Is Robinhood Unlocking Crypto’s Next Frontier?

I'm here with Avi Felman, who usually does the intros, but this week I'm introing because Avi put out a tweet and I wanted to tee it up for him. Normally, he tweets about markets and other funny stuff, and tweets about his mom, but this time he wrote something a little sentimental, thoughtful, interesting, and thought-provoking, and it went viral.

Basically, to summarize the tweet, he wrote, “One of the odd things about life is all the directions it can pull you. I started my crypto journey almost a decade ago at this point by taking a crazy risk at the age of 21.” It goes on to say, “As time goes on, priorities change. I've already felt it fracture, but I don't think I've articulated it yet. I don't think crypto is a thing anymore. It's just finance, tech, et cetera. Back to basics. Focusing your life on crypto will be a mistake in a way that wasn't true for the last 10 years. Focus on the bigger picture.” That's what the tweet says. Avi, what did you mean by that?

It's been a ride, Jonah. It's been pretty incredible to watch crypto since I got in in 2017, just the way that it's evolved. You had a bit of a different experience than I did: You fully got into crypto, I think, in 2020, right? That's when you took the plunge into crypto full-time.

You'd already come from a world of finance, right? You were trading oil. You'd been at Goldman. You'd been in this financial world for a long time, and crypto felt like going into fintech in 2020 and 2021. In my personal opinion, it was actually still different from getting into crypto in 2017, when most of the world did not take crypto seriously in any way, shape, or form. In 2020 and 2021, people started taking it a little more seriously.

1. Is Crypto Just Finance Now?

So I think a lot of the people who joined viewed crypto as this area of really emerging tech, really interesting, but a small subsection of the financial world, still a separate thing at that point. DeFi Summer was, “We're going to build an entirely parallel financial system. We're going to have everything separate from the traditional financial rails, and we're going to build our whole new utopia over here.” That's a mentality that I got into in 2017. That's the reason that I got into crypto, in large part.

There was a pretty crazy community that was dedicated to crypto. We were spending 0% of our time reading financial news. We were spending 0% of our time looking at the traditional markets. We were spending 100% of our time reading about ICOs, learning how to program in Solidity, researching the newest L1, debating over whether it was going to be L2s that scale the world or whether a 1-platform, high-throughput chain like Solana was going to win. The entire debate and all of our time was spent around crypto, and we had no interest in anything else.

As the years go by, I think what's happened is that crypto has really merged with the rest of the world in a way that I would never have guessed in 2017, because I thought crypto was building a competitor to the traditional world. Now crypto has become part of the traditional world. It's really funny to me because, if you go back to 2017, we would always shit on all the people that were “blockchain, not Bitcoin” and “blockchain, not crypto.”

The blockchain-not-Bitcoin people were 100% incorrect. They were totally wrong. The blockchain-not-crypto world kind of played out like that: Everything that's being built that's useful is a company that just happens to use crypto tech to meet its end goals.

I guess this is a little bit about what the tweet was about. I've been on Crypto Twitter for a long time, and I call it Crypto Twitter because all my friends, all my colleagues, all these people—we talk crypto to each other all day, every day. All of my tweets were about crypto. It was a post of a chart, or a post of what I thought a new L1 could accomplish, or what this new L2 was going to do, or what this new decentralized exchange was going to accomplish. It was all very centered in this world of crypto by itself, crypto as its own self-contained thing.

I guess over the last year, really since Trump's election, I would say that crypto has gone fully 100% mainstream. Without a doubt, this thing is now mainstream. This was true a little bit while Trump was campaigning as well, because you had crypto being talked about by a presidential candidate, but once he got elected and started pushing out actual statements and trying to pass bills about crypto, it became real—truly real—in a way that it never was before.

Just think of this: 3 years ago, our biggest problem was that we were fighting tooth and nail with the SEC to allow us to do what we needed to do. Today, the SEC works with us, and the administration works with us. Even now, I'm using the word “us,” but really, what crypto has become, in my opinion, is part of the broader financial world.

