Finding Crypto's Next Big Trade | 1000x

There’s no winning. There was this great quote that I’ll read, which basically ties into trading very well. It’s by Søren Kierkegaard:

“Marry and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it. Marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Hang yourself and you will regret it; do not hang yourself, you will regret that too. Hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way.”

This gentleman is the essence of all philosophy, which is also kind of the essence of trading. This quote is trading in a nutshell.

This episode is brought to you by Perennial Finance, the onchain DEX primitive redesigning derivatives for the DeFi native. You’ll hear more about Perennial later in the show.

Welcome back to another DX podcast.

It’s been a wild ride since our last one. The ETH ETF was approved, ETH basically doubled in price, and I hope at least some people managed to take on that trade. It was funny because, when I was pitching that trade, I really did think it was a 6-month play. I had no idea it was going to happen so quickly. I put the probability of it happening very quickly at 20%, maybe, but then it happened quickly.

I just knew that it was a good thing to hold because, when you have assets that you know are going to react to certain events in a particular way, you never know when the event is going to come. It’s just good to own them. I think we’ve had some pretty good calls so far.

Why not do a victory lap? All of Crypto Twitter does a victory lap in the most obnoxious possible ways, so we can at least say that we recommended ETH. I think ETH is a great trade. Had you listened to this podcast, you would have heard that word on a number of different episodes, and hopefully it did something for you.

If it didn’t, the market seems like it’s setting up for a pretty extraordinary second half. I think there’s going to be quite a lot of opportunity, but also a lot of danger and landmines if you’re in the wrong tokens or if your book is too messy. This is a pretty critical pivot point, don’t you think, Avi?

I think so. The issue here is that the market hasn’t reacted the way that I think most people would have hoped to the ETH ETF move. Yes, we got a nice candle. It ripped hard, and ETH is a big asset, so that was a huge move. But the reality is that we’ve stalled here.

People started panicking a little bit that the ETF launch might look similar to the BTC launch. A lot of people got derisked on that candle, and I also think there are a lot of people out there who just aren’t in the market. People were caught off guard by the strength and severity of the ETH move. The market clearly wasn’t pricing in the ETF, so what’s happening right now is that we’re processing the information and the sales of the people who bought for a quick flip.

The reality is that inflows probably aren’t going to come for a month or two because the ETF isn’t going to go live immediately. That gives us the opportunity to range for a bit. I would assume that you get a lot of derisking from people over the next month as they wait to see what happens with the ETF flows.

The chart also doesn’t look amazing. We had the ETF come in, and we didn’t actually push ETH through the highs of March, which is obviously a little concerning. With all that said, I think it’s just short-term noise. Maybe ETH goes down 8%, but the reality is that the market is structurally bullish.

I think so too, and I think what’s more important than the ETH ETF approval is the meta behind it—the why. I was originally hoping for a pullback where I could buy some $55,000 Bitcoin, just on chop and apathy and a lack of momentum leading to some sort of inertia selling. Maybe you get the occasional shank to add to your portfolio.

I’m kind of losing faith that’s going to happen. If anything, I think we just start to push higher, a lot higher, very quickly from here. The reason why is that you have to ask yourself why the ETH ETF got approved.

There seems to be this sea change going on in Washington, where the Democrats are giving up on their anti-crypto stance. Why would they do that? There’s been a lot said about this, so I’ll try to keep it brief. To me, if you have tens of millions of crypto holders in the United States, in an environment where wealth is getting inflated away and people have significant percentages of their net worth invested in this asset class, why make single-issue voters of them?

The election is going to get decided by a couple of counties, and 20,000 votes can swing the whole country one way or another in terms of red versus blue. Trump jumped on the crypto train and came out pretty vocally in support of it. There was that crypto dinner at Mar-a-Lago that you were part of, Avi, where he offered full-throated support for crypto and claimed that Biden didn’t understand it.

Now Trump is speaking to senior cryptocurrency executives. Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are advising him on crypto policy. Meanwhile, Biden has reversed course and flip-flopped. Thinking rationally, why would I die on that hill? Who cares? I’ll join the crypto train too.

