Has This Cycle Peaked? | 1000x

Imagine selling Bitcoin at $92,000 because you're worried about a nonfarm payrolls print 8 days before a regime change in Washington—and not just any regime change, this regime change. To me, I think we're in wait-and-see mode.

A lot is going on. The market has been very volatile, up and down, left and right. We got a lot of hate for our last podcast because we talked about how much we hate Sui.

1. SUI & The L1 Trade

I took another crack at trying to understand why Sui matters after the vitriol and the hate, and the best bull case I could come up with for Sui after all the vitriol and the hate was the vitriol and the hate.

There was this moment in late 2023 when I put out this tweet. I had a bottle of wine, I was in Venice, and I had some free time, so I put out a tweet about how Solana is shit. I talked about well-articulated but not that well-researched reasons why Solana was ultimately doomed to fail.

The token was trading at about $20 at the time, and it immediately got 700,000 views. Everybody started hating on me. That bald guy who's the cheerleader for the community started freaking out, calling me names, insulting my parents, and stuff. I thought, “Okay, wow, I guess this ecosystem isn't dead. In fact, it's the opposite of dead. It's vibrant. People really care. They've invested their livelihoods in this thing.”

Then we got Toly on the podcast the next week. I don't know about you, but I got bullish—$10 higher than where I was maximally bearish. Obviously, I didn't buy enough, but I bought some.

I think something similar is going on with Sui, which is that if you bear-post and immediately have people coming out of the woodwork to tell you how stupid and ugly you are, that's a sign that people care. People are really invested in this chain. They're invested in working on it. The community is there, trying to pump this thing and make it go up.

It doesn't feel like a bunch of people who are just long on the highs and are unsure why. There are some clear technical advantages that Sui has. That was also reflected in the Blockworks Research survey, where they asked a bunch of Solana developers, “If you were working on another chain and weren't allowed to work on Solana, what would it be?” The vast majority picked Base or Sui.

Those 2 responses—Base and Sui—were tied. Nothing else even came close. To me, the rabid community is the reason why we might see a self-reinforcing rally.

Beyond that, I kept trying to debate people on Twitter and ask what the actual business case for this chain was. People would say, “Oh, you're so stupid. You don't understand the tech. It's just better than everything else.” But I would keep prodding and saying, “What's the business case? Blockchains sell block space. Why would buyers of block space prefer this blockchain to any other? Is there any unique product or service that can only work on this chain, or that can't work as well on the more established chains?”

No one could answer my question with a straight face. They could only insult me and tell me that I'm a nontechnical idiot. To me, it reminds me of previous blockchains that have been technologically superior to the incumbent, but that technological superiority hasn't necessarily translated into upward price action. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't.

I don't think there's enough here. If you aren't holding SUI bags from the lows and rolling in money right now, I don't think there's a compelling reason to invest here.

Yeah, I agree with all those points. What's very clear to me is that Sui has managed to build a pretty crazy community, but not just of retail investors. There are a lot of venture capital funds and hedge funds that have started to take it seriously.

I think it stems from the fact that these guys were building at Facebook and Meta. These were serious tech people. It was Sui and Aptos, and Aptos kind of shit the bed. Nobody really talks about it anymore.

What happened there? They were the more vaunted product when they launched, and then the founder just quit. What the hell is going on there?

When we were diligencing them way back in the day, what was always said to us was that the Sui guys were better actual tech people, but the Aptos guys were better at marketing and business development.

I think what ended up happening with Aptos is that they never really got the product to the place it needed to get to, while the Sui guys learned how to market their good tech. They did build good tech. As far as I can understand it—look, I'm not a developer. It's not like I've gone on and built something on Sui and can verify this—but I'm going off secondhand information from people who have built on it.

It's like, okay, it's pretty good. Developers seem to like it. I haven't heard anything of that sort from Aptos, so I do think they took Aptos's niche away from them. Aptos wasn't able to capitalize on the initial hype that surrounded it. They weren't able to turn that into real usership, and I think what's happening right now is that Sui has completely cannibalized it.

Is it worth $52 billion? No. I think it's kind of nuts to think that it will stay up here. But is it something that might actually stick around? Yes.

