah, bro. I almost won that shit. This was yesterday. Coinbase sponsored it, so shout-out to Coinbase for inviting me. It was dope. There were 10 traders. It was funny—it was East versus West, like League of Legends, where they have 5 on one side and 5 on the other. Like that, but it wasn’t teams.
Some of the really popular traders in the East and some of the really popular traders in the West were there. It was me, Jez, HDF, Fumble Farmer, Intern, and Kev from—he used to be at Monad, and now he’s at Robo Strategy[?]. Then there were a lot of the guys in the East who were crushing it. Booming Bull was neck and neck with me for a good bit of it. It was a $10K starting balance, and you could trade any perp on Coinbase Pro, their new product that they’re launching—or relaunching, I think.
I didn’t mean to do that. Keep going.
What the hell? What the shit is that?
I just want to show them what it looks like. It’s like a typical esports setup.
It was sick as shit. There were 5 of us on one side and 5 of us on the other side. We did intros and shit, and in the middle there was a big crowd of people watching us trade. It was $10K per trader, any asset on Coinbase Pro. It was right before the New York market open, too, so we actually had a good bit of volatility while stuff was selling off.
Super cool that Intern won. So cool.
Bro, yeah, it’s sick. I was long Bitcoin and Zcash for the first 10–15 minutes. I closed, went short ETH, and I was in first for a little bit. Then it bottomed, and Intern went long Bitcoin on like 50x leverage and caught up to me and the other guy who was short. So I think I got fourth.
4. Trading Needs A Better Format
Can I ask you a question? I think that, from the lens of you and the average person in crypto, it’s bullish and cool to see a production like this. It’s cool to see these institutions, platforms, and products interested in putting budgets behind entertainment, media, content, and the attention funnel.
I feel like attention is the fucking moat, right? At the end of the day, we’re moving into this crazy era of AI where it’s going to become trivial to copy products. The ability to distribute, market it, and tell the story is going to be everything.
So I think that’s kind of where everybody’s head’s at and why companies like Coinbase are partners with Phantom and Venice and shit, Polymarket. That’s kind of where everybody’s at. You obviously see Pump versus FOMO. These guys are super competitive with each other, and a lot of it is that they’re in competition for people’s attention.
For that reason, this is cool to me, but I actually have a countertake to it. I don’t think that this esports format is it. Can I ask you a genuine question about this? Do you think Intern won due to luck, or was it skill, or what combination of these things do you think it was?
No, it was definitely skill.
100% skill when you’re trading leverage in a small window of time.
I feel like it’s a great representation of how people—
What was that?
People do day trade low time frames. I don’t trade as much on the low time frames like that anymore, but I used to do it a lot. There are a lot of people who are really good at trading low time frames.
For me, my strat was that we had already broken a pretty key level on majors, and I thought we were going to continue to sell off. But we had also sold off a lot going into the actual start of the competition. It’s 1 hour, so you’re basically betting on what this hourly candle is going to look like. Is it going to be a green hourly candle? Is it going to be a red hourly candle? Where do you think the wicks are going to be?
You’re on the 1-minute chart because you have to be in and out of stuff, just because price doesn’t go straight down or straight up. If you have a compressed amount of time, you’re basically trying to catch very small percentage moves in both directions in that short amount of time.
What Intern actually did was super smart. We were all short at the same time. I was in first, Booming Bull was in second, and Intern was in third, I think. We were all short. I was short ETH, Booming Bull was short BTC, but I had top-ticked it and I had a bigger position than everybody because I was on max leverage.
What Intern basically calculated was, “I can’t win if I’m short because Ansem has a bigger short position than me. It doesn’t even matter if price keeps going down. I’m not going to win if price keeps going down.” But he was like, “If price bounces from here and I’m long and the other guy’s short, you basically have double the P&L,” because I’m going to be gaining P&L and he’s going to be losing P&L at the same time. So it’s kind of like a 2x gain immediately when price flips back the other direction.
No, I get it. There’s obviously some element of scale. These guys are going to out-trade our production guys if they went and sat down and tried to compete in something like this. You’re not just trading against your—
I don’t know. I’m just not sold that this specifically is the best representation of what fucking trading is. I don’t know if it speaks to trading culture in the way that I think it could, like the way that I think a production could—a more curated, refined, fresh, and new idea.
Is it not safe to say that leverage trading is, like you just said before, more degenerate? A little bit more risk-on and a little bit more volatile than just trading spot or focusing on what the market’s doing over a longer period of time? Would you agree with that?
Yeah, it’s definitely more degenerate, but it’s definitely skill-based. I would say if you put 10 traders in a room and give them a perp comp with a set amount of time, the best perp trader is going to win a higher percentage of those times.
For sure. For sure.
There’s definitely a skill curve. It’s not pure gambling.
I don’t know. Also, just the entertainment factor of it—I feel like it’s very technical. You’re staring at charts; people are tuning in to look at charts, which I feel is adding to the barrier.
I feel like the most entertaining aspect of trading for me is hearing people articulate their ideas about why they think the way they think. When Rasmr walks through a trade, I think it’s indicative of his audience and how much he’s growing. The way he speaks about positions and why he’s trading things, as it relates to his own personal life or his view on shit—the thesis part of it is such an important representation.
I just don’t know if I think it represents what the industry is about and what trading actually is very well. It’s the opportunity to teach. I think that’s more entertaining. I would like to see a longer period of time, and I would like to see people talk. I’d like personalities to be able to shine a little bit, and for people’s brains to come through—to articulate what they’re seeing and how they’re thinking. I feel like that’s such a huge part of trading.