I think the whole ETF approval is a sign that the Elizabeth Warren–Gary Gensler, Democratic, anti-crypto obstacle has been removed. What that means is that institutions can start to get comfortable with crypto.

Institutions have already gotten comfortable with Bitcoin and ETH. There’s been a multiyear, almost decade-long onboarding process. Institutions like Bank of New York Mellon can custody it now, and that bill ultimately passed in Congress.

Where we’re at is that the floodgates are about to open, in my opinion, for institutions to settle on-chain. The pathway has been cleared for regulatory clarity around whether or not these things are securities. That, in turn, will lead to a world where companies can just issue tokens and pass through dollar or stablecoin revenue to token holders, much like equities pass through dividends.

Then I think we’re in raging-euphoria mode again in crypto. That’s basically why I’m so excited right now. I don’t really understand why the market isn’t just ripping on all of that, but maybe it’s going to take some time to digest.

I think you’re right. All of that is true over a long period of time. The issue, and the reason the market isn’t ripping, is that while all of this is extremely good news, it’s not clear when these inflows are going to come in.

All of the people who are scared off by the regulatory policy of the Biden administration are very likely long-term allocators. These are your pension funds, your big banks, and people who were looking at crypto, evaluating it, and waiting for regulatory clarity.

Maybe their plan was a 3-year plan, and now this regulatory clarity has cut that 3-year plan down to a 1-year plan. But it’s still a 1-year plan. They’re probably not coming in until January of next year, because they’re going to spend this entire year dedicating more resources to it, starting now.

A lot of people viewed the election as the main decider for how crypto was going to be treated. If Trump got elected, they would start working, because they would have 4 years under Trump to get into crypto. If Biden got elected, they shouldn’t do anything with crypto, so any time spent on it right now would be a complete waste of time.

That’s changed. As you pointed out correctly, no matter who wins, crypto is in a good spot. It’s actually quite nice. I feel very comfortable.

The thing is that these people are only now going to start allocating time to figuring this out. Talk to the people who are making crypto investments. Talk to big hedge funds and ask them about their conversations with these guys. They’re always going to be slow-moving.

The real issue is that we don’t know when these inflows are coming. They could come in a year. What does that mean for the short term? There’s no real rush to front-run that type of asset inflow, because if you don’t know when the inflow is going to come, you can’t really front-run it.

There are so many things that are going to happen in the meantime. How do you isolate that risk? What if macro starts to go to shit? What if liquidity gets sucked out of the system? Then what have you done? You’ve front-run an event that isn’t even here yet, and you have to sell your position because the event is too far off and you can’t justify staying in it.

What it does is create stale longs, which is why I think any movement we got off the back of this is kind of like a shitcoin pump. It’s as if somebody tweeted, “By the way, in 1 year I might buy some of this coin,” and it’s a big name. Maybe somebody tweets, “In a year, I’m going to buy some of this coin.” It gets a 20% pump and then retraces immediately until he actually buys.

That’s the way I’m viewing this market.

That’s an interesting way to think about it. For those who have never been on an institutional market-making desk, the thing that clients are most afraid of when they trade with an OTC desk, like the one that I ran at Cumberland or the one that I ran for oil at Goldman Sachs, is that the market maker is going to front-run them.

Let’s say a producer comes in to hedge a bunch of oil production. They’re going to sell some oil futures, and they’re always very scared that as soon as the guy at Goldman picks up the phone, the price of oil is going to start going down before he gets his hedge off.

There was rationale for that. The way it used to work was that a salesperson would receive the call from the oil producer, stand up, and start waving in a special sign language—frantically waving to the trader, the Jonah or the Avi sitting there getting ready to quote.

Depending on whether the wave was a hand scooping air upward or a hand pushing air downward, it would tell you whether to start clicking buy or clicking sell. Indeed, there was quite a lot of front-running that used to go on inside these banks back in the day.

Then clients wised up, regulation tightened up, and that stopped. If you were clicking ahead of a trade, you almost always lost money. Front-running became nearly impossible because the way information flowed tightened up and the speed of trading increased.

There are still traders out there trying to front-run the flows, but as you said, it’s literally impossible if you don’t know when they’re going to come. Front-running only works if there’s going to be a big flow and you know exactly when it’s hitting the market.

