Is BTC A Buy, Metals Crash, Hyperliquid RWAs, New Fed Chair

But I think this level—this $78,000 level—we got all the way down to $74,000. This is what you wait for as a trader. This is what you wait for as an allocator. This is what you wait for as an investor.

You're down 40% off the highs in Bitcoin, and things are starting to look very attractive from a risk-reward perspective for long-term allocators. That's really the key. I also don't think you're probably getting a ton of old money selling here. Let's fucking go, guys. If you have money in the system, if you have cash, I think this is where you're supposed to be deploying it.

Things are starting to look cheap. Solana is defending that $100 level. ETH really got absolutely nuked on high volume. I'm probably not a huge fan of ETH here, but I'm a big fan of Bitcoin. I'm also a big fan of generally all the altcoins that we've been talking about, and I think this is, if not a good time to allocate for the long term, a phenomenal trade.

The risk-reward on this trade is great because I think you can get back up to $90,000 on a bounce, and you can cut below $74,000 on a drawdown. The risk-reward as a trader looks good as well. What do you think?

1. Is Bitcoin A Buy?

You know, Jonah, I was just typing a tweet: “Come hang out with us and commiserate.”

It's pretty bad out there, isn't it? It's nasty out there. And you know what? I always feel bad saying this. I do feel bad saying it, but I did say it was the worst-looking chart I've ever seen.

Which chart?

Bitcoin. The Bitcoin chart was disgusting. And then I was like, “Maybe you should buy at $85,000.” But holy fuck, the moves so far have been pretty violent.

Actually, if you go back to the original buy zone that was outlined a few months ago, that original buy zone was somewhere from $71,000 to $77,000. That was sort of my ideal long-term level: I buy a ton of Bitcoin here. We're kind of here now.

When I said the chart looked nasty, I said I was on the sidelines. I was waiting to see what happened, and then the move happened so fast that I haven't had any time to buy. But I think this level—this $78,000 level—we got all the way down to $74,000. This is what you wait for as a trader.

This is what you wait for as an allocator. This is what you wait for as an investor. You're down 40% off the highs in Bitcoin, and things are starting to look very attractive from a risk-reward perspective for long-term allocators. That's really the key.

I also don't think you're probably getting a ton of old money selling here. If you have money in the system, if you have cash, I think this is where you're supposed to be deploying it. Things are starting to look cheap. Solana is defending that $100 level. ETH really got absolutely nuked on high volume.

I'm probably not a huge fan of ETH here, but I'm a big fan of Bitcoin. I'm also a big fan of generally all the altcoins that we've been talking about, and I think this is, if not a good time to allocate for the long term, a phenomenal trade.

The risk-reward on this trade is great because I think you can get back up to $90,000 on a bounce, and you can cut below $74,000 on a drawdown. The risk-reward as a trader looks good as well. What do you think?

Yeah, I like that. I like that. I think it's about to get insanely volatile here. I can't tell.

First of all, the four-year cycle is broken because the previous bull market only lasted 3 years, and we're definitely in a bear market right now. This is bad. We've been trading down pretty much in a straight line, with a couple of bull traps, since the highs last year.

Let me just pull up the chart here. Really, really since October 6, 2025, was the high.

Yeah.

Basically, we've been straight down. On a daily chart, we've been straight down 40%, with that consolidation period from November 21 up until January. Again, we own our dubs and our Ls on this podcast. I thought that the beginning of the year would lead to a more sustained rally, and then when we retraced that rally and got back into the range, I started to say this was one of the worst things I've ever seen.

And that's actually a pretty good example of this. I'll show you an example because I think it's useful to understand as a general chart pattern and a matter of psychology.

If you establish a range like this—this was a range for some time here—and then you break out of the range over here, and then you go back inside, that's a really bad sign. That's always a really bad sign. You don't want to see that breakout and then a failed breakout.

What that normally means is that everyone who sold during the range starts to buy the breakout. Then, when you go back in, everybody panics that you didn't break out of that range, and they all sell at the same time. That forces a break of the low.

Actually, it's funny because basically the same thing happens here. It happens pretty frequently. Let's go to a weekly chart over here. You have a range set here, you have this false breakout right here, you go right back in, and then you collapse.

Go to your original drawing. Go back to the daily chart and go to your original drawing.

Let me just—

No, don't delete all that.

Let me get rid of that to clean it up. You want me to go back to the original drawing—the one that you just deleted? It's all good. No worries.