Yeah, they’re definitely 2 different pieces. The longer-term spot positions, I think, are going to make you the most money, but also, if you get really good at trading perps, I made most of my money trading perps and just getting good at TA.
People hearing how I’m thinking through entering positions and getting out of positions—that’s important. If you’re able to enter perp positions at optimal times in the bull market, you’re going to make more than everybody else who’s playing spot, which is true. But you have to be one of the people who is the most skilled at doing that. It is something that you can learn to do and learn how to get better at.
I think what’s interesting is the leverage stuff. I’m on 50x leverage. I have 500,000–600,000 positions with a $10K starting balance. That’s why it’s entertaining for people, because leverage is how you can turn super-small accounts into large accounts in a short amount of time. It’s always going to be more entertaining than, “I bought $100K of a pump and now I’m up 300.”
But I do think you kind of have to explain that both things do exist. If you believe traders are going to be celebrities and popular content creators, there’s definitely going to be that side of it that people want to watch and are entertained by.
And you also see it with the memecoin stuff.
The lens I'm looking at this through is esports. My relationship with esports—obviously, FaZe is the biggest esports brand of all time. We had super successful teams in esports. Esports has historically been a struggling industry. It's been hard to make any sort of profit in esports, and it doesn't have a huge audience.
With Call of Duty, for example, content creators and streamers who are aiming to entertain are winning the battle of attention. I spoke about it in this pre-show, but I just feel like they kind of lost the plot a little bit. They overprofessionalized it. Esports kind of went the route of traditional sports, and I just feel like meeting the culture where they're actually at—what they want and how they live day-to-day—is super important.
I feel like Call of Duty esports should have gone the WWE-UFC route, because the peak, pinnacle of COD esports for me was when people were popping off, throwing controllers, talking shit to each other. There were some drama arcs, storylines, and beefs, and now all these guys get fined if they say the fucking F-word. You know what I mean? That's not indicative of what the culture is actually doing.
Anybody who's spent a considerable amount of time in a Call of Duty lobby has probably seen the memes about it, right? It's toxic, and people talk shit. That's a huge part of gaming culture.
And then again, I don't know. Somewhere in between, I agree with you: let's buy $100K worth of Pump here and see where it goes is probably like watching paint dry to a degree. But again, I think—
You're literally not doing anything. I'm—bro, a lot of those positions where I'm in swing positions, you're not doing anything for a lot of the time. You're like, "Yeah, of course, below here I'm selling and I'm getting out." But otherwise, I'm just going to chill and be in the spot.
Yeah, two different things. But I will say, I don't know if esports is definitely similar, but I think the thing that's interesting about trading is that in esports you're watching people do something, but trading is like you're watching people make money. So it's always going to be different, because people watch the trading like, "Oh, how the fuck do I do what they're doing?"
I agree. There's potential here. But that's kind of where my head's at. I think that if it's articulated and curated properly, live audiences watching people trade should be in the millions. And as we know, our show and other shows like this—these trading competitions—they're not attracting that level of attention and that level of engagement, right?
It's like, how do we make it bigger? How do we make it more entertaining? How do we make it more engaging for the average person? I don't know. I just think, longer term, I have some ideas. Maybe I'll take a crack at one of them and see how it stands up against these competitions.
Hit up Coinbase. Tell them to do—
A Banks x Coinbase trading competition.
I'm honestly—I have some ideas, and I would really genuinely love to do something like that. Again, I just think it would be cool to have a Big Brother-style house in production and have someone come up with an idea in real time, with a confessional room and a camera pointed at them on day 1. Then they hit some Kingmaker, PONKE, or STON-type trade.
You know what I'm saying? At the end of it, they're up seven figures on the month, and that person formed that idea and carried you through the entire trade over the course of a month. It was live, it was all caught on camera, and there were other dynamics, with other traders having their opinions on it. More social, engaging things with personalities like Rasmr, et cetera. You know what I mean? That's the shit I feel like I would be glued to.
The point I'm trying to make is that these trading competitions, how they're currently set up—I'm not really going out of my way to watch them. I'm not seeking out clips from them because they're not the most entertaining things in the world. That's just my opinion, right? I'm sure there's an audience for it, et cetera. I just think it could be much, much bigger.
I don't know. I'm fucking rambling at this point. But, yeah, you came in 4th. Intern won it. I—
Fucking GOAT. We love him in here.
He's the fucking best. By the way, he texted me at 1 p.m. He's like, "You guys aren't going live today?" He's in Singapore right now, too. What the fuck? I'm like, "We're going live at 5." How funny is that?
He's definitely wasted up 150 racks with the belt. He's like, "I'm fucking trying to watch Market Bubble." He's a sicko because he knew we were going to talk about it, obviously.
Yeah.
It's hilarious. Can a memecoin flip Bitcoin or the stock market? Morad is still on this, like, SPX to trillions. It's going to flip the stock market. Is that possible, bro?
I like Morad. I think Morad is directionally correct in that these assets driven by collective belief are actually going to become a lot more popular, and people are going to ascribe a lot more value to the social consensus around certain things.
But the reason a memecoin can never flip Bitcoin is because Bitcoin is the biggest memecoin. Bitcoin is the original memecoin. That's why I know no memecoin is ever going to be able to flip Bitcoin, because Bitcoin itself is the first digital asset whose value was derived completely from collective belief that this thing will be worth trillions in market cap someday. It started from zero, and that immaculate conception with Bitcoin—I don't think it's ever going to happen in that way again.
I will say that the interesting thing with Bitcoin is that if you believe in the quantum risk and you believe that may be an issue in the future, then I could see why, or how, something like Zcash could get to a very similar valuation. Zcash is also driven by the collective belief that this asset is a better store of value than all the other stores of value that exist, and it also has better properties than Bitcoin.