Looking at the market, you have a point. Institutions are going to buy a lot, but you don’t know when. I take your point that it’s impossible to front-run that because of the timing element.

There is another flow that’s looking pretty consistent, though, and I think it’s a wave you can ride. I’m tracking the Bitcoin ETF Grayscale rotation. Grayscale outflows—whoever was in GBTC either liquidating for cash or rotating into IBIT or BTC—have stopped. The Bitcoin holdings of GBTC have basically leveled off.

I tweeted out some charts about this, but IBIT inflows are steadily continuing. They’re averaging around $50 million a day. That steady flow should keep a floor under the market. It’s a flow that you can front-run, or, if it’s consistent, just ride.

That’s going to keep a steady floor under the market and prevent me from getting my dip to buy. As the political climate turns—it’s only been a week or two since this fast, incredibly relevant political sea change occurred—I think that, buoyed by those flows and the halving as well, you can ride a gradual sentiment shift into a more bullish second half.

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I think that’s actually spot-on. We have to admit that this has been a big shift in the market, and it can’t be disrespected. What that necessarily means is that you can probably be happier with your position in BTC and ETH.

I also think it goes downstream. There are a lot of assets that were under SEC scrutiny that now probably aren’t going to be. You can probably pick them up now.

The question of whether the inflows come now or later—I think the answer is still later. It’s not now, 100%. I don’t think we’re going to blink our eyes and be at $100,000 in 3 seconds.

What’s going to end up happening is that there’s going to be a floor in the market for a bit. People who would have stayed out during a massive sell-off will now feel more comfortable stepping in and picking up assets.

I don’t think you’re going to get that crazy sell-off anymore. I don’t know if we’re heading for $52,000 anymore. I think it’s actually very likely that we just chop around for the next month.

Heading into next year, I also think there’s going to be a lot of good news with respect to crypto. If you’re not positioned by the end of the year, you probably should be.

That brings us to one question: In a market environment where you have this big catalyst that you know is coming, and you know that these inflows are going to come at some point but you don’t necessarily know when, and you think there’s a floor in the market, what’s the best way to trade something like that?

What’s the best structure? Are you selling puts against your ETH? Are you selling puts against your BTC because, if it trades to $60,000, you’re happy to take it against cash because you want to accumulate? Or do you really not think it’s going to get to $50,000, so you’re just selling volatility because we might go sideways for a bit?

If we go into a low-volatility period, what are you doing with your book?

I think the trade coming into this whole thing has been Coinbase. Coinbase stock has been performing really well on the back of this regulatory shift, and I’m wondering if that’s going to continue.

The left-curve take is that deregulation is good for Coinbase. The smart-guy take would also be that deregulation is good for Coinbase. What I’m worried about is whether we go into an environment where everybody can access TradFi exchanges, with all the flow shifting onto IBIT on the New York Stock Exchange.

Does Coinbase lose a big chunk of its business? I don’t know how many of you have traded on Coinbase. If you’re all total on-chain degens, Coinbase is not cheap to trade on. It’s not the best solution.

We reviewed Hyperliquid a while ago, and there are any number of places to get better liquidity on any of this stuff than Coinbase. The more mainstream this becomes, the more I’d worry about Coinbase.

Maybe a total horse trade would be to buy Coinbase puts. That’s actually kind of interesting.

I think Coinbase is kind of bad to trade on, but the question is this: If meme coin mania continues, or altcoins continue, Coinbase still represents the ability for more traditional people who only have access to a brokerage to bet on the growth of basically all coins.

Base is exploding too, and its Layer 2 is actually doing well. I read something today that was wild. How much volume do you think Robinhood did in meme coins over the last 2 weeks?

When I was quoting Robinhood, they were basically only listing Dogecoin and Shiba Inu. I don’t know what meme coins are on there now, but let’s say $40 million a day.

They did $4.5 billion in meme coins over the last 2 weeks.

$4.5 billion? Whoa. That’s enormous. What memes can you trade on Robinhood?

I don’t have a Robinhood account. I know you can trade Pepe and Dogecoin. Crypto on Robinhood is probably something we should know more about.