This one? Well, I can draw it again for you.

That's all good. Can you do Control-Z there?

Yeah, you can paste.

Yeah.

There we go. This is what I was talking about over here. Basically, it's the little head fake above a range, and then you go right back in.

That's never a good sign, is it?

That's always a bad sign, just for markets in general.

2. Ads (Kraken)

I'll show you one more thing you should be paying attention to as a trader if you're thinking about how to buy. Generally, what happens here is you want to look for volume. Let's go to the 1-hour chart. You want to look at volume here.

We had our first drive out of the range, our second drive out of the range, and our third drive lower. The volume has come down a bit. You see how over here the volume was a lot higher, and over here the volume is a lot lower? That signifies that we're, I think, in the middle of forming a bottom.

What you want to look for is somewhat of a retrace here. You never, ever want to buy on a bounce up to the previous consolidation. My guess, if you're short-term trading, is that you want to buy around $75,000 to $77,000. You don't really want to buy at $78,000.

If you're a short-term trader, that's one thing. If you're a long-term investor, buy here and just hold the position.

3. Ads (Kraken)

But maybe what you want to do is layer in some ladders. You want to ladder it in down here, if these are representing orders. That would be what I would do.

4. Meltdown In Metals

Okay, fair enough. I kind of agree with all that. Let me start with a bit of cope.

One thing that I've noticed: Gold, the indestructible metal that we thought was eating our lunch, is off 22% from the highs. It peaked on January 29 at $5,600 an ounce, and today it hit $4,399. So that's a 21.5% move in 3 candles.

My cope—or, I think, relevant observation—is that there's something bigger going on here than crypto just spiraling while everything else proceeds with business as usual. I think that's an important distinction to make. The stock market's nuking. There's a broader risk-off move happening.

We can't just look at Bitcoin in a vacuum, tear our hair out, and decide to rage-quit the industry and move on to other stuff. Other stuff is in bad shape, too. It's important to notice that.

The second thing is that we've had a 40% move in Bitcoin over the course of October 6 to February 2. We've had almost half that move in 3 days in gold.

And we've had more than that move in silver. How insane is that?

Look, we were talking about this on the last podcast, and you were super bearish on metals.

You’re like, this is all retail mania. This is all nonsense. This is all crazy. And my response was, I agree on silver, but I don’t know about gold. And then both gold and silver totally just nuked themselves.

Well, what you said specifically, if I remember correctly, is that when the unwind happens, it’s going to happen really fast, because everyone is going to nuke their positions at the same time. It’s very difficult to hold on to gold and silver as a long-term investment unless you have a 10-year thesis. And basically, nobody buying gold and silver at these levels had a 10-year thesis. They were all just in it for the FOMO trade, right?

Yeah, basically. Well, there was another thing I said, so I will own a dub here. I did say, “Don’t buy metals” when metals were on the highs and we were talking about it last week. I cautioned against that. I said I don’t really know when it’s going to top out, but when it unwinds, it’s going to be ugly, and the unwind is not going to be short.

And here’s why. We talked about CTAs last week. I don’t know exactly what moving averages they use or what speeds they use or how complex the math is, but we’re definitely below the 50-day moving average in silver and maybe in gold. Probably below the 100-day moving average in at least silver. And 250 would be the longest one; I doubt we’re below that one yet.

Basically, once you start to cross below those moving averages, a CTA is going to start to flip and sell what it’s long. And these CTAs are probably long, gargantuan in size. Another thing that a CTA will do that’s very important is—and you have to know what the flows are in your space in order to trade something appropriately—they volatility-adjust their trades. So they attempt to keep their variance constant.

What does that mean for somebody who hasn’t worked inside of a trading firm? Basically, it means that they want their daily P&L variance—the number by which their P&L moves every day in each asset—to stay consistent, right? They don’t want to have 3 years of $10-a-day moves in their P&L in gold and then suddenly, for 6 months, have $100 million-a-day moves in their gold portfolio. They want it to be smooth over time.

So basically, when an asset is less volatile, they trade larger size, and when an asset is more volatile, they have to reduce their size. Right? As gold has been ripping, they probably accumulated gargantuan size from it just being this incredibly smooth thing that was moving up a little bit every day. I think for most of this gold rally, it was still less volatile than oil or natural gas or Bitcoin. It only started to get crazy volatile at the end.