Do you long Zcash currently?
I'm not long. I have some Zcash spot, but I'm not long on perps.
I don't think it would be very hard for me to see how a pure meme could flip Bitcoin, but I guess it's possible. I say it's not possible, but it's very fair and likely. The core thesis that I think Morad has is directionally correct.
I do think if we live in a future where there's a trillion AI agents and intellect is commoditized, there's going to be a premium on individuals and a premium on assets that people have real belief in. So I think that is—
Culture, bro. Culture and attention. That's all we'll have left soon.
Yeah.
That's the way I see it as well. He gets a little bit off the rails and starts getting crazy, but—
He's really eloquent.
Yeah. Yeah. He's fun to listen to.
He's a smart guy, bro, right?
Super smart.
Bro, did you see this? I hit this SI trade. Did you see this SI coin on-chain? Super Inu. You see this?
So me and the boys hit this trade. We're buying this thing at $23 million. We couldn't have been more right about it. I fucked it up. I didn't size it properly. I made 20 bands on this. I'm fully exited out. I have no position in this, and I sold a little too early.
But this thing—this is where I should have known, and this is where I feel like I should have sized up. I'm curious about your opinion on this, because I had the thought: did you see—obviously, you saw Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Jensen, literally the fucking Justice League roundtable of tech moguls and billionaires, with Donald Trump, the biggest clout king on planet Earth, literally in a collaborative effort, just decide one day to rebrand AI to SI: superintelligence?
So fucking insane, bro. Like, insane.
So insane. Out of left field. What the fuck even is reality?
It's insane. By the way, it's even more insane that this happened 4 days after we traded this fucking Super Inu. This thing starts to vamp. AI starts to tank, SI starts to come. But this SI token topped out at around $55 million.
When you have literally the White House, as you see on your screen, Donald Trump—you, like, bro, is that not super bearish on-chain in memes? Am I misreading that?
I don't think it's super bearish. I think what it says is that, on-chain, there's a finite amount of capital at any one point in time. When something goes super viral like that, what you have is a lot of that capital going into one thing that's going super viral.
It happened with Jimothy; it happened with this SI thing. It's going to happen with a lot of things. But what drives memecoins to a multibillion-dollar market cap is not single attention events that drive the existing capital on-chain to bid things up. When memecoins go to multibillions, it's when stuff goes viral outside of the existing on-chain capital balance that's already on-chain.
Me and you have money on-chain, but the millions—or billions—of people on the planet don't have a lot of money on-chain. When something goes super viral outside of our little CT bubble, goes viral with retail, and reaches all these people who don't currently have exposure to crypto, that's when stuff starts to go really high. That's why it takes time, and that's why these accumulation periods actually matter a lot.
People are like, “Bro, the price isn't moving. It's been sideways for months.” Over that period, there's a lot of trading volume happening. Once there are more aggressive buyers and sellers in the same range, eventually, when the price does get pushed up, that's when stuff goes really high, because you have this strong base of holders that have been accumulating for a while.
Stuff that just pops in a day or in an hour or whatever, that's cool, but it's not what's going to drive the multibillion-dollar market cap. The fact that it topped out at $50 million doesn't mean that things won't go to multibillions. That's what I was saying.
Yeah, I agree. Again, with my generally relatively low understanding of the market compared to yours, I just see something like that and I'm like, “Dude, if this happened 2 years ago, this thing would have gone [__] insane.”
I do agree, bro. You had Peanut the Squirrel get mentioned by Donald Trump, right? It went off for a day, and this [__] went to billions. It touched billions.
That is true. That is true. I mean, [__], insane. There definitely is a ceiling that's much lower. I've noticed for memecoins, culture coins, and community coins, the higher-end top seems to be relatively low. You see STON, PAWS, and others touching $200–300 million, but those are real products that generate revenue. For pure narrative meme stuff, the ceiling is relatively low compared to what we've seen in previous cycles, at least right now, with Bitcoin at $80,000.
I guess that's just kind of where mine's at.
Yeah. Yeah. No, I think the pure-play meme coins—I said it in a longer tweet. Let me see if I have the tweet, because it was actually a decent tweet. I'll see if I have it so I can send it to you real quick. It was this.
Someone in the chat said, “I sold Peanut at $50K.”
Oh my God, that's—
That's brutal.
What's your worst example of selling something too early?
What's my worst example of selling something too early?
I don't really have one. I've round-tripped a million [__] bags to zero, but I don't have any examples of buying something too early.
Yeah, that's the thing. I'm usually not super early to stuff, so it's not a cheat.
I'm suffering with people buying hella [__] super early. They're like, “Oh, I sold this at $10K.” I'm like, “Bro, I was never seeing that at a $10K market cap. What do you mean?”
What was I going to say, though? I was going to say—what did you just ask, the on-chain stuff, the ceiling stuff? Oh, yeah, the pure—the pure—
Yeah, I just sent you the tweet in the chat. The pure-play meme coins, like pure animal memes and animal runners, I do think those will have lower ceilings. The reason is that when stuff goes super high, it's driven by a lot of excess speculation on something that people have never seen before, so they have nothing to compare it to.
Now, I think we've seen a ton of the pure animal memes happen, and there's so many more options for people to bid on. We see the issue with VCs in all these tokens. The reason the issue of VCs is never going to go away is because everybody wants to buy something at a $100K market cap. Nobody wants to buy something at a $100 million market cap.
When you have people who want to put small amounts of capital into these really low-market-cap things, it kind of changes the psychology of a lot of the market participants and what they decide to put capital into. For stuff to go multibillions, you need people who want to bid at higher market caps.