$4.5 billion over 2 weeks is $321 million a day. That’s serious volume. That’s 2021-type stuff.

I just asked Grok. On Robinhood you can trade Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, WIF, BONK, Pepe, and Floki. Is Grok fucking with us?

It could be. Grok could be fucking with us, but that’s pretty bananas.

While you were looking that up, I was thinking about the younger traders I’ve met through my commodities network—the guys who are passionate oil, gas, gasoline, and jet-fuel traders. The average one has around 30% of their net worth in crypto right now, and it’s traded on leverage.

It’s crazy. People with any risk appetite in that generation just don’t see a path to financial freedom through TradFi stocks and bonds. I can understand why Robinhood is churning $300 million or more a day in memes.

That’s actually wild. If this continues, maybe Robinhood is the play for traditional guys with a brokerage account who want to bet on memes. Maybe you just buy Robinhood.

It’s rallied pretty aggressively over the last month, so if that $4.5 billion number is right, that’s significant.

When I was quoting Robinhood, they were making 35 basis points on every dollar of notional that a user traded on the platform. I think they’ve since reduced that to around 20 basis points, but if they’re trading $350 million a day, that would be about $700,000 a day of meme-coin revenue.

That’s pretty bananas for a platform like that. It could be a stock you buy as meme-coin beta, because I don’t think the equity analysts are paying attention to it.

The more I think about it, the more I like it. We all know that these types of assets—basically ETF-like ways to access the crypto market when nobody else can—tend to do very well.

Me too. There’s weird alpha in some of these listed equities that touch crypto. GBTC, for example, was a grand slam. Now Robinhood could be a meme-coin mania play.

For some reason, TradFi just doesn’t pick up on this stuff. There’s a weird Chinese wall between the world of TradFi and the world of shitcoins.

What I’m concerned about, though, is that as we go into the second half of this year, we’re all bullish on Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana. The bar for investing in a token that is not Bitcoin, ETH, or Solana—or something in the meme-coin casino, which isn’t even an investment, it’s just fun—is so high because the thesis and risk-reward behind the benchmark Layer 1s are so good.

I’m getting really worried about 2 things. One is putting my money into an altcoin that tanks or flatlines while the rest of the market rips, thereby missing out on the huge rally with that capital.

The other is being risk-averse and having all my money in Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana, only to have some sector summer occur. DePIN, AI and crypto, Livepeer—it could be any of these things—and then missing out on a huge move.

It’s dicey in the altcoin space right now. There’s no winning.

There was this great quote that ties into trading very well. It’s by Søren Kierkegaard:

“Marry and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it. Marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Hang yourself and you will regret it; do not hang yourself, you will regret that too. Hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way.”

This gentleman is the essence of all philosophy, which is also kind of the essence of trading. This quote is trading in a nutshell.

The way one of my mentors, a legendary natural-gas trader, explained it to me was: “Jonah, in natural-gas trading there are only 2 emotions: shame and regret.” Shame is when you miss out on a trade, and regret is when you buy the wrong thing and lose your shirt.

I don’t think of all these sexy mega-launches that have occurred recently. There’s Aptos, Sui, Sei, Worldcoin, Telegram’s TON, and so on. Are we supposed to own any of that stuff going into this new paradigm?

I think they’re good for trades. What I’ve failed to see is any real traction, and I would love it if anyone in the comments could correct me.

One of my favorite things about doing this podcast, Avi, is that anytime I say, “This isn’t happening,” or “That isn’t happening,” or “This sucks,” or “That sucks,” we inevitably get comments saying, “You haven’t looked at this.” I’m hoping we get that this time.

Avalanche, Aptos, Sei, Sui, and all these other platforms outside of ETH and Solana—Arbitrum, Optimism—nothing is actually happening with these platforms anymore. I think that’s one of the reasons meme coins have pumped so hard, in my nonprofessional opinion.

Last cycle, there was at least a façade of things happening on Layer 1s. There were all these partnerships, and people were saying they were going to build this or build that. There was the game of, “It’s Uniswap on this protocol,” or “Balancer on this protocol,” and so on.