Maybe they would have taken a little bit of profit when gold was melting up, just to reduce the size of their position and keep their variance constant. But now that you’re getting the wildest volatility that we’ve seen in my entire life in gold to the downside, the CTA is basically saying, “Okay, the model’s telling me I have to sell because I’m below moving averages, but the model’s also telling me that I have to reduce because the P&L volatility is too extreme. I have to downsize my positions.” That’s a double whammy.

So basically, that unwind—they’re not going to vomit that all in a day. They have armies of quants basically trying to figure out how to reduce slippage. The last thing they’re going to do is say, “Right, we’re long like a third of the open interest in silver. Let’s just go liquidate that this afternoon.” No, they’re not going to do that, right? They’re going to be selling for a long time.

They have a long, long way to go to get out of all this risk across all the precious metals: gold, silver, platinum, palladium, whatever else. And so the initial move here in silver and gold was very vicious. But I don’t think this is a time where you want to catch the falling knife.

The biggest participants in these markets, aside from central banks, who will not be selling here—they’ll probably buy more, if anything—or are pausing in fear like the rest of us, are far and away the CTAs. And I would guess they’re probably 25% of the way through the wood they have to chop, if that. Does that make sense?

I think that makes a ton of sense. But that doesn’t bode well for the retail that got caught up in this trade.

Retail that listens to this podcast wouldn’t have gotten caught up in that trade.

Yes, that is true, because there were a lot of warnings. We basically spent half the podcast talking about how nuts this silver move is and how it’s entirely driven by retail FOMO. And what was kind of interesting is that I sent this tweet out a few days ago that said, “Crypto has really trained me to trade retail FOMO and extension and insanity.”

One of the big correlations, actually, is that there was apparently a silver ETF trading in China that was trading at a 42% premium to the underlying futures. The futures were going totally nuts. That’s basically exactly how we thought about trading Bitcoin in 2021 with GBTC and futures: when Bitcoin is going into pure euphoria mode, you look for retail products that are trading at a premium to the underlying to get a sense for how much craziness is actually in this market.

If futures were not trading, if demand for leverage was not high on silver, and if ETFs were not trading at a massive premium, then it’s much harder to say that there’s euphoria. But they were, and then the thing started to collapse. That really started happening after $80. That’s really where silver, I think, went totally nuts. All these statistics started to blow out.

At that point, you have to say to yourself, as a crypto trader, “I’ve seen this before. I know exactly what retail euphoria looks like.”

Another great little thing is whenever people feel really comfortable clowning on the bears. Mike Alfred, by the way, is kind of an annoying guy, but he did tweet out—[laughter]—whatever, he’s got his quirks—“I’m taking a silver short.” And every single comment, Jonah, every single comment, is, “You’re a fucking idiot.” That’s normally only 30% of the comments on Mike Alfred tweets, but it got to 100%.

And so when that—

And make an indicator.

Yeah, the Mike Alfred hate indicator was at 100%. I saw that and was like, “All right, maybe this guy’s going to make a lot of money on this silver short.” Unfortunately, I did not make a lot of money on the silver short because I was not confident enough to hold it for an extended period of time.

However, I do think that now is not the time to be short metals anymore. It actually offers you a trade. I like to set up trades on this podcast. And my setup was: guys, I’m really bullish on critical rare-earth minerals, and I’m really bullish on uranium. I think these have megatrends driving them forward.

We were talking about this when silver was trading like $110 or something. If silver and gold go down a lot, if it all collapses, that’s going to give you phenomenal entries on these other metals that were sort of—

Even REMX is just nuking.

5. What To Buy Next & The New Fed Chair

Right, because it was dragged around unfairly, I think, by these metals. There were a lot of people—this was classic, truly classic crypto price action—where the leader runs, gold runs, and then the secondary asset, ETH, runs, silver runs, and then all of the other random shit—people just start buying it solely because they want beta to the main asset.

These assets got unfairly dragged around despite there being real fundamental reasons for them to go up. The other thing is that they got unfairly dragged up in a way that you don’t really see in the crypto market these days. I mean, there are huge dislocations between the alt market and BTC in general.

And that’s because there are 10 million cryptocurrencies and there are, what, 16 tradable metals. They’re not that many. And so everyone was just crowding into the metals trade, buying every metals product that they possibly could. That obviously, I think, again unfairly dragged it around.