I think what they've done is they've managed to get to a place—unlike a lot of these other chains—where people are taking them seriously. Developers are taking them seriously. Nobody ever really took NEAR seriously, despite its claims of having great developer tools and a better ecosystem for building. They raised that $800 million ecosystem fund, but the people building on NEAR weren't actually building anything real. They were just porting over copycats from the rest of the world.

2. The AI Crypto Trade

I do think what it says is that, if you go look at the top assets now, Sui has reached parity with Avalanche. Avalanche had such a huge head start on Sui, and I think it tells you that people don't want subnets. People don't want L2s. People want a fast base-layer chain.

That's also what you're seeing with the fracturing of Ethereum. People just don't want interoperability between all these different chains. They want one good chain, because otherwise it's too confusing. Nobody has figured out the user interface to make all of these subnets very easily usable.

That brings me back to my original question, though. Solana serves that purpose, right? I understand—I've been educated by the online community of anti-Jonah people—that Sui can do things Solana can't. It's faster, it provides better tracking of asset ownership than Solana, perhaps, and maybe it's less buggy. Who knows? It hasn't been battle-tested, but let's assume that it is.

Even then, that alone isn't enough. I think Sui is the kind of product that you buy during the next bear market. All of crypto will go through a winter, and all these tokens will get crushed. Sui is probably one of those things that you're going to want to accumulate for the next cycle, when everybody writes off all L1s as dead but the Sui builder community is still strong, still grinding, still trying to put apps together and achieve product-market fit.

Then some smash hit will come out during the bear market that you can capitalize on in the next bull market. I don't think it's a good trade to be buying it here at $50 billion. That's nothing against Sui. That's just markets and valuations. It's overpriced relative to what it is right this second, and it will probably be a good dip buy for the next run.

I think that's an amazing framing. It makes a ton of sense. It's one of those things that, if it exists through a bear market and maintains its community, that could be another 100x-er after the next bull.

You could kind of do this with Solana. Everybody thought Solana died, but they maintained their core community and their developers. People never fully gave up on it, even after FTX. That took it from $8 to $200—from the lows to the highs in the bull market just recently.

I think the same thing could happen with Sui if they manage to keep that hype. But looking at the TVL on Sui and the applications on Sui, they don't really have a killer app in any meaningful way. Their biggest protocol is Suilend, which looks like any other borrow-lend protocol that's ever existed. You go to the website and it looks like every other one.

The one thing I'll say is that it's growing. Sui is growing quickly.

The amount of hate we got for suggesting that Sui might not be good value for your money at this particular point in time wasn't even close to the amount of hate Jonah got for suggesting that Solana was torched.

When I suggested that, there were literally 100 times as many Solana diehards coming out of the woodwork to engage. This time, Sui was actually lower in price. Let me see where Solana was when you decided to shit on it and call it stupid.

That was last November.

No, I think it was October 2023.

Yeah, October 2023. It was about $15 billion in market cap.

Solana is about $92 billion in market cap right now, so it was about a third of the size that Sui is today, and it had a larger, more active community around it.

I agree. The way to play this is to ignore it until you get to the bear market, and then it's a freaking amazing trade if you get into the bear market and it still has a good community surrounding it. Definitely keep an eye out.

3. Hyperliquid

One thing we haven't really talked about on this podcast is Hyperliquid and its plan to become an overarching L1. What's cool is that very rarely do you see an application go backward into an L1. Normally, L1s have a massive valuation premium, so if you're going to launch any project, you're going to launch an L1. If you're launching an application, you're probably launching it on an L1, and you don't have any ambitions to become an L1.

Now Hyperliquid has backed into this, which has massively raised its potential valuation. It's also cool because you now have an L1 with a built-in killer app. That's very rare. Normally, L1s are searching for their killer app instead of the killer app becoming an L1.

We're off about 50% from the highs. I think people have generally stopped talking about it in the way they were talking about it 2 weeks ago. The entire timeline was just bull-posting Hyperliquid, which is almost never a good time to buy.

When the biggest holders of something feel so good about themselves that they can end every tweet with “Hyperliquid,” and go after people mercilessly left and right, I think that's a sign to start taking some money off the table. SoFlo is the biggest proponent of this product, and that guy was having way too much fun on Twitter when Hyperliquid was at $30. He was having way too much fun, and I like Hyperliquid. I'm a fan. I'm an owner.