I think what's going to drive people to bid at higher market caps are coins that people don't have anything to compare to, that are new to people, and that look different. You also get institutional capital involved once something has reached a certain market cap, because people who manage tens and hundreds of millions don't really care about this stuff when it's under $100 million.
When stuff gets to $1 billion or more, they're like, “Oh, this might be good beta for us to have,” or when it approaches those levels. So, yeah, that's where I'm at with it.
Makes sense. You're still generally bullish on the market, though?
5. MemeFi Drives The Next Cycle
Yeah, I'm definitely bullish. I'm super bullish on-chain for sure. The reason I keep pushing this “meme” term—I really like the term “memeFi”—is because there are obviously a lot of assets that are going to come on-chain this cycle.
You believe in the RWA supercycle thesis. You believe in the tokenization supercycle thesis. You believe that the U.S. government really wants U.S.-denominated stablecoins because they force people to be buyers of U.S. debt unknowingly by using these stablecoins on-chain.
The providers of these stablecoins, like Circle and Tether, are holding U.S. debt. The more people who are trading with stablecoins on-chain, the larger the buyer of U.S. debt becomes, which solves a big problem for the U.S. government.
If you believe that they want to push a lot of these assets on-chain, you believe that a lot more money is going to go on-chain. When a lot more money goes on-chain, you're going to see a lot more developers build protocols around enabling speculation on all this new value.
That's why I keep saying “meme,” like memecoins, which is just people speculating on these assets that are on-chain and wouldn't exist outside of crypto. But then the “Fi” part, the finance part, is: What creative games can people create around these coins? What creative protocols can people create around these memes? What other utility can they add to these projects, or how can they make them different from stuff that existed before?
If you're able to combine both of those things together, those are the things I think are going to do the best this cycle, just because I think so much capital is going to come on-chain.
Yeah, I think that's pretty much programmed for all the reasons you just articulated. USDC, man, it's going to come and save the day.
Yeah, it is, bro. It's really wild. It's wild.
It's honestly an incredible product. It really is. I don't know about you, but I think I move more money around—more size—in USDC than anything else.
Yeah.
Like, a lot more. So, I don't know. What's your favorite trade this week?
Better than banks, bro. Using stablecoins—
It is way better. It's way more convenient.
Bro, it's [__] leagues better.
100%. People feel like, because crypto has this [__] horrible narrative and stigma around it, it's less safe, but it's way safer, too. If you're operating the right way with it, it's way [__] safer.
Yeah.
But, yeah, obviously there's blood in the streets. We're watching some serious drawdowns and retraces and some big dips. What is your favorite trade this week? If there's a kid at home with $1,000, what's your favorite trade this week?
Favorite trade this week? So, next week, I'm going to say—when I do weeks, it's Sunday to Sunday. Every weekly candle is Sunday at 8:00 p.m. Eastern to the next Sunday at 8:00 p.m. Eastern, for people who don't typically bracket things that way.
Next week, what I would be looking for the most—my highest-conviction spot. I'll give a few, actually. I think something that's kind of under-discussed right now is StarkWare.
StarkWare is an interesting one because people are super concerned with the quantum stuff. If they're able to break the current cryptography that a lot of these coins use, it would obviously affect a ton of other things as well. StarkWare is one of the projects where one of the co-founders is also one of the co-founders of Zcash, and they're one of the most technically sound teams in crypto.
They're currently an L2 on Ethereum, but they have the privacy narrative, the quantum-resistant narrative, and the programmability narrative. There's not really a project that combines all those things together.
The chart is really beaten down because, as we know, all the L2s got crushed last cycle. But right now, it’s starting to turn a little bit, and I don’t know anybody holding STRK that I can tell you about.
I’m going to be honest with you: I’ve never heard of it in my life. What?
You would only know what StarkWare is if you were one of the supertechnical people in crypto.
You would only—
It’s STRK. You would only know what StarkWare is if you were one of the supertechnical people in crypto. I’ve been following crypto for a while, and I’ve done a lot of research because it’s not a retail-popular coin. It’s not a meme coin that did really well last cycle.
I think this is interesting. I’ve met the founder before—Eli Ben-Sasson. Eli is one of the GOATs, one of the underrated people, to be honest. He’s one of the OGs who’s been around for a while.
They’re very ready for this upcoming threat that crypto is going to face, and they’re one of the only coins that would actually benefit from people thinking, “What the fuck do I buy to guard against that?” I think StarkWare is interesting going into the next week.
Well, you said you had a few.
Yeah, I have a few. I’m still very long Pump. I have a lot of Pump. I think they’re going to continue to dominate the launchpad space. They’ve been making about $2.5 million a day pretty consistently over the past couple of weeks.
Despite all the competition they constantly face, they’ve had competition from Bonk, competition from STOMP, and competition from FOMO on the social-trading-app side. They have people affiliating themselves with all these other projects, and I think their ability to continue delivering on their revenue numbers and continue shipping features is impressive.
I think they’re shipping at a really good pace right now, they’re making a ton of money, and the chart actually looks great. It’s one of the best charts. I think the weekly looked really good—it just had 3 strong weekly candles and is pulling back. I feel good holding Pump. It’s one of the bags I’m least worried about.
Yeah, yeah. $0.005 to about $0.0055—that area, I think, is a strong spot. I honestly think it’s going to be at all-time highs within a few weeks, which is about $0.01.
Wow.
I still like HYPE a lot. I think HYPE is going to continue to do well. We’ve been shilling this thing nonstop. It’s super easy to shill.
Super easy. Super easy to shill.