What's really funny is I actually wrote this tweet before what I think is possibly the biggest announcement that has ever been made in the history of crypto, and that's Robinhood introducing tokenized stocks on its platform and really, in a way that's never been done before, melding the 2 worlds of TradFi and crypto into 1. In a year from now, there are going to be hundreds of stocks trading on crypto rails that you can interact with crypto products using these tokenized stocks, and crypto will have fully become just another segment of the financial system. Sure, a segment where, at some point in the future, the technology and the backbone will capture a tremendous amount of the traditional financial markets, but all of the products, all of the things that make money, everything that we invest in except Bitcoin, will just have to be a company. It'll just have to be looked at as a company in a way that has not really been true in the last 8 years since I got into crypto.

Back then, it was about, “Wow, what could this build? What could this be the backbone of?” I think today it's just fintech, just a little bit different. That's a little of the nostalgia behind the post: The world that I grew up in, the world that I basically learned everything about and spent all of my time on, kind of no longer exists.

I think a lot of people get this—I get this a lot on Twitter—and part of the reason for my post was to give some feedback to people. I get all these messages all the time: “How should I spend my time? I'm a 22-year-old. Should I go all in on trading crypto? Should I buy a Messari subscription as a 22-year-old, or a Delphi subscription, and try to just figure out crypto and invest?”

2. Your Bags: Republicans vs Democrats

I think there's something to that, in that it is easier to become a seed investor. It is slightly easier to trade in crypto, but that's going away very quickly. 3 years ago, I would've given very different advice to these people. I would've said, “Yes, it makes all the sense in the world to not go the traditional route and just focus your time on crypto.” Today, I think it's a lot tougher, and if you want to go get your MBA, go get your MBA and focus on crypto. Some of the best, most productive people that I know in this world right now who are building come from the traditional world because of the melding.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's a big gap between the world that I came in and experienced crypto through and today. Today, it's just a subsection of finance. That's why, on this podcast—I'm talking to the listeners, obviously Jonah's noticed—if you've noticed, we've been talking more about macro. We have more takes that aren't just exclusively crypto-related because at the end of the day, you have to make a decision.

Are you a trader, or are you a crypto trader? I think saying that you're a crypto trader is not the smartest thing to do anymore. You have to just say, “I'm an investor and I'm a trader,” right? We observe the broader markets and make decisions based on what the broader markets are doing.

Sometimes crypto will be the best place to put your money. Sometimes it won't be. Sometimes it'll be, “Okay, look, crypto's heating up. Time to go allocate to memecoins. I'm going to cycle out of some Nasdaq and put some shit in memecoins because this is a perfect time to do that.”

But it's not like I don't ever think that I'm going to be holding outside of Bitcoin. I'm not. And right now, it's HYPE and Maple, but that's because those are real products generating real revenue. I don't think I'm going to be holding memecoins anymore in the way that I used to, like, “Okay, I'm going to accumulate this shit at the lows, and I'm going to get a 50x out of it.” It's much tougher than it used to be.

3. Ads (Kraken OTC, Katana)

So anyway, that's my spiel: you guys should all be widening out your horizons.

4. Crypto Merging With TradFi

What an amazing spiel. I have so many comments on that. The first comment that comes to mind is when you say it's not a good idea to tell people you're a crypto trader anymore. What's so funny about that is that the first time I ever started telling people I'm a crypto trader, I kind of said it with pride because I really loved crypto, and I'd been invested in it long before I dove in professionally.

Once I started telling people, “Hey, I'm a crypto trader,” people would look at me like I had leprosy. They'd be like, “Ooh, oh, what?” Oil trading just had so much more prestige to it. Now, if I tell people I'm a crypto trader with Bitcoin trading at $110,000, they're like, “Oh, well, good for you.” It's like you almost get acceptance now, which I think speaks to your point about crypto having integrated into the mainstream so thoroughly that it's not really a contrarian bet anymore.

That's a big issue for me: crypto is definitely not contrarian anymore. When something becomes the general take—“Yeah, okay, crypto's here to stay, Bitcoin's a great asset”—how much upside is there left? The answer could be a lot, but is it asymmetric relative to the risk that you're taking in other asset classes?

Well, I think that's going to be evened out at some point, and I'm still very bullish on Bitcoin. I just think—look, also, if you look at the crypto market cap right now, just go to CoinGecko: the total market cap is $3.5 trillion, and that includes memecoins that are getting autogenerated every microsecond. Let's say you have $2.1 trillion in Bitcoin; that leaves $1.3 trillion of value among all this other stuff.