But when somebody's having that much fun on Twitter with their number-one bag at the highs, you should probably start chipping out a little bit. At least it's easy to say in hindsight.

We're all having fun when crypto is ripping, and it's hard to know when it stops because you're not in it for a 10% or 20% rally. You're in these tokens for a 5x to 10x at a bare minimum, because at the end of the day, that's the kind of risk you're taking to the downside too.

I don't know about Hyperliquid. First of all, to call a spade a spade, Hyperliquid is built using the Cosmos SDK. I looked into this when I did my research on Hyperliquid a while ago and ultimately concluded not to buy on the lows, which was stupid in hindsight.

It uses Tendermint. It's part of the Cosmos SDK and part of the Cosmos ecosystem. If they become an L1, is that bullish for Cosmos? What else is going to get built on Hyperliquid other than their own ecosystem?

Cosmos is done. It's now public infrastructure. Its token has no real use. They did great stuff for the crypto community by basically building a pretty good framework, but the token itself is done. It's over. That's in the past. I don't think it's ever really coming back.

They have no real leadership. That being said, we are always going to be indebted to them for what they did for the industry, which was build a really phenomenal framework and come up with new consensus mechanisms to drive the industry forward. We appreciate them for that, but I don't think buying the ATOM token makes any sense in any meaningful way.

I agree. How ironic would it be if the most successful Cosmos outcome is Hyperliquid, which is basically built with Cosmos technology, and Cosmos benefits not at all from it?

I think that if they go backward and become an L1, you already have a community of enriched bag holders sitting there. They want to keep the train moving forward. They're going to build all sorts of other interesting stuff on Hyperliquid—or uninteresting stuff.

I think that's the next move for Hyperliquid. You have to see whether this is just an exchange, or whether they're figuring out other unique applications for this latency-sensitive platform beyond the same crap that's on every other chain, including Sui, Solana, Base, and Ethereum.

If it's just a bunch of Uniswap-style DEXs, forget about it. But these guys, based on being an exchange alone, are undervalued. If they figure out a way to get even a few other applications built on them as an L1, they deserve to be valued higher.

Right now, I think they're trading at a 12x to 15x forward multiple.

Yeah, I agree.

4. What Will Perform In The Next Leg Of This Bull Market?

I see a downward-trending channel in the midst of a market where the benchmark, Bitcoin, is ranging sideways. My take is that the market has shown its hand for what's going to perform during the next phase of this bull cycle. I do believe there will be a next phase.

There's a debate about whether we've peaked or not in this cycle. I think we're going much, much higher. When we do, the market has shown its hand in terms of what's going to rip. Hyperliquid is clearly going to rip. Those cards got shown a couple of weeks ago. Maybe Sui, as much as I hate it, will rip. The AI coins, like ai16z and Virtuals, will rip.

But in the absence of sector-wide momentum, and in the absence of a rising tide, I think it's interesting that all those coins are just spiraling lower and lower. They're grinding lower. They're not tanking, but they're grinding lower every day or every week.

To me, that's relevant because it shows you that this is hot money. That's where people who feel rich are throwing their cash. It's hard to feel rich when your Bitcoin is knocking around like a pinball machine between $92,000 and $98,000.

If we take the next leg higher to $125,000 or $150,000 Bitcoin, the hot money is going to flow right back in and power-lift those tokens.

I don't think it's a trade where you buy Hyperliquid here at $20 a token, trying to catch that falling knife. I would rather buy Hyperliquid at whatever price it's at when Bitcoin breaks through the top of the range and keeps going.

Let me clarify one thing: I'm not talking about how you accumulate your first position. Yes, it would be good to have some Hyperliquid here. It could go down another 50% before it starts to rally.

Your conviction buys could be scaled in now with small size, but if you're going to do a big slug on high conviction, that's when the market is rallying again. That goes for Virtuals, ai16z, and some of the other things that performed recently as well.

I don't know if I agree. The thing with Hyperliquid that's a little bit different to me is that so many people missed this. What I watch the most when I look at a chart like Hyperliquid is the flows of the token. Are the big buyers buying or selling right now?

Since $30, once it hit $30, a lot of the big wallets started moving, offloading, and taking a ton of profit. A lot of them are now starting to buy back below $20 and $18.