I mean, we all know it’s the best perpetuals platform in crypto. They now have the U.S. partnership with Kraken, and I think there are going to be a ton more people who start trading perpetuals in the U.S. As we know, it’s difficult to do—you need to do all these other things to get around it legally. I think that’s going to continue to do well.
Two interesting ones that I don’t have positions in yet, and that I haven’t been able to get over the line on buying, are LayerZero and Grass. We had the Grass founder on probably a month or 2 ago.
Certy was talking about how Grass is the freest thing to a dollar. It’s free to a dollar.
Yeah, the price action on this coin has always been terrible, and it’s because they don’t do great marketing around what they actually do. They also have to sign a ton of NDAs with these AI labs.
Just to give an overview of Grass: Grass is a data project, a data-labeling project. Essentially, there’s a ton of data on the internet that these AI labs need for training their new models and for doing inference. It’s hard to access a ton of this data because internet providers block people trying to access it directly unless they’re doing it from a human-centric or user device.
What Grass has figured out how to do is get onto individual user devices and crawl the data from all these devices that they now have access to. Then they sell that data to these AI labs.
If you think data is going to be a moat in the future and you believe AI is going to continue to need more and more data—which I think we both can agree is going to be true—then Grass is in an interesting spot. They’re solving a big problem that these labs are all going to continue to need, and they can do a lot more with that data in the future.
Grass is interesting. LayerZero is also interesting. They’re launching this new Atlas. I think it’s kind of an exchange. I don’t know what the best comparison is, but LayerZero is an interesting one, too. I also like Ethena. Ethena’s cool, too.
Do you want to rapid-fire the big ones—the ones we’ve been talking about nonstop—and just give me realistic peak price targets?
Price targets.
Yes.
I don’t know about price targets, bro. Price targets are tricky. I gave my price target at the bottom. I said $60 to $600.
Target for SOL.
Oh, SOL—$60. Remember when SOL was at $60 and I was like, “Bro, it’s just going to $600”? Yeah, it’s going to—what about Hyperliquid? Just a rough, middling target.
Give us conservative price targets if the market is trending bullish and moving up.
Where do we think Pump could go? In your head, when you’re thinking about this—it’s obviously all subject to change—but you’re long Pump. Where do you think Pump could go? You said Pump could hit new all-time highs.
The big ones are Hyperliquid, Pump, BTC, Zcash, and Solana. My target for HYPE is so high that I don’t really have a price target for this cycle. If they’re going to consume all of finance, then how the fuck do you even price that? There’s so much they can do.
The reason I don’t like giving specific price targets is that if you attach yourself to them, 1, it may be a bad idea to sell once you get there, and 2, if you don’t get there, you might not sell when you should be taking profit. I react to the market.
You’ve always been really good at switching your opinion and shit.
More than anything else. Yeah.
You have to be. You have to be. It’s just fun.
Pump—I’ll get one for Pump. I think Zcash could reach a $100 billion market cap. That’s my target.
Which would put it at what, $10,000?
I think that would put it close to $10,000.
Oh my fucking God. Please. WAGMI. Alhamdulillah.
Amen. Please. If Zcash hits $10,000, I’m seeing this all over Twitter, too, which is either a really good thing or a really bad thing—it tends to be—but I’m seeing people’s targets. Most people are shooting for $5,000 to $10,000 on Zcash, which is fucking crazy. This thing was at $500 a few months ago, and we were on the show talking about it.
Yeah. Insane.
Yeah, I like Zcash a lot. My only thing with Zcash is that it was pretty low a year ago. Was it $40 a year ago?
Oh, my God. Were you trading it at $40?
I was not trading it at $40—a little bit higher than that. I tailed Spaceman Spliff. Shout-out Spaceman Spliff. It was a little bit higher than that. He was like, “Bro, I think we can CTO Zcash.” It was around $70 or something crazy.
We’ve got these Polymarket odds on the screen currently: Will Zcash reach $2,000 by December 31st? I feel like that’s super realistic.
Is that 1.2 right now? Yeah, 30% seems low.
I feel like that’s got to be closer to 50/50. That’s what my gut would tell me.
Yeah, actually low. I definitely think it hits it. I think it’s around 70%.
Wow. Really?
Yeah.
So, yeah, maybe this might just be the trade—this Polymarket. There’s a good amount of volume in this, too: $600,000. Somebody go scoop that up. It’s at 33%.
Yeah. I think Q4 is going to be super bullish for crypto. I really do. I think a lot of people are offsides right now, and I think the majors are going to move pretty aggressively.
What about a Bitcoin target? My real Bitcoin target is gold’s market cap, which is about $30 trillion right now. So that’s around $1.5 million per coin. That’s my real Bitcoin target. I think in my lifetime, Bitcoin will reach the same market cap that gold is at. That’s what I truly believe I’ll see happen: $1.5 million.
I’m dead serious, bro. I’m dead serious. I think the only thing that could counteract or interfere with that is the quantum issue. That’s the big risk for Bitcoin, I would say—the quantum issue and the inflation issue.
No, I mean, it makes sense. It makes total sense. You said you did have a price target for PUMP, or you didn’t? I forgot.
Yeah, I think PUMP in the $20 billion to $30 billion range makes sense.
And what’s it at right now? Like $2B to $3B?
$2.5B.
Okay.
But the thesis for PUMP is that, for that to happen, you would be betting on tokenization growing a lot this cycle. If there are a lot more people creating all these coins, then they’re going to be making a lot more money. And if you believe social trading and mobile apps are going to continue to grow in popularity and go viral, and PUMP is one of the main mobile apps benefiting from that, then they kind of have a two-pronged attack on the fastest-growing areas in the market outside of perps and stablecoins.