Buying uranium here at the URA ETF at $53, I think, is a great trade personally. I think buying REMX at $85 is a great trade, right, because these things genuinely—

Have megatrends supporting them. I mean, nuclear power is going to be ramped up tremendously over the next 5 years, and we’re going to start seeing that really play out. And I think you need—

As a retail trader, you kind of can only invest in megatrends because, in shorter-term trading, you’re in a rock fight with really smart people and algorithms, whereas with megatrends, your timeline is just beyond theirs. So it’s sort of white space that you can occupy.

I don’t think anybody out there should feel guilty about not top-blasting silver and getting short and then covering here.

That's just impossible. You can pick the top of anything almost by definition. That's why it tops: it's because the buying stops, right? It's not because there's some sort of obvious plateau that gets shorted by everybody on the highs. Markets rarely consolidate on the highs. Usually, it spikes and then plummets.

You would have had to be in there with such precision—you couldn't just sit there and wait for your spot, then get lifted on the highs and ride it back down with confidence. You literally have to be the native warrior hiding in the tree with the loincloth and the blow dart, waiting for your opportunity.

Are you calling us retail traders savages? Is that what you're calling us, Jonah?

In a sense—

And are the civilized men going to come and wipe us out with their smallpox?

What I'm saying is that certain types of retail traders are savages. They are the guy with the blow dart in the tree, trying to hunt something far larger and more menacing. Whereas, realistically, why not just arm yourself with the bazooka that we know as investing in megatrends and holding on for dear life, and all of those good things that crypto teaches you to your point, Avi, rather than attempting to arm ourselves with the blow dart of using a human-meat computer to attempt to top-blast quantitatively traded, liquid, international markets like silver ETFs and futures, right?

So, basically, what I'm saying here in a nutshell is we're setting up for a great buy. I don't think the great buying opportunity is coming yet, because I think CTA selling is a feature that should not be ignored and will persist for some time. But never in a million years would I short a market that's melting upward in parabolic fashion. Absolutely will I try to get into REMX. I missed my first shot because I hadn't even heard of it until you brought it up, at which point it had already rallied too far. But now maybe it'll get dragged down unfairly by this other stuff, and it's time to buy. I put Bitcoin into that category, too.

Realistically, zooming way out, what's happening here? We're having a bit of global macro indigestion for a couple of reasons. The first is, hey, instead of that [expletive] who just wants to cut rates to zero like the president of Turkey did, even though there was a problem—I forget his name—the guy that betting markets were saying was going to win last December. Who is it? The guy—

Yeah. Warsh is an economist. He's not going to run the car off—he's not going to redline it, right? I don't know much about him, but people are sobering up a little bit. Then the second thing is this tariff thing against Europe is looking kind of bad. We're having another tariff tantrum like what we had last April.

But I think you know that's always going to be walked back.

It's a screaming fade, so that's another reason to buy. The only reason not to buy metals specifically is CTA flow. Bitcoin, though—I guess in the value-and-momentum framework concocted by one Avi Felman, you have value now, but you don't have momentum. It's kind of rare to have both, isn't it? So maybe we're supposed to wait for it to bottom out and get a little bit of upward momentum before we buy.

Or, at the very least, Bitcoin isn't really a CTA-traded market yet, I think. So, yeah, maybe you buy it here, stop out at $74K and take profit at $92K, and just start range-trading Bitcoin in this crazy, volatile range. I don't see it going back much lower than where it is now, frankly.

Yeah, look, I do think that Kevin Warsh is going to be good long term. I think the issue is obviously the short-termism here: this guy is not going to just cut rates to zero, and he's not going to be super, super, super dovish. But I think one thing that's very, very important is obviously that he handles the potential for inflation to come back.

And that's why I think long term he's obviously good for the markets, because I actually think the markets would be worse. It's like a sugar rush, right? You cut rates to zero, it's going to feel good for about half a second, and then if inflation starts coming back, everyone's like, "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." And then things actually start to fall apart again.

So hopefully the long-term market reaction to him will be, "Okay, this guy's going to be able to land the plane effectively," or continue flying the plane effectively, because I think Jerome Powell landed the plane in turbulent weather. Now we've taken off again, and we just have to proceed smoothly. Hopefully Kevin can do that, as opposed to trying to take us straight up and then inevitably crashing the plane.

I know the plane was an extended plane analogy, but you guys understood what I was talking about. It basically would have meant the whole economy—every chart could have looked like the silver chart.

Yes.