What I know is that there's a significant amount of money coming back in to buy this thing below $20 and $18. The longer that we hold above those levels, a lot of the people who missed out on that first rally are going to come back in. I don't see that many large holders offloading anymore. They're just not really selling.

Virtuals is a completely different chart. When we first talked about it, it was trading at about $2.25. When we launched our THX token, it was trading at $2.25. It went all the way up to $5.20 and is now all the way back down to $2.70.

People are absolutely hammering this thing. As far as I can tell, the reason they're hammering it is that a lot of competitors have popped up that are better.

I love Virtuals because it's where we launched our token, and they were very good to us in the beginning. But we actually migrated off their framework.

To be fair, their no-code framework is what we migrated off. We migrated to Eliza, which is ai16z's framework. It's a framework where you write a ton of code.

The reason why we did that was because a no-code framework just isn't good enough for most bots. To be completely fair to Virtuals, they do have their own write-a-bunch-of-code framework. It's called GAME. We just didn't choose to go down that road because Eliza was so popular on GitHub that it seemed like a no-brainer for us to explore it in the limited amount of time we had.

That's kind of what I'm saying. There are different frameworks out there.

I talked about this a little bit on The Steady Lads podcast that I went on Friday. Somebody pulled up a chart of AI market cap versus DeFi market cap, and we're not even halfway there. There's still so much more room for the AI crypto space to grow.

Can you state the numbers you saw on the chart for the listeners?

I think I saw $10 billion versus $50 billion. What did you see?

I've heard that AI is $15 billion right now. It's probably $10 billion since you saw that.

In the peak of DeFi summer, DeFi's market cap was $150 billion.

I haven't run these computations myself with any rigor. I just wanted to get the numbers out there for the listeners. Please continue your thought.

There's a huge difference between these AI things and DeFi. DeFi inherently has network effects built into it. The larger an exchange gets, like Uniswap, the more liquidity it has and the better it is as a product. The more liquidity a borrow-lend protocol has, the better it is as a product.

As winners get larger, they become harder to displace, not easier to displace. In AI, there are basically no switching costs.

I disagree with that. Moving off of Virtuals was work. You're right in the sense that we could technically clone our agent on GAME or any other framework, or just build one ourselves. When we get our bot to a sufficient level of competency, we could turn off our Eliza bot and migrate to the new bot. But that would be a heroic pain in the ass.

For a no-code framework like what Virtuals promoted to get us on board, it's very easy to switch. You literally copy and paste a few questionnaire boxes from one framework to another. For the no-code stuff, it's as seamless as switching from Uber to Lyft for a given ride. For a full-code framework like Eliza, it would be pretty heroic for us to switch. We'd have to do a lot of work.

Let me reframe this. The more people that use a framework, that doesn't necessarily make it better.

Obviously, if you have better, smarter people contributing to a framework in larger numbers and improving it, then it's better. But just the usage of the frameworks doesn't make them better.

What I'm trying to get to is that in DeFi, it was pretty reasonable to assume that once you hit $20 billion in market cap and thought you were going to $100 billion, you could buy the top 10 DeFi protocols and say, “If DeFi does well, these top 10 DeFi protocols will do well.”

In AI, I think it's a lot harder to say, “I think AI is going to grow, therefore I'm just going to buy the top 10 biggest AI projects,” because it's so much easier to disrupt them.

Dude, it's so interesting. I like that take. I hadn't thought about it that way before, but we've seen this now with 3 different protocols.

First, it was Bittensor, TAO, going to the moon and then just stalling out—plateauing. It was weird. Maybe that's a unique ecosystem that's a little complicated and hard for people to understand. Maybe the space is going in a similar direction.

Then Virtuals shows up. Virtuals goes to the moon, and we're all feeling pretty good.

You forgot about GOAT.

GOAT was cool, but there are so many different cycles already.

I used to think this was going to be like DeFi, where AI mania was coming to crypto, and that was my conviction trade. I was just going to be long the top 10 call options that positioned me for that. That doesn't look like it's going to work.

These things rip and then fizzle. To your point about network effects and DeFi, the analogy doesn't work in AI. The more people who use the Eliza framework, the worse it becomes, almost, because your bot is going to sound like all the other Eliza bots.