Once they have the user distribution, they can continue to innovate and do a lot of other things. They just started with the launchpad, then built PumpSwap, which is the DEX, and now they’re focused on the mobile app. They’ve been able to verticalize pretty well. The team has executed really well so far, I think, and right now the mindshare around PUMP is still mostly negative. I would say it’s shifted a good bit over the past couple of months. There are definitely people who are more bullish on it now.
But what happens when it becomes not taboo to launch coins, and people don’t think that launching coins is scammy or whatever? It becomes like being on TikTok or scrolling Instagram Reels. What does that look like for PUMP? I think that’s how you get to those super-high valuations.
I do think that the app layer is going to mean a lot more this cycle. We’ve already seen it with Hyperliquid. Hyperliquid has touched something like $90B FDV, and I think it’s around $25B circulating right now, or somewhere around there. That was an application that had real revenue, real PMF, and executed really well. I think PUMP is one of those similar apps. The L1 trade in 2021 is kind of like the app-layer trade right now.
What about this right here? What would that put the market cap at that price?
14%. Wow. It’s like $15B FDV, like—
This is free as shit.
At 15%? People really don’t believe in this coin, bro. They really don’t.
I wonder why.
They really—I don’t know.
Again, for some reason, I feel the most comfortable, safe, and cozy in PUMP and HYPE. I don’t know why. Even Zcash feels a little bit like—
That’s everybody’s trade, bro. Everybody’s trading these fucking—
Yeah, makes sense.
All the on-chain activity, bro. Like—
Thanks. [laughter]
It’s all of it.
Facts.
Really? All of it.
6. Building A Million Dollar Portfolio
If you had to restart and make $1M in crypto, what would you do exactly?
Had to restart and make $1M in crypto? What am I starting with? How much?
Let’s say you’re starting with zero—$1,000.
Okay. If I was starting with zero, first—
Because, to be honest with you, that’s the realistic starting point for a lot of people: a few hundred bucks, $1,000. That’s the dream, right? $500 is a fucking dream. Yeah, I’ll say I can actually tell you exactly what I did in crypto. When I started in crypto, I had—well, when I first started trading, I had about $100. Literally $100.
So you funded this whole Anom arc with $100 with one blue.
One blue.
That’s insane, dude. See, but it’s [__] possible. So, yeah, what did you do?
One blue. One blue. In 2016, the first stock I ever bought was Snapchat.
And I was wearing skinny jeans and Off-White and bumping Uzi. That’s what I was doing in 2016.
I started in crypto with probably around $3,000, I think, at the end of 2017. I was buying literally $100 worth of Bitcoin every time I got paid. Whenever I got some extra cash, I would buy some more Bitcoin. With the rest of it, I would start trading altcoins. I was on Bittrex, Cryptopia, EtherDelta, and BitMEX trading perps.
I was doing all these things, but I had my Bitcoin stash that I just had on auto-buy. If I had to say what the safest auto-buy coin in crypto is that also has some upside in the future, I’d probably have to go with HYPE. If I was going to auto-buy something blindly for some amount of time, I think it would be HYPE.
I would start with HYPE, and then the rest of it is that you have to be a degen. If you’re starting with $1,000 and you’re trying to flip that into $1M, you do have to have some part of your portfolio where you’re catching these alts early, catching these on-chain trends early, and beating everybody else to information that they don’t have yet or aren’t paying attention to yet.
What I did in my first cycle, in 2017, was trade a lot of these altcoins on Bittrex, Cryptopia, and EtherDelta. It’s basically the same thing you do now, where you’re front-running narratives and attention on these different coins and compounding your gains together. What I fucked up on in my first cycle was that I didn’t sell the top at the end of the cycle. I had a ton of gains in alts, and I round-tripped a lot of it.
In my second cycle, in 2020 and 2021, I kept most of my recurring Bitcoin buys on for most of that time period. I had that, and I knew how to play the rotations better, how to play altcoins better, and how to combine and string together wins. I was mostly trading perps, to be honest, in 2020 and 2021.
I caught a lot of the big perp moves between Solana, Luna, and AVAX. Those were the trio of coins that would rotate back and forth between each other. I was trading them on perps. I would catch a Solana move up, rotate into something else, rotate into another altcoin, and basically just be in the top-performing coin, whatever it was for that month.
I was looking at every single chart on TradingView. I had hundreds of altcoin charts that I would look at. I was always locked in, spending a ton of time on charts and being early to these momentum trades. In crypto, momentum trades are how you really compound your capital, because when altcoins start moving, they move really fast and aggressively.
If I was doing that right now, I’d be trying to figure out which altcoins you can put money into and hold for several weeks, then rotate out of those alts into other altcoins that are doing well. I’d also be focusing on the on-chain coins. But have your core—whatever it is that you buy—that you’re still buying over time. Over the years is when you should be able to build that into a larger portfolio.
In bull markets, crazy shit can happen if you combine gains together. I think there are people right now who bought Anom, hit Anom on the original run-up, bought Cash Cat, hit Cash Cat on the original run-up, bought AI, hit AI on the original run-up, TP’d all those, and are sitting on a much bigger stack now than they had a few months ago. They’re throwing that into higher-conviction spots, like Bitcoin or whatever.
That’s what I would do.
I want to bring up this old clip. It’s a clip from Threadguy when he lived in L.A. with Jack Duvall and Cupsy. I feel like people get so stuck in this trading thing, too, which is super high risk. It’s a PVP game. You’re going up against people with really big brains who are likely much better than you, especially in the early innings if you’re brand-new to trading.