That has disappeared from crypto. You don’t hear anything out of these Layer 1s anymore about them doing real work. If they are doing it, it’s not widely appreciated, widely known, or, realistically, widely cared about, because it’s viewed as fake.

My view is that these guys aren’t actually doing anything, and you can only keep that façade up for so long. It would be nice if somebody in the comments came in and told me otherwise.

I haven’t paid attention to that area of the market. Maybe I should have, but I haven’t, because for a very long time my takeaway was that there was no reason to.

That doesn’t mean they aren’t going to pump. It doesn’t mean you aren’t going to get a good trade. There are always idiosyncratic buyers of any asset.

If you monitor all these different Layer 1s and track their volume, then one day you wake up and the volume is 5 times what it normally is while the price isn’t up that much, maybe you need to buy the thing. But that doesn’t mean anything for the long term. It’s just a good trade.

That’s how I feel about a lot of these assets right now. Unfortunately, they aren’t good investments; they’re just good trades. That’s fine. You just have to know what you’re getting yourself into.

I agree. Another thing you can do to play these downtrends is think about what’s going on inside a Sui, Sei, Aptos, NEAR, or Avalanche from a market-structure perspective.

The reason they trade broadly in correlation with Bitcoin and ETH is that there are correlation algorithms. Every time ETH ticks up and NEAR is unchanged, the algorithm will buy a little bit of NEAR, and vice versa.

These are mid-frequency correlation algorithms. Sometimes they pair-trade the asset against ETH, and sometimes they don’t. Crypto has a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy because these algorithms keep all of the major benchmark assets in line with each other.

But underneath the hood, what’s going on inside ETH or Solana is that there’s actual shit happening. There are developers, an ecosystem, new users coming in, people opening wallets, and people buying tokens.

In these more dead-zone ecosystems, like Polkadot, there isn’t much happening, except for insiders and VCs unlocking and selling.

The pairs are where you can really read the tea leaves of what’s going on. Obviously, this excludes a massive catalyst event or an explosion in volume, but day to day, the Polkadot/ETH pair or the NEAR/ETH pair will just be in a smooth downtrend.

One thing you can do as a full-time trader is identify opportunities where perpetuals in these dead ecosystems trade at a premium. You can pair-trade them by shorting the alt Layer 1 and buying the benchmark Layer 1, like ETH or Solana.

These smooth trends last for weeks, so you can pick up a little bit of funding and a little bit of smooth P&L. I don’t personally have time to do that sort of thing anymore, but I used to.

I remember seeing some charts you shared in the past where you looked at the distance from a moving average on these pairs. When it had gotten to a point that was 2 standard deviations away from the average distance, you would buy it, because these pairs tend to mean-revert in general.

That’s probably good trading for right now, especially because, if these assets don’t have any real fundamentals behind them and these pumps are just idiosyncratic buyers in the market, mean reversion probably happens very frequently.

You could even set up a screener that looks at each coin, picks the 3 most correlated coins for every coin, and then calculates the screener to find large standard-deviation moves. That could be a good exercise.

If you build that, call me. I’ll pay for your product.

Another good one—shout-out to Josh Frank, who built The Tie—is VC unlocks.

Imagine you’re a VC locked into one of these totally dead, mega-cap assets in crypto. You’re literally crossing off the days on your calendar until you can get the hell out and redeploy that capital into something interesting.

These guys have gotten lucky. All of their shitcoins have rebounded massively since the collapse, and a lot of them are locked up in SAFTs that were minted in the 2020–2021 era. They’re going to get out as soon as they can.

Those unlocks will knock down the pairs—the alt Layer 1 versus ETH pairs. If you have the unlock calendar, maybe you can get ahead of that and make some easy money. That was something we did at Cumberland as well.

I hope that doesn’t get too widespread, because some of these trades get really crowded. One of my favorite trades, though, is the airdrop trade.

For example, Arweave is getting a massive airdrop over the coming weeks. Right now I’m looking at the futures curve, and you can short AR futures. They aren’t backwardated yet, so you basically get the free airdrop at some point.

That future will eventually go into backwardation, and you’ll have made some good money on it. You can actually make money both ways if you time it right.

You can short the future now, wait for it to go into backwardation, buy back the future, and then go short on the perpetual. It’s kind of nice.