The more people who use a certain framework, the more commoditized it becomes. The attention you're trying to farm with these bots isn't something where you want to be a commodity. You want to stand out. You want to be unique to farm attention.

I take your point there. I still think AI mania is coming to crypto, and I still think all of this stuff is going vertical, but you've definitely made me more cautious and made me want to sell some.

I'm deeply in the money on Virtuals, deeply out of the money on ai16z, which I added on the highs, and I've got a constellation of other little coins that I'm experimenting with that don't really move the needle in my portfolio.

I think you're right. You probably hold small percentages of those things just in case they come back, but you don't place big bets on them here.

With Virtuals, if it really washes out, I'm probably rebidding between $2 and $2.30. I think that's a reasonably good level to get back in. But right now, it's in a full downward trend, and the conversation around it is being outpaced by every other framework out there. Therefore, it doesn't really make sense to get in and buy it.

5. The Rise Of AI Agents

We should probably talk about our token, podcasters, launching tokens, and where some of these agents can go in terms of vision and the future. I personally think agents are going to be the part of this AI sector that really sticks and achieves mainstream appeal in the next 12 months. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, I think that's very reasonable. I don't really know where else AI fits into crypto, to be completely honest. Where does AI and crypto fit besides these types of protocols? Maybe DePIN and decentralized compute, but I don't think that's decentralized GPUs or something. Render has been trying to do that, and NEAR dipped its toes in, but it's not really getting traction.

To me, an agent is really the only thing where you could cross the chasm from crypto nerds to the mainstream.

We could talk about what we want to do with our agent and how it could potentially cross that chasm. At this particular juncture, I don't know.

To me, an agent—a bot that posts content, is interactive, and is trained on some unique training set—has universal appeal. It doesn't matter whether it's Tesla's full self-driving, trained on millions of hours of driving videos, or a little Twitter bot trained on our podcast. Agents have universal appeal and can be understood by people outside the crypto world.

I think I'm still trying to understand why these projects need tokens, but it is sort of a form of equity that people can use to monitor the progress and traction of an agent. So it's useful in a certain sense.

Tokens aside, our THX agent has begun tweeting interesting crypto updates, syntheses, and takes on those updates. It incorporates momentum and technicals into its takes. It tries to understand the backdrop for the news and synthesize a bullish or bearish opinion, with degrees of bullishness and bearishness. It understands what's neutral and what's not.

We've built in a character file that references our podcast transcripts. We've built in crypto market niche knowledge that you and I have accumulated over the years. The bot understands how to think about certain types of developments in the crypto market.

That is a completely underrated part of this. In order to train an agent to be good at something, you need to be good at it. You can't just have random developers building trading agents, because they don't know how to trade and therefore don't know how to teach the bot.

What parameters do you put in? What data do you ingest? What do you look at? How do you synthesize it? A lot of that is manual. We have to give it the parameters ourselves.

If open interest goes up, what does that mean? It means X in context A and Y in context B. You and I have literally had to input that into the bot and train it.

Building that for crypto is something you and I could do. Building it for oil is something I could do. Building it for distressed credit is something you and I might struggle with. We need to bring somebody else in.

One thing that's becoming very clear to me is how useful these things are going to be in a broad variety of contexts. Once you dive into it—I know you've spent a lot more time on prompt engineering than I have—there are some core tenets that hold true across whatever you're trying to teach this thing and whatever market you're trying to teach it about.

Once you build one, it becomes a lot easier to build the next one because you understand the process. At the end of the day, this 1000x bot is going to start on crypto, but it's going to expand. It's going to become a trading personal assistant for whatever market you want it to be a trading personal assistant for, which I think is going to be pretty sick.

It will require a lot of work. We're going to grit our teeth and work through it, but it's going to be pretty broad-based and broad-reaching by the time we're done with it.

It all started as a little joke. It was a pet project. You launched it while I was sleeping, and then we started jamming on it together. It's so fun to work on this.

The roadmap would be to make this bot excellent at its current mission, which is your crypto market sidekick that keeps you up to date on everything that's going on and helps you understand whether it matters, and if it matters, why and how much.

We're going to make that as good as we can for crypto. Then I think it's a pretty light lift to copy and paste that into commodities. We can crowdsource the relevant commodities-market context, and then we can put it in every other market as well.