It’s the 90-90-90 rule: 90% of traders lose 90% of their money in the first 90 trades. I feel like people make the mistake of thinking that the only opportunity in a market like this is trading, when obviously a market as lucrative as crypto—with some days where it feels like there’s literally endless capital and such an abundance of capital—has all types of opportunities.
You can start with zero and come in and add value somewhere, where people are missing something that you see. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this clip. Cupsey talks about how the best thing you could do—because he was asked the same question. I’ll just let him explain it. We’ll watch the clip.
Do you think creator fees ruined a lot of the memecoin stuff? They completely destroyed the incentive for anyone to push a coin after a certain threshold, right? What did creator fees do to the market?
Basically, what creator fees did was give devs completely zero risk and infinite upside. Traders are like, “Oh, why the fuck would I trade when I could just dev? Zero risk and infinite upside. Why would I risk my money buying things?”
Obviously, you can still make a lot trading. There’s always money to be made. But we’re shifting to more devs than traders, and it’s going to the dev side more and more and more by the day.
So, we're just shifting to the wrong side: fewer traders, more devs. Everything in the stage we're in is such a snowball now. When things start coming down, it comes down fast. This is obviously dated, but is this more true and relevant today than it was a year ago, whenever they had this conversation? What's your opinion on this? This is from a year ago.
Yeah.
Oh wow. Yeah.
Kind of ahead of its time a little bit, right?
I mean, he's the closest to the trenches, bro. You know, Cubsy is in the trenches a lot.
Yeah, it is true. There's a lot more devs right now than there were quote-unquote devs. I don't know if you want to call them devs.
People in the chat are asking too—not to cut you off—“How do I dev? Where do I dev? How do I dev?” That's kind of what Pump.fun exists for.
Yes. Yes. A couple of people have asked that, and Pump.fun has basically democratized it and made it a 1-click process for extremely cheap, or for free. That's kind of what Cobie's point was: Why risk my own capital when I can just drop these narrative coins or whatever, just dev coins, and if one becomes a PNUT or something?
Yeah. Yeah.
I don't think it's that simple because that game is super, super, super competitive now. The people who are actually deving coins that do well have very, very, very good systems for how fast they're creating the coins—how fast their connections and RPCs are, and all that. They're really good at how they're bundling. The people who are deving coins are bundling every coin that they dev, first of all, and they're selling a ton of the supply of the coins that they're deving. That's why they're actually making money.
They're not making money just because they click a picture and create a coin on Pump.fun. The people who are just doing that are not making as much as the people who have a system for creating a ton of coins, bundling all the coins, and selling them super early. I do think that's part of the issue with why coins haven't gone so high. But it's also part of the reason why PUMP, I think, is going to go so high, because there are people who just want to dev instead of actually trading coins.
I don't think that's a way for you to make millions of dollars. For the average person, deving coins is not the way you're going to make millions of dollars. I know.
It's just a pipe dream. It's not as easy as they're making it sound like it is.
Not at all.
I guess Robinhood just added $25 million worth of Bitcoin to its balance sheet. What does this mean? How do we feel about that?
Yeah, it's pretty sick. I think it's them showing alignment with crypto, which is pretty dope. They're showing that they want to be more crypto-native and supportive of the ecosystems. It also shows, I think, that they're bullish on Bitcoin, which is good.
It's the same as Coinbase holding coins and stuff on its balance sheet. Robinhood is doing the same thing. It's definitely cool. I think you're going to see more of that in the future. We've already seen pension funds hold Bitcoin. Obviously, the ETFs have a ton of smart institutional buyers there. It's going to be as commonplace to hold Bitcoin as it is to hold gold and stocks and all these other things. That's just going to continue to keep happening.
Got it. Agreed. I have to head out in 5 minutes. Are you going to do a post-show, or are we going to end at the same time? We don’t have any guests.
Yeah.
What was that?
Yes, I will. I don’t have the phone. If Z does—Z, do you have it?
Got it. We’ll do that in a second. Take that off the screen for a second. Z, are you going to be live after we end, or are we both ending at the same time?
No, we’re both ending at the same time. I’ll probably do a live when I get back to my crib.
Will you be back at home for next Thursday?
Yes.
Amazing. So, yeah, we’ll have a regularly scheduled program next Thursday. We’ll have some cool [__] guests. Z and I will both lock in on making sure that show is [__] 20 out of 10. We appreciate you guys so much. Obviously, we appreciate our partners at Polymarket. What are our picks and takes on Polymarket this week?
What trades we got? Let me see. Today's Friday, bro. My Eagles lost to the Rams last week. That was brutal on the last drive. We got smacked by the Bears. We're 2–2. It's nasty. We're not even first in the NFC East right now.
Hurts has been playing well, though.
I mean, football—the clips I've seen and the stuff I've read about how the season's going—I've just been so busy, and I know you can relate. I haven't been able to really watch any football. It's honestly kind of brutal. This is the first football season ever where I've missed Sundays—ever.
Literally, the only football I've watched was when I went to New York. I went to the Giants' home opener, and then the next week I went with the Jets' owner—the people who own the team. I went to their opening home game as well, in the same stadium a week apart. That's the only football I've watched. I haven't even watched the Pats play. It's fucking—I'm like, bro, I need to reorient my life. How the fuck am I missing football on Sundays? What the fuck is happening?
Facts. It's all about routine and schedule. I've fallen so far off my routine. Remember how hard we preached all that shit early in the show, like episodes 1 and 2 and shit? We were on a fucking beam. We were in such a good bag.
At least I was, bro. I was 10% body fat. I was getting my steps. I was so dialed. I feel like I'm super productive right now, but it's very chaotic.