To be completely honest, Jonah, I don't really believe in half of this shit anymore, right? We can trade this, but should ETH really be valued at $309 billion for what it is? No. Actually, I think one of the things that justifies its market cap the most is Dogecoin. I do think these pure monetary plays make a little bit more sense.

XRP at $132 billion, BNB at $96 billion—I actually think that is reasonable.

Me, too.

Because I think that's a real product, right? That'd be the stock, and they do buybacks. But you go down—obviously Hyperliquid, whatever. All this stuff is kind of like shit. In the future, this is all going to be replaced with new stuff, except for Bitcoin.

Our job on this podcast is to pay attention. And within crypto, here's the thing: there's still a lot of opportunity within crypto because it doesn't have all of the professionals looking at it so closely. But the game that you can't really play anymore, in my personal opinion, is, “Oh, this is going to appeal to the crypto natives, and the crypto natives are going to take this up and it's going to do really well.” You need it to be a bit broader than that today.

Yeah.

Right. Three years ago, you're like, “The crypto natives are going to pump this thing.” I don't think that really works anymore. I think too many people like me have tapped out of this sort of framework.

There are still a lot of funds out there with a decent amount of AUM that kind of need to invest in crypto. My bet is that the best funds over the next 3 years are the ones that are doing macro and crypto. That's my bet.

There's 1 thing about crypto—focusing on crypto, even if you don't call yourself a crypto trader, that's fine—but there is 1 thing that I think it teaches you which is relevant to other markets, and I can say this from experience. Crypto really teaches you—well, first of all, it's accessible to retail, which, as we've discussed on this podcast, is really not the case for many other markets, particularly commodities and interest rates.

If you're trying to trade 2-year, 6-year swap spreads or butterflies or something, you've got to work at a bank or a hedge fund. You can't really do it from your bedroom in your pajamas. The same goes for commodities. In crypto, you can still get leverage, exposure, access to the best conversations, research, and products just from home, right? So crypto does give you that.

As it merges with TradFi, I think what it's taught an entire generation of crypto traders is how to ride a trade, how to sit through volatility without panicking, how to develop objective frameworks, when to throw spaghetti at the wall—namely, when it's a VC bet, something low-market-cap—and when not to throw spaghetti at the wall.

It's like, “Oh, maybe ETH will do something cool.” Bro, it's $300 billion worth of fully diluted valuation. You need it to become the official currency of an alien civilization, like a spacefaring civilization, to justify that market cap, right? So it teaches you when you're supposed to transition from taking a flyer on a sports-game-type trade to real observation of fundamentals.

So it's this fantastic training ground. But, yeah, it's not a contrarian bet anymore. It would be a contrarian bet to say that Bitcoin is going to zero and that crypto is all a scam, which was literally the most mainstream narrative in finance up until 2021, briefly. Then again, it was the narrative from 2022 until Trump got elected. And now it's over, right?

So I think, if I had to hone my impression of your message here, it's: 1, I completely agree with you. 2, don't give up on crypto; use it as a training ground for other asset classes. And, most importantly, 3, for you and me as well, we should broaden the scope of this podcast and try to make it a little broader, more opportunistic, macro-thinking.

People go into commodities; people specialize in all kinds of stuff, right? You can specialize in equities, you can specialize in rates, you can call yourself a commodities trader if you dive into that world. It's still fine to call yourself a crypto trader, but maybe you and I should try to make this podcast a little broader, more opportunistic, more macro-thinking, diversify into other assets when the opportunities arise, and try to point things out to our listeners outside of just, “Hey, maybe Slerf is going to pop off because it's funny,” right?

Yeah, no, agreed. I mean, that's where a lot of people are stuck, right? They're stuck in that mindset of, “Oh, let me chase the memecoins, let me chase Pump.fun, let me do this, let me—” If you're thinking right now, “Hey, I should become a degen trench trader,” I think that game is basically done.

And that being said, there is going to be a period where there's going to be 2 months of that working, and everyone's going to be like, “Oh, I'm fucking genius again. I should do this.” But it's not. No, it's not the way that it was in 2021 or 2024. It's not going to be like that.

5. Robinhood & Tokenization

You know what I'm seeing? A real frontier right now. No, no, hold on. We've done this a little bit in the past, and 1 thing that I want to pat myself on the back for, because I still own a little bit of this, is Robinhood.