That's actually really not what you want at all. You really don't want a chart that looks like that, because it scares people from buying an asset when it goes down 40%, or 20% in 3 days. That's a scary thing.

Now, I happen to believe personally that gold is coming up on some pretty damn good buy levels, because if you look at the chart—I'll just pull it up—this is very simple. I think that prior to breaking $4,000, gold was advancing at what I call a healthy clip, right? It was a very steady rate. Anytime you got too far away from this trend line, you would inevitably come back down into it. And that's what happened here, right?

You just get too far away from this trend line. The distance, the gap here, is too large, and you come back down. My view is still very much that central banks will continue to accumulate gold, people will continue to diversify out of U.S. equities into gold, and we're going to see gold at much higher levels over the next 3 years.

But what we're not going to see is gold go up 22% in basically 2 weeks. That's obviously unsustainable. That's a very, very, very unsustainable clip. I think we're getting back to levels where you can start to get into gold. If gold trades at $4,500, for example, again in the coming days, I'm probably buying a gold position.

You know what else is kind of interesting? That means it's advancing at a healthy clip still.

Yes, I agree.

6. Precious Metals Hedge Funds

But let me just quickly add a tangent. I think you and the listeners will appreciate it. I know some precious-metals hedge-fund guys. It's a niche, right? There aren't that many of them because it's not a big enough market for you to have all-weather P&L. There are entire decades where that precious-metals space is super uninteresting.

Anyway, those guys have been in party mode for 2 years. They've been crushing it. Basically, in 2024, precious metals were grinding up every day, right? Then anybody who was a precious-metals hedge-fund trader—hedge funds don't give you a lot of elbow room. You know this, Avi, right? They don't let you blow up.

No, I'm well aware.

So basically, 2025 rolls around. Anybody who's still in a precious-metals seat at a hedge fund has been a bull, right? 2024 took all the bears and led them out back and shot them in the head, right? So 2025 is just bulls—not even thoughtful bulls, just being long and not even thinking about it, or maybe thinking, "How can I get leverage being long to try to get paid more?"

Then 2025 gold goes insane, right? And silver goes insane. These guys are probably expecting the biggest bonus of their lives. They're probably pre-buying Mediterranean villas and expensive cars and doing all the things hedge-fund guys do, booking vacations on yachts they can't afford. We've all known those guys, right?

Anyway, I've even been to a couple of their parties. They suck.

I was going to say, "Known those guys, buddy." I've been that guy.

You've been a precious-metals hedge-fund trader?

No, I'm buying the yachts. I probably shouldn't have.

Yeah.

Anyway, go ahead.

Fair enough. Anyway, my point is your 2025 bonus at a hedge fund—they rarely wire you the cash on January 1. Usually, they'll communicate the bonus in January, and then it hits the bank in February, right?

By the way, that's one thing I loved about the last place that I worked: they paid you out in January. It was insane. Every other hedge fund I've ever worked at, it's February or March.

That's right.

Yeah. That's how most places do it, because what they want to do is say, "Okay, we want you to get to the next year off to a good start," and then the big ones, like BlueCrest or sometimes Millennium, will hold a little bit of your bonus as a reserve in case you blow up.

Almost all hedge funds that I know of now structure P&L so that they’re going to take at least half, if not 66%, of your bonus if it’s over a certain amount of money, and they’ll pay it out to you over 3 years.

Yeah, which sucks.

So, now we pull up—hold on, let me share my screen here. Now we pull up the gold chart. You’re expecting your bonus in a couple of weeks, right? It’s the beginning of February, and gold pukes 20%.

The reason why this move is so exaggerated is because hedge-fund guys were obviously still long in 2026, because this is January, right? Obviously, they’re partying, expecting a huge bonus and expecting another huge bonus in February 2027. They’re all still long. This is all of them getting stopped out at the same time, right?

Hedge funds have pretty tight risk limits, too, none of which ever would have been triggered during this smooth-as-ever rally up here. But they’re all getting stopped out now, and that’s part of what created this move.

So where that leaves us is that this entire community of precious-metals traders is not only not receiving a bonus in 2026, if they still have jobs; they’re negative gargantuan money in 2027. And as you know, Avi, it’s impossible to claw yourself out of a hole at a hedge fund because they cut your risk, right? They’re like, “Oh, you had a $10 million VaR and you drew down to X. All right, now you have a $3 million VaR, and you have to climb out of that.”