It's good like that, bro. Actually, why I like this pause is that it kind of forces you to be—
Yeah. It stays. It keeps you on a fucking routine.
It forces you to be like, “What the fuck am I actually doing right now? Am I really on track with everything?” Because we have to talk to you guys every week—that's so important. And you think certain things cost you time, but really, it's plus-EV, like the walking thing, right? Option A is to fucking sleep in until 10:00 a.m. Option B is to wake up at 8:00 a.m. and start your day with 10,000 steps. Walk two and a half miles, go get a coffee, and kick your day off. That's obviously the way to go, right?
If you hold yourself to that routine, you're going to see compounded success, and the outcome is going to be insane. I'm speaking from my own personal experience, but it kind of all starts and stops with routine. I've got to get my shit dialed.
I gave away production. I think I gave away like two bands pre-show, which means we have $3,000 to give away to chat. So chat, let’s see what the [__] you guys are doing. Maybe we’ll ask them some questions. Let me put chat on. We’ve got three airdrops, $1,000 apiece.
Uh, what?
W Phantom, by the way, in the chat. What three trades did I take in the Coinbase trading comp?
Yeah, he mentioned it in this [__] show, too. Did you mention all three in the show? Yeah. I know two. Wait, I think somebody just said it: short ETH, long Bitcoin, long Hyperliquid.
Short, short. I think somebody did say it, though. Is that what it was?
It was—
They’re close. No, I don’t want to say it before. Somebody said the direction, too. In addition to the assets, you have to say the direction.
A short or long into the three assets. You haven’t seen it yet.
No, during the—
Yeah, somebody say the pockets.
The pockets.
What was the answer?
I was long Bitcoin, long Zcash, short ETH.
The pockets. Congrats—$1,000. What's Ansem's price target for Bitcoin before his life is over? Little quiz on the show. I like this, by the way. This is really who deserves this shit. $1.5 million is the first, chat. That was just a quick one. Whoever that guy was, I think his name was Fair or some shit.
Fat or something.
Yeah, something like that. And then we have one more bullet to unload. I just want to see a general good idea and a good take on where the market's at. I'll let Ansem pick out of the chat who he thinks is articulating an idea.
Give us some ideas, guys. How are you feeling? Talk about a trade or a position you like that Ansem hasn't mentioned on the show, that he would agree with and like. The first good idea you see, Ansem, let me know, and this is how we'll end.
I actually do like Kite here. I like Anoma here a lot, too. I wish I could trade it. I was just having this conversation yesterday. Anoma has felt so free the last couple of weeks.
Yeah, bro.
It's actually held up crazy over the last couple of days as well. I think it's gone up in the last couple of days. Yeah, a little bit.
Yeah, yeah, which is crazy.
I can promise you one thing: it is a great entry here. That I can—
It feels that way. It feels that way. Honestly, chat, I know I have a little bit more information than you guys do, but Ansem's been so locked in with all the shit that he's doing that I really don't have a ton of extra alpha on any of that. It just feels very obvious to me. The Kite shit as well—I feel the same way about Kite as I did when it was at $25 million.
Bro, I texted you about this, by the way, on the TA shit, because this just looks almost—
Whoever said QQQ 10/31 calls, I like whoever said that.
Okay, we'll give that person $1,000. Whoever said QQQ, it's a good idea. Whoever said that—
Yeah, man, I'm ready to start making money again. I've almost fully rerouted everything. I was up—like I told you, on this little degen portfolio that I put together, I was up almost $300,000. We're all the way back down to around $90,000, and I gave back a lot of money this week. A lot. I'm just—
I'm just overtrading. It's fucked, too, because I stabled up all of it. Imagine how tilted I am. I was super tilted.
I sold everything and stabled it all up. Then, 2 days before everything crashed, I fucking fired it all into 2 or 3 positions, like Zcash and a couple of other meme coins, and I'm fucking—yeah, I'm down like $80,000 in the last 3 days. It's whatever.
Hey, man, but you've been on, though. You've been hitting. You definitely—
It's been fun. It's been fun, and I think it's important to keep your finger on the pulse and stay connected to the market, et cetera.
I gave you guys the trade of the week. Don't forget the trade of the week.
What was it again?
Starkware.
Starknet? I've never even heard of this before. You're a psycho.
We've got to see where that goes.
Watch. It's at 6 cents right now. Watch what it's at next Thursday. Watch.
Fuck, man. Do I have to go trade this fucking thing?
Bro, it's probably on whatever app or whatever.
No, some shit like that. Do you think that's a longer-term thing, or are you trading in and out of this?
I do see it. I do think—
That's some shit that I'm just going to go to Jupiter for.
I think there are 2 parts to it, but I think Threadguy actually speaks to this really well. He's really good at finding the hottest trade in a very short time frame, so catching that pop is the stuff you can catch on perps and leverage because—
Limited downside and upside in that amount of time is aggressive and fast. Then the longer-term trades might take fucking months, whatever. Yeah.
So there are 2 parts to it, but I do think it's both things.
Well, I'm going to fucking trade it. I have to at this point. I'm going to want to kill myself if I don't.
Did you see this tweet, by the way, on Market Bubble? It fucking banged. It went nuts.
Which one?
I'll show you. This positive techno-optimist bait.
Anyone who touches his post—crazy. It's banging, bro.
Almost 20,000 likes.
Marc Andreessen is the GOAT.
He's killing it. He's killing it.
Love that guy.
Yeah, amazing. Follow the Twitter, obviously. Follow the channels. We’ll be live next week, same place, same time. Thanks, Z. Thanks, chat. Love y’all. Peace.
Peace.