Speaking of airdrops, I’m looking at what happened to Friend.tech. That’s not very friendly price action.

At some point, everybody will forget that Friend.tech exists. It will bottom out, all the sellers will be gone, and then it will rip. That’s what happens.

The key is remembering to pay attention. I fall into this trap a lot. Unlike some people on Crypto Twitter who are super popular, I’m not really a cheerleader. I’m occasionally willing to throw in the towel on something forever and say that a particular asset is shit.

I’m worried—not saying it’s definitely the case—that Friend.tech is just toast and that the token is gone.

This is why people hate me out there.

You’re kind of a hater, just being honest.

Well, no, I mean, I love Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana and certain memes, but let’s not pick on Friend.tech. Have you heard or witnessed examples in crypto of products that launch, are popular for a month, lose people’s interest, go silent, and then have an airdrop? Around the airdrop, people start farming and getting involved and being active to claim their tokens, and then the whole thing dies again afterward.

Aren’t you worried about buying airdrop tokens because of that sort of price-action and activity pattern?

The answer is no, mainly because I can’t think of many other products in crypto that are like Friend.tech. I guess there’s Farcaster, and Telegram kind of competes with Friend.tech, although it’s just in crypto. There aren’t that many crypto products that have achieved the prevalence of Friend.tech.

You saw it with speculative products. GMX was huge for a while. Rollbit was obviously very big for a while and then fell out of relevance. There are assets tied to speculative products that fell out of favor.

Friend.tech is a speculative product, but it’s a different type. It’s genuinely a social-media platform, so I have to give them some credit that they’re going to be around and figure out a way to pump their token, for lack of a better word.

I can’t think of many Friend.tech-like platforms that have reached this state.

I’m struggling too. I’m just throwing things out there. The Bored Ape Yacht Club was kind of a social network with a value attached to it.

I’m basically trying to parse through the altcoin space with you and see if there’s anything worth doing against the backdrop of this screamingly bullish, amazing risk-reward in the benchmarks.

Right now I’m a benchmark maxi. What can I say? The other stuff is just too dicey. The benchmarks are so obvious to anybody who’s paying attention, and the rest of it is too difficult for me to get my head around.

It’s crypto. It still hasn’t had its mainstream-adoption moment.

Even with the benchmarks, it’s been a bit sad to see a consistent sweep out of ETH/BTC for the last 3 days. The market has been conditioned to fade ETH/BTC. It’s down 1% or 1.5% today. Bitcoin is up, and ETH is struggling.

Even with all these tailwinds, ETH can’t catch a break. This thing keeps getting slammed.

Who’s slamming it? It’s people who are long ETH taking profits. The same thing happened to Bitcoin after it gapped higher. People were getting out.

Let’s see if they come back in.

They don’t need to if an ETF gets approved, which it basically has. You have a new buyer base coming in. Maybe TradFi starts opening wallets and settling things. Maybe the BlackRock BUIDL fund expands.

ETH/BTC is a tough one, but if you’re going to look at an altcoin pairs trade that’s steadily trending lower, don’t look at ETH/BTC. Look at one of these alt Layer 1s versus Bitcoin or ETH.

Maybe that’s the way to structure it: an alt Layer 1 versus Bitcoin.

I think it’s all about the entry point. What you want to wait for is one of these scam pumps on something like Aptos. You want to see it go up 15% or 20% in a day, and then you say, “Get me out. Get me out. Get me out. Go, go, go, go, go.”

That’s a good one to short. Aptos has huge VC unlocks coming over the next year or two.

Although it died in March, came off 50%, and has been sideways since then. The issue with these trades right now is that a lot of them are already off. I’m of the mindset that I want to wait to short these things, but we’ll see.

One thing we didn’t mention is that I don’t know if you saw the headline that came through saying Musk is working with Trump on crypto. Then Musk came out and said, “Just kidding, never mind.”

The issue is that you’re dealing with 2 of the biggest liars who have ever existed on this planet, so you don’t know which one is lying. One of them is lying, but it’s not as if there’s one trustworthy person and one untrustworthy person.

If it’s true, you probably want to own more Dogecoin.