Robinhood has just absolutely crushed it. The first time we brought up Robinhood, I think we talked about it at $25 a share. It's now $100 a share, and it has popped massively on its announcement. Let me just read the headline of the announcement: “Robinhood launches stock tokens, reveals Layer 2 blockchain, and expands crypto suite with perpetual futures and staking.”

Robinhood is going straight for Coinbase's lunch, going straight for Hyperliquid's lunch, and they have an entire business already dedicated to traditional markets. Robinhood is, I think, going to become the focal point of the financial system if they pull this off correctly. Because if you can combine these 2 worlds, that's going to be huge.

Everyone's been trying, right? Everyone's thought about, “Okay, how are we going to get these worlds together?” A lot of it has been through things like Pendle or Maple, where you have, “Okay, we're going to tokenize some assets ourselves,” and then we're going to try to have some assets that exist in the crypto world that are tokenized traditional assets.

There's kind of a one-way trapdoor function, right? The traditional assets went through the crypto door, and you couldn't really go the other way. Now you finally have a two-way door, and Robinhood, I think, is going to benefit massively. I don't think the Robinhood run is over. I actually think it's very possible it may just be the beginning.

But think about this: European customers will have access to 200-plus U.S. stock and ETF tokens. In 2021, there was a product on Luna called Mirror. It gave you access to stock tokens, and people were saying that was going to be the future, because think of how easy it is if you can just get on crypto rails and buy tokens, borrow against them on Aave, and then reinvest them here. This is the beginning, and Robinhood really seems to get it.

I want to read a quote here by Johan Kerbrat, GM and SVP of Robinhood Crypto. He says, “Crypto was built by engineers for engineers,” which is true, right? Now it's finally hitting the mainstream. I think the funniest part of the announcement, Jonah, is that the stock tokens will initially be issued on Arbitrum, but future tokenized stocks will be launched on Robinhood's Layer 2 blockchain.

Oh my God. Which just tells you everything you need to know about L1s. Yeah, it's like [bleep]. It's like [bleep] for L1s and L2s. You can short against it—just buy Robinhood and Bitcoin and short all L1s and L2s against it.

I mean, okay, another example: the Solana ETF, right? No one cares. Nobody cares. All the tokens that are supposed to be exploding, parabolically mooning on that ETF—you know, all the other ones, Jupiter—they don't. No one cares. Just buy Robinhood stock. It's a real company.

You know who else is doing this? Who else is tokenizing stocks, Avi?

Kraken. And no, they haven't paid me to point this out. I was just poking around. They launched something called likely xStocks, too. Basically, you have Robinhood, which is a TradFi platform onboarding crypto. You have Kraken, which is a crypto-native platform onboarding TradFi. They're both coming at the same prize from opposite ends of the spectrum.

They have a similar number of users. Kraken's, I think, more than 10 million. Robinhood's just over 20 million. We can all be certain that tens of millions of users, whether it's through Kraken, Robinhood, or similar platforms, are suddenly going to have access to tokenized stocks. But what does this mean? Why is it important?

I think it's important because there's the obvious stuff, like 24/7 trading of stocks rather than waiting for the New York Stock Exchange to open and close. If you live in Europe, too bad if you've tuned out for your afternoon Aperol spritz by the time the New York Stock Exchange opens. There's 24/7 trading, but I think the most important one to me is borrowing against your stocks.

A platform like J.P. Morgan or Schwab will give you that, but crypto will give it to you more easily, right? If you're holding your equities in tokenized format, there will be lending protocols like Syrup and likely Aave that will give you dough against your positions and liquidate you on-chain much more efficiently than an individual broker.

The other thing about on-chain lending against positions like that is that you can easily compete with lots of different lenders. You aren't just locked into the Schwab or J.P. Morgan lending ecosystem. You get to compete with lots of lenders, which means lower rates and a better user experience.

But to me, the really big one for tokenized stocks is the fact that, let's say I wanted to transfer you 1 share of my SPY ETF. It would take 6 weeks of us trying to explain to our respective brokerages why we were doing that, right? They just can't handle the transfer of anything other than fiat.