So now none of these guys are going to get a bonus for 2026, paid in 2027, either. They’re getting no money until 2028 at the earliest. Basically, what’s going to happen now is that this is going to be a feeding frenzy for the headhunter community.

This is when all the gold traders are like—oh, the headhunters are calling up the senior traders at various firms: “Oh, this guy? Yeah, he’s got huge P&L. Massive trader. He’s not really looking, but he’d consider a good offer if you showed him one.” And then by June, these guys are basically moving places for free because there’s no other way out of the hole they’re in at their current shop.

From a Schadenfreude perspective, this gold chart is kind of hilarious to look at—the behind-the-scenes stuff—because basically there are a bunch of commodities traders who are going to be changing jobs and not getting paid for 3 years. It’s always hilarious to watch.

One thing that I was very proud of on the last podcast was calling the literal pico bottom of Hyperliquid, which was done almost entirely by mistake. I was just looking at the supply. I didn’t know that they were going to cut the supply that was handed out to team members, which I think is a huge reason for the rally.

But what I was aware of is that their volumes on real-world assets are trending up massively because of HIP-3, right? They’re trading silver—hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars traded through their silver and gold products. Well more than $1 billion between the 2 of them, easily.

They’re really turning into a genuine competitor to the Nasdaq, right? They’re running a lot of volume, you know. And not only are they running a lot of volume, it’s so easy for anyone from around the world to just deposit money onto Hyperliquid and trade any asset that they could possibly want in the next year or so.

I see them not just eating up all the crypto volume, but eating up a nontrivial percentage of commodities volume and stock volume. These guys are really, really doing it.

The only thing that makes me nervous is, of course, the regulatory side. And hell, it doesn’t matter as long as Trump’s in charge. That was always the drawback with these types of things: you’re always nervous about the regulatory side. But it just doesn’t matter if Trump’s in charge.

I was looking at Hyperliquid at $22. Now it’s trading at $31. It’s up 50% since the last podcast. A lot of this, I think, is because people were just scared of the supply issue.

The core thesis on the last podcast was that we’re seeing real volumes pick up on the real-world-asset trading side of Hyperliquid, and I think the supply issues are out of the way. That seems to be accurate.

We’re watching the thesis right now: revenue-producing assets are outperforming in crypto, crypto is now dead, and what matters is companies. We’re watching that play out in front of our eyes.

Of course, the first company that’s going to be ridiculously successful in crypto is going to be an exchange, right? We always knew that crypto’s biggest value add was that you, the individual, are able to move money anywhere and trade anything at any moment, and it’s seamless, easy, and simple. That’s always been the case.

Of course, Hyperliquid is going to do well as long as they don’t get eaten by competition, which is kind of what happened in the past with GMX and all these other things. But things are looking pretty good for Hyperliquid, huh?

Yeah, and I love Hyperliquid. I think you made a great point on the last podcast. I’m ashamed I didn’t buy any. One thing that I don’t like doing in altcoins is catching a falling knife, but now that Hyperliquid’s bottomed out and started rallying, I’m happy to buy again. I think the sky’s the limit for that one.

I think I did a little bit of research on Jeff Yan, the founder. I say I did a little bit of research—I read a tweet about his biography. He’s truly impressive. Basically, he’s—

Really, really top-tier research, Jonah.

Yeah, top—actually, what did you find out? Let me know.

I didn’t realize that he was an elite Harvard, physics-Olympiad-level genius. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that he was at Hudson River Trading, a genius quant who left the golden path that those firms ultimately offer to go into crypto in 2018.

I did know that Hyperliquid was entirely self-funded, but I assumed he was one of those one-timers—you know, the kind of guy I wouldn’t have accused of being like some of the BCH maxis who are really anarchist, privacy-focused, libertarian maximalists, and that’s why they invested in Bitcoin, not because they were actually smart.

He’s actually one of the smart ones. Not just one of the smart ones—one of the smartest ones, if not the smartest. It’s the old VC adage that you back the best founders. Hats off. That guy is a gigagenius, and he gets it.

There’s an element of altruism in there, too, because he’s not searching for his first bag. He’s already made it in crypto. You probably met him in the Puerto Rico mafia when you were down there.

People who have made it tend to distribute the wealth a little bit further in their next venture to try to achieve greater intellectual and life-achievement-style heights, as opposed to the “I just want to buy a nice house and not have to worry about the rent” kind of people, who tend to be a little bit more like hoarders and pearl-clutchers.