Even before we do any of that outside of crypto, we have sponsors, partners, and people in our network who run interesting crypto platforms where we could incorporate the 1000x bot into their terminals and user experiences. This thing could look at your positions and be your little sidekick—a voice in your ear that talks to you about what you're doing—in a way that you couldn't necessarily rely on ChatGPT to do for you.

I think there's utility there. The big vision, once we've got this thing going for all markets, is to replicate the process outside of trading and incorporate it into other businesses. We could have this agent be present in other categories of marketing or areas where there's decision-making and user engagement.

If you're deciding what movie to see, maybe there's a Gladiator 3 agent reply-guying to politicians as Maximus. Maybe there's a shoe bot shilling Nike in replies to Adidas's tweets. I don't know where this is going, but this journey feels like it has legs. It's one of those good gut feelings that's fun to work on.

6. Crypto's Angel/KOL Flywheel Problem

It's a great learning experience, regardless of how things actually end up. What's cool is that when you get to interface with technology that's genuinely doing something new, it's pretty good stuff. I think it's only going to get better.

I was going to say that this feels good, but AICC—some other podcast—launched a token and it all went to diddly-squat pretty quickly. What did they do? Should we talk about it?

First of all, it's still trading at $60 million, which is kind of nuts.

That is nuts, but I think it speaks to the level of grift that exists within crypto. I don't think the actual founders of this AICC thing are necessarily bad people. I think they're good people who were trying to build a good project.

But you have to be very careful with the types of people you allow into your project. I think what ended up happening is that they got too close with the Bankless guys, and the Bankless guys took advantage of them. They ended up getting a pretty massive allocation and then immediately dumping.

To take a step back, I've been in this industry as a so-called KOL for about 8 years now. I don't do a ton of angel investments, partly for this reason. The unspoken thing about all these angel investments—and this is going to piss off a lot of people—is that you get access to projects that you're guaranteed to make money on, not because they're going to be good long term, but because you get in at an unbelievably low price.

A lot of people invest in projects like that. I've tried to avoid it at all costs, but when people get these opportunities, it's a home run. It's free money, because you're getting in at something like a $1 million valuation. You know it's going to go live at least at $15 million, $20 million, or $40 million.

You also understand that your entire edge is getting in at that low valuation, so of course you're going to sell right away. You don't believe in the project long term. You don't want to hold it. You think it's nonsense, but you have to pretend that you believe in it long term, because otherwise nobody is going to buy it.

You know in your heart that this thing is making you money because you got in at a cheap price. That's what I hate about this industry, and that's why there was no round for THX.

A lot of people got upset with me over this. They were saying, “How did you not tell me that you and Jonah were launching? You didn't tell us. What the hell?”

You didn't even tell me. I might be a really good friend of yours.

To be fair, I was just messing around. I genuinely had no intention of launching this as a real project. Even once you woke up and we talked and decided maybe we should take it seriously, I still didn't tell anybody. Why would I?

If you have an audience and want to launch a project, I think the best way to go about it is organically. Let it be discovered organically. That creates a strong base. It creates trust between you and your community, and it creates a strong base of holders who don't feel like they were taken advantage of.

It also absolves you of accusations of grift.

This is very key. You can't even seem like you're taking advantage of people. There are a lot of actions you can take—for example, raising a round because you think raising a round will help you get the right people who can help you the right way.

What I've found is that in 98% of cases, unless you're working with somebody who has a genuinely stellar reputation, most KOLs put in their money and then disappear. They ghost you, they don't talk to you, they don't help you, and they don't do anything. They put in their money, and then they're gone.

But people just want names. They want name brands. “I want to stick my name on this. I want to stick my name on this. I want that guy's brand. Let me go raise.”

It's not necessarily the right way to do things.

No, I agree. What you really want is people who are genuinely involved, and that's our community at the end of the day.

As for the Bankless guys, I've never really had any respect for them in any meaningful way. I think this was an obvious outcome. They produce good content and have been in crypto for a long time, but I don't understand why you would get involved with a project to pump it up and then dump all of your tokens on launch day onto the general public.

They made money. The reality is that these guys are probably poor, and I'll tell you why. If you love Ethereum, you're probably poor.