Exactly. That could be pretty wild.

Do you think our society has jumped the proverbial shark after the DOGE ETF?

I think society has already declined. We’re witnessing the decline of Western civilization for a number of reasons.

I don’t think society jumps the shark if we end up with a DOGE ETF. Most zombie companies, most equities, and crypto in general are already far crazier than an ETF for a popular meme coin. I really do think we’re far beyond that point of wildness already.

That’s fair. There are a lot of other things that are probably marking the top of the American Empire that I won’t get into on this podcast, because I’ll probably get canceled for believing them.

If you want to get canceled, just say Solana is in trouble, and then it’s going to go down.

Then I’ll get you canceled. But if you don’t say that, I think you’re good.

If you repeat “Solana is in trouble” 8 times, then I’ll buy Solana and I’ll actually find out.

If you could do that for me, it would be real nice. Much appreciated, buddy.

What I mean is, is there even any point asking what else there is to buy besides Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana? There has to be some process, other than selling coins that are slowly dying, that we can use to make money.

The big red flag for me across all of this is watching what NFTs are doing. NFTs basically show you that just because Bitcoin has pumped every cycle—every bull market since its inception—doesn’t mean that every crypto asset will pump every bull market.

I do believe in NFTs. I think they’re going to skip a cycle and probably pump again later this decade. But what that shows you is how spectacularly you can underperform.

The BTC/BAYC pair is just up-only in all environments. As a trader, you’re always trading a pair. You’re trading Bitcoin versus USD if you’re buying Bitcoin, and if you’re buying something more speculative, you could consider it a speculative asset versus Bitcoin, because that capital would probably be in Bitcoin.

The burden of proof is so high to invest in anything right now. I think you hit the nail on the head: We’ve got to start actively trading catalysts, actively pair-trading, yield-farming, collecting funding from perpetuals against spot, and doing all the little creative things that people need to do to eke out a profit.

There’s no real long-term investment thesis beyond the benchmarks.

That’s depressing, but fair.

It’s good for traders.

It is. It’s good for trading, that’s for sure, which is what I’m doing.

Right now I’m tactically short the market because I think we could have the floor fall out from under us in a 5% or 6% move. I’m recording this right before PCE, though, so if equities and the rest of the market sell off a ton, that actually makes it a really good buy.

If we get good data, there’s a nice upside surprise. In general, I’m trading pairs and being careful. It’s going to be an interesting market over the next few weeks, because there’s no real direction.

These are the hardest markets, because they’re the ones where you lose focus, do stupid shit, and put on a bunch of bad trades. Then, 6 months later, you don’t notice the pain in the beginning, but eventually you’re kicking yourself. This is where discipline comes in.

One thing I’m noticing is that commodities broadly are rallying, but oil is puking right now. If we get a proper sell-off in transportation fuels, I think that could help.

The inflation people aren’t necessarily laser-focused on that right now. If this sell-off continues, which I think it probably will, maybe you get some cooler CPI prints. Then rate cuts could start as we head into the election cycle, and assets could overheat. That could be a bullish catalyst.

Other than macro, there’s nothing particularly crypto-native that’s going to cause a lift-off at this point.

Why did natural gas rally so much? I’m not paying as much attention to natural gas as I should, but I think that move was related to some sort of late-winter cold snap or something.

I forget exactly why, but I don’t have a good answer for you there.

Maybe we should wrap it there and let the audience enjoy our confusion. If you’re confused, feel less bad, because so are we. Long the benchmarks, and hopefully they help us figure out the rest.

Avi, it’s a pleasure talking to you as always. Sorry for losing focus toward the end. The market was shitting itself, and I was covering my shorts.

Traders have to trade.

That’s good. It’s like you guys are on the trading floor with us. You get to experience what it’s like: the meandering conversations and the “Can you shut up for a second while I make this trade?”

Exactly. It’s good. We’re just doing a hard job.

Great talking to you, Obby. Obviously, none of this is investment advice. We clearly don’t know anything. Good luck out there. We don’t know a goddamn thing. We’re going to try to do some more creator/dev-type interviews pretty soon to get you some new content, not just us rambling about sideways markets. All right, later. Adios.