I think all of the tea leaves are there. I would want to own—let’s say that here’s the big, million-dollar question for this next crypto cycle: whatever your crypto bags are right now, do you want to just full-port Hyperliquid? I’m not talking about your stocks or your metals, your RWAs, or anything. For your crypto portfolio, do you want to be 50% Bitcoin, 49% Hyperliquid, and 1% Aster, just in case CZ, who’s probably an order of magnitude richer than Jeff, wins the regulatory war in Washington?

I know World Liberty Financial is in bed with Aster. Then there’s Lighter and a bunch of other ones. I wouldn’t bet on those.

You’ve got to bet on the organic usage, right? One thing I’ve learned about crypto is you’ve got to bet on the organic usage. It’s very difficult to bet on the big boys because, for whatever reason, it just never seems to work.

It obviously plays out, and you see it work every now and then in the real world, where these companies will just crush—absolutely crush—startups. One example in crypto, obviously, is that Binance came out of nowhere and did not have any institutional backing. They did not have—they were not coming in top-down in any way. They launched in 2017, and they just built a better product.

Crypto users are very fickle, and they'll switch to a better product like that if needed. People were like, “Fuck these other exchanges. Screw Poloniex,” which had the lead at the time. “Screw Coinbase. I'm going straight to Binance.” Then Binance became the place because they just kept adding altcoins super early.

Hyperliquid is really that, right? Hyperliquid is a better product than Aster, which is a better product than Lighter. Regardless of how top-down these guys try to push it, I think we've seen this over and over and over and over and over in crypto. One thing I like about it is that there are such low switching costs to exchanges. People just go to whatever has the best liquidity and the best user experience, and that's Hyperliquid, right?

The worry, obviously, is whether these other exchanges are going to get up there, but so far they haven't, and I only see evidence of Hyperliquid pulling ahead more. To answer your specific question as to whether you go full HYPE, I mean, look, I'm a big believer. I think that they're going to make me a lot of money. I think that if I hold HYPE, maybe I'll actually be able to afford that yacht.

But it's really tough to say, “Hey, you should put all of your eggs in this one basket,” when that basket does have the potential of being disrupted. Obviously, I don't think that makes sense. I think you can easily hold 30% of your portfolio in HYPE, but if you really want a diversified crypto portfolio—

Crypto portfolio, you're saying?

Yeah. If you want a diversified crypto portfolio, you obviously need Bitcoin with that. With all that being said, Jonah, if you really want to make a lot of money in this life, sometimes you just have to take a bet and stick to it.

Having a diversified portfolio is maybe not always the optimal choice, especially if you don't already have a lot of money. If you're working with less than $1 million, maybe you want to shoot for the stars. Maybe you want to concentrate. Maybe you want to size up. Maybe you want to have some balls and put all your money in something that you believe in. Believe in something. Buy HYPE.

I've basically been buying Bitcoin from the lows of COVID ratably all the way up to $108K. Some of it is wildly in the money, and I don't want to sell and trigger a massive tax bill. But at these levels, I would say 15% of it is out of the money.

What I'm considering doing right now in crypto—I like the overwhelming majority of my crypto to be Bitcoin—is selling out of every tax lot of Bitcoin that is currently out of the money, locking in that loss for tax-harvesting purposes, and dumping that into Hyperliquid. Like you said, usage is king, right?

I mean, I think that's a great idea personally. Yeah, I think I'm going to do that after this call.

Because the age of—the age of the crypto portfolio is probably over, right? This is what we keep talking about on this podcast. It's about finding individual assets and individual trades that make sense.

The Bitcoin trade is uncorrelated to the HYPE trade, actually. So maybe I was wrong if I'm talking about a diversified crypto portfolio. It's not really—maybe I shouldn't even say those words anymore, right? Maybe I should just say HYPE is a good investment in a portfolio. I should say Bitcoin is a good investment at these levels in a portfolio.

Maybe we need to start moving away from that terminology of your crypto portfolio. You can have what we call the moon bags, but maybe the moon bags need to include some equities as well, right?

That's right.

Maybe the moon bags are your meme coins, like Penguin, which ripped, actually.

Mm-hmm. I wonder if there are any meme coins associated with the Epstein stuff.