All I can say is that torching your reputation for $2 million is the funniest thing I've ever seen in my whole life. If you've been in this industry for as long as they have, if you've been running a podcast, if you've had all these angel investments, and you've done all this stuff, you're not worth at least $10 million or $15 million? Something is wrong. You're not cut out for this.

Maybe they're not even trading. To me, it's $2 million. Split it between the 2 of them, and that's $1 million each. They probably live in high-tax jurisdictions, and they're Americans. You're torching your reputation for $500,000? Are you kidding me? Golf clap.

I don't know. It makes no sense to me. I'm so shocked by this. We launched a token at the same time as Bankless, and they rugged their entire community at the same time.

Just to clarify, they did not launch the token.

Sorry—they got an allocation. But we launched our token at a $100,000 market cap, and our community is freaking awesome. We found our developer through the community, and we found our branding guy through the community. It's completely different.

I think the way to build a community is that crypto is great at incentivizing groups of people who don't know each other, all across the globe, to help each other out without gigantic reams of documents, startup equity, lawyers, and startup expenses.

7. Macro & Bitcoin

If you do it that way, you have to get your community involved at an attractive price. You can't let them in on the highs, hammer it all the way down in their face, and expect a good outcome.

I wouldn't have pegged the Bankless guys for this until now, but they've torched their reputation. Nobody is going to deal with them anymore. That's crazy. What they did to themselves is epically stupid. It's pure self-immolation for not that much money.

If they'd done it for $500 million apiece, I would have said, “Okay, well, hat tip.” But this is small potatoes.

Should we talk about nonfarm payrolls, macro, and Bitcoin? Very quickly, I feel like the whole market got itself worked up over an NFP print, and it didn't matter.

I've seen this a lot in young traders. Maybe there are some interest-rate people who are really good at trading around these economic events, or FX traders or macro traders. But for the most part, the only thing that's going to torch crypto from a macroeconomic-data perspective is a screaming-high CPI print.

If inflation is back with a vengeance, then we can all get worried about crypto again, like we were in 2022. But nonfarm payrolls and jobless claims—who freaking cares? These prints come out regularly. They don't matter. The Fed isn't going to change its policy because the economy is going well.

We have about 90% of Washington about to turn over in a week and a day.

You also have to remember that a lot of the talk you see is massive hindsight talk. It's hindsight capital.

There was an article in Bloomberg that came out after the NFP print saying this was a huge shock, rates were going to go through the roof because of all the uncertainty around Trump, inflation was going to come back, rates were going to go through the roof, and it was a screaming buy.

All I could think to myself was, “Where were you when the 30-year went from 4% to 5% from December until now?” If you look from December 1 to January 1, the 30-year rate went from 4% to 5%. That's a huge move. It's a big move. Nobody was talking about it.

People only talk about it when it really hits you in the face. By that point, the move is priced in. It's really hard to make a bet on that. You can't extrapolate.

The right bet would have been to say, “I think there's going to be a rate move before all of this goes down.” After you get a huge move, talking about it just screams hindsight capital.

It came in strong, and it could be an indication that inflation is going to come back in a big way, but that's not a given. The only thing we have to watch now is CPI.

Trump is likely to be an inflationary president. The things he wants to do and the things he cares about are inherently inflationary. He wants a screaming-hot economy, and he wants to pressure the Fed to cut rates.

No more illegal laborers. High tariffs. No more illegal laborers.

Exactly. There is an argument that, with Trump in charge, inflation will come back. That means the Fed will have to pause, and we might go into a rate-hike cycle.

If the Fed pauses, Trump is going to go ballistic on the Fed. I think what he wants is for the Fed to cut rates while inflation goes up, and to pump the stock market and maybe Bitcoin this time too. But he can't really have that, because the Fed is independent.

All I'm saying is, imagine if you sold Bitcoin at $92,000 because you were worried about a nonfarm payrolls print 8 days before a regime change in Washington—and not just any regime change, this regime change.

To me, I think we're in wait-and-see mode. The one thing I would take away from a Trump administration, macro-trend-wise, is that I wouldn't touch bonds with a 10-foot pole. I'm bearish on bonds. I think yields are going higher.

You do not want to be earning fixed income in Trump land. That is crazy.