Even more so, when I switched from Schwab to J.P. Morgan, it took me weeks to get my portfolio moved over. For a while, I would look at my 2 apps and I would look completely broke. It was kind of a panicky moment. My assets just disappeared for a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, crypto is purpose-built for value transfer. It doesn't just have to be stablecoins; it can be anything that floats, anything with floating value. So I think before long, what that means is, let's say I hate dollars. Cash is trash. I do not want to hold a single U.S. dollar, but I'm forced to because I have to have a checking account to fund my life. That's just interest I don't earn, unfortunately. I try to keep it as low as possible, but that's annoying. It requires maintenance and whatever.

If I had my entire portfolio on Robinhood or Kraken and had it invested in things that I like, I think SPY is the new U.S. dollar, right? I think that's the low-risk, obvious thing to hold on to if you want to preserve wealth. Just invest in 500 American companies that make stuff. Don't invest in the fiat piece of paper that's getting printed into oblivion and spent like crazy.

Let's say I want to denominate my portfolio in the S&P and I have some Bitcoin, too. I don't need to hold any dollars to spend with a Robinhood Gold Card. It'll probably just sell little bits of my S&P to fund payments. If they aren't doing that now, they will quickly after they realize this.

If I want to send you some SPY to pay for something, I can do that, right? Or to split a bill. It basically allows the user to redenominate what they're holding. People may not notice right now, or may laugh at me and say I'm crazy for not wanting to hold dollars, but the worse it gets for the dollar—and mark my words, it's going to get worse—the more people will want to hold things other than USD.

It's already down 15% this year. It's the freaking global reserve currency. In Argentina, they're already holding Bitcoin. I think increasingly in the developed world, people will prefer to hold indices rather than the fiat that just gets trashed.

So that's a long-winded way of saying tokenized stocks allow you to minimize your holdings of fiat cash, which is important for the upcoming macroeconomic cycle. But the other thing, just to wrap up this thought, that matters to me so much about on-chain trading is that it opens up billions of opportunities for arbitrageurs to come in and arbitrage IBM stock versus tokenized IBM stock.

If you do want to be an, air quotes, crypto trader, maybe it's not as easy to click-trade, click-trade meme coins as it was last summer, but there's going to be a Cambrian explosion of new opportunities in the low-latency arbitrage space—basically helping crypto attach itself to TradFi properly.

I think there are going to be some new firms that pop up that make absolute fortunes, like what Wintermute did, but maybe 2.0.

6. Dollar Exposure & Tokenized Stocks

Yeah, I fully resonate with your first point and the second point. But the first point is: How can you minimize your holding time of the U.S. dollar? Obviously, I have expenses, you have expenses, everybody has expenses, and those expenses are currently only payable in U.S. dollars.

The way I always ask it is: How much money do I need to hold in my checking account at any given time relative to my net worth? Basically, my entire life is trying to minimize that, right? I want to be as invested as possible in the stuff that I like the most, while making sure that, at any given moment, 1, I don't have to sell when I don't want to sell, so I don't have to sell when it's down; and 2, I'm not stuck in a cash bind. If, for example, I run into a large expense and need to shell out $25,000, I have that in my checking account or I can easily get it out of my brokerage account.

As it stands right now, it's reasonably simple for me to do that. I can say, “All right, I'm going to sell some of my S&P, and then I'll wire some money to my checking account out of my brokerage account.” All in, that'll take me 24 hours, from selling to wiring. But sometimes it'll take people more because some accounts want you to wait for it to fully settle.

Luckily, I have an account where you can kind of just wire it out, because—trust me—on small amounts, I know that I can do that. But I'm also aware that not everybody has that ability.

So, let’s call it anywhere from 24 to 72 hours to get that cash out. If I want to get a loan, it’ll take me about a week. If I don’t want to sell and I want to go to my broker and say, “Hey, I would like a loan—let’s say I want to pay for a wedding—of X amount against my money,” it’s going to take me 5 to 7 days to get that loan approved.

What I think would be sick in the future is when you get these tokenized stocks to automatically borrow—literally just autoborrow against them—and use that to pay expenses. Can you imagine a world where I set it so that I have a credit card, and what the credit card does is automatically borrow against my stock portfolio and pay with that cash? That’s basically what the Robinhood card will do, right? Like, that’s pretty great.

No, yeah. It’s not going to decline your transaction if you only hold tokenized SPY. I haven’t looked through the docs yet, but I would imagine that at some point in the future you’ll probably have the option either to swipe and borrow against your SPY on-chain or swipe and sell $3 worth of SPY to pay for your espresso.