Epstein. Honestly, I hate talking about Epstein. Is there a memecoin called Epstein? That'd be kind of funny. [laughter]

Yeah, I don't understand why everybody's so fixated on him. I just find this whole thing to be a big who-cares, but whatever. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. My point is—

I like Hyperliquid more and more by the day because I do think that, basically, Hyperliquid is like what FTX's promise was. Suddenly there's lumber traded on FTX. Now there's stocks on there. Sam Bankman-Fried was flying a little fast and loose with customer money, but he built a great product and made some great investments on the side.

If he hadn't gotten addicted to meth, maybe we would have had a generational liquidity venue in FTX. Hyperliquid is kind of like that, except it's 11 dudes led by this physics genius, Jeff Yan. And they can't—they actually can't rehypothecate your capital.

It's all on-chain. They're not on meth, to the best of my knowledge. I do speak to people who would know, and it seems legit. Basically, what they're doing is iterating in a more agile, rapid way than even your Binances of the world, which have lost their founder.

And what is the big Coinbase? I had it described to me by somebody this way: Coinbase is the Hyundai of crypto. It's sort of a general-utility tool for everybody, but there are limits to a Hyundai. I think Hyperliquid has speed that Coinbase will never have, especially for a global audience.

I really like Hyperliquid. I do. I think that there will be commodities on there soon. I've gotten some of my commodities-trader friends addicted to Hyperliquid because there's nothing quite like a perp in commodities land, and Hyperliquid is the home of perps, right?

I've watched them trade gold, HYPE, and all sorts of things on Hyperliquid. They're super excited. They're like, “Wow.” They're starting to get excited about their first shitcoins, kind of the stuff that we all went through many years ago. They're starting to have that emotional roller coaster on Hyperliquid.

It really is the best venue in every possible sense. I don't care that it's not decentralized enough. It's decentralized enough. The people who put philosophical decentralization above all else—which, at this point, is basically Vitalik—like, that doesn't necessarily accrue value to the token holder, does it?

No, it doesn't.

7. Final Thoughts

But, you know, I think we're finally here, Jonah. We're finally in the era of tokens accruing value to the token holder. The buybacks on PUMP have been really amazing. The buybacks on Hyperliquid have been amazing.

One thing I actually haven't looked at in a while is RLB. I know that they're actually doing well. If you chart these things against Bitcoin, there really is a discrepancy forming here between these assets and the rest of the market. Just something to pay attention to on the next leg.

Yeah. Can you hear me, by the way, or was that your internet or mine that just went out a little?

I can hear you. You good?

Okay, yeah, great. You went a little choppy there for a second. Anyway, we should probably wrap it soon, but I guess, just thinking out loud: bullish Hyperliquid. I think Bitcoin's finally a good short-term trading asset at these levels. I still wouldn't touch precious metals.

I think basically all of this got catalyzed by the tariff threats against Europe. I don't understand why people haven't clued into this by now. We're, whatever, 5 and a half months into Donald Trump. He anchors negotiations at an insane level, and then he extracts reasonable concessions by walking his way back across the line of insanity toward a neutral goal.

Like, “Yeah, I want a better trade agreement with Europe, so I'm going to pretend to invade Greenland and Denmark, and I'm going to abduct the princess of Norway and make her my concubine.” Then it turns into, “Oh, we just got a 5% lower tariff on European imports of American goods,” right?

I don't understand why the markets keep panicking about this, but I think what's instructive from the gold price action here is that getting over your skis on the highs can be deadly, whether you're a quote-unquote professional hedge-fund-based precious-metals trader or even just a retail crypto dude or lady.

It's all about maintaining solvency, even when you're deeply in the black. On that, it is kind of crazy how much of life is applicable at basically every single level. You learn as a kid, “Slow and steady wins the race,” and then you grow up and realize that can basically be applied to literally everything.

As Warren Buffett said, nobody likes to get rich slow. And that's again the reason that we named the podcast 1000x: the whole point is that you're not supposed to 1000x. Stop looking for the 1000x. Look, you 1000x over the course of years with us. Continue to make good trades, continue to stack good investments, and maybe in 10 years you'll 1000x, but you're not doing it this year.

I think that 1000xing depends on your starting point, too. When, in my first week out of college, after I set up my apartment in New York City in the East Village, I had $63 in my checking account. And today, Avi, I can proudly say I have $63,000.

Go, Jonah.

Let's go.

All right, we can end it there.

Avi, great talking to you. I love these streams.

These are great. Take care.