I think that’s a beautiful new future because I don’t think anybody wants to be holding the dollar right now, especially with what Trump is doing. Which, by the way, I do have to give him credit for basically pulling through on everything people said he wouldn’t be able to pull through on. Yeah, they landed the plane, which is kind of unexpected.

I think we called it on the podcast. Another victory lap for us. We did say that Trump was not going to have his legacy be that he tanked the American stock market and economy and sent us into a depression on a basically self-inflicted wound related to tariffs, and lo and behold, he U-turned.

So, anybody listening to this podcast back in April, whenever Liberation Day was, probably made out like a bandit. It seems like he did. He just anchored the negotiations at an extreme point and extracted a better outcome from them as a result.

It feels like he’s just going to keep pumping our bags from now until 2028. We’re probably supposed to get a little bit worried in 2027, or late 2026, when the Democrats decide who their candidate is going to be. If it’s Zohran Mamdani or AOC, I mean, the way that I look at it, we basically have a bunch of race communists, and then on the other side we have a bunch of debt fascists.

I’m trying to find a better term for that, but people who don’t care about the debt and also want to be authoritarian—like a light authoritarian. Those are kind of our 2 choices right now in the political sphere. Neither of them is going to manage the debt. Both of them are going to spend excessive amounts of money.

One of them is going to be bad for private enterprise. In the beginning, it might look good. Obviously, the race communists are going to be bad for enterprise at some point, but in the beginning it’s going to look okay because they’re going to increase spending.

On the other side, the Trumps of the world basically look good until they really take a step too far on something and then the nation gets embroiled in some constitutional crisis. Yeah, that’s my take.

Yeah, I think it’s a good take. I think that both sides are here to just massively pump money into the system, and we’re going to reap the benefits of that.

I disagree. By the way, this isn’t a political statement. When I’m slamming socialism and Mamdani and AOC, it’s not that I don’t believe in that ideology at the scale of a government, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make right now.

The point I’m trying to make is that if those people get elected, they’re getting elected on redistribution. Even if you call them race communists, and even if it’s kind of a long shot—the Democrats are as unpopular as they’ve been in decades right now, so their odds seem pretty low—if their odds are nonzero, you have to price in an expected value of them getting elected into your bags, basically your crypto.

What does that mean? Basically, if they win, in the unlikely scenario where that group wins, they’re being given a mandate by the American people to take money out of capital markets, where rich people are perceived to be holding their wealth—and that’s largely true—and basically use it to buy apartments and rent them out at controlled rental rates, and do other redistributionary things like government grocery stores, the stuff that Zohran Mamdani talks about.

No knock on that. I’ll save my opinions for later, but that is bearish for your capital.

Sorry, you have no knock on grocery stores controlled by a state?

Oh, I’ve got knocks on it, of course, but I’m just trying to make a purely academic point about what it means for your positions. A poor person can hold Bitcoin and still get screwed by that, right?

So, I think basically what I’m saying is I don’t think that both parties are bullish for your risk assets like SPY and BTC. I think they will both spend like crazy. The Republicans will cut more taxes. The Democrats, the Democratic socialists, or whoever’s taking over their party, will spend more, and technically that debases the dollar more, which is bullish Bitcoin in both scenarios.

I’m just saying that other redistributionary tactics, like massive capital gains taxes and things, are more of a risk on the Democrat side, whereas on the Republican neo-fascist side, whatever you want to call it, they’re trying to deregulate to the point where you might expect a bit of growth to help buy your bags out of any major problems.

So, basically, I think Democrats, politically, are very bearish BTC. Politically, Republicans are very bullish BTC, even though they’re both going to expand the deficit. Does that argument make sense?

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the way that I would clarify is, with those Zohran Mamdani and AOC types, I think you’re right, but I also think a large part of it is because crypto has become politicized, they would go after crypto in a way that they go after equities and commodities, too. They go after everything.

But I guess what I’m trying to articulate is that their policies are much, much worse for equities. The actual policies of what they want to do are much worse for equities than they are for crypto, because Bitcoin is, in theory, supposed to be a hedge against governments doing terrible things like this and debasing the dollar.

With that said, it still could be bad for crypto, and specifically Bitcoin. The rest of crypto, I think, will go down if equities go down, but specifically Bitcoin, because it’s been politicized, they might try to attack Bitcoin as well.

Yeah, but I think, just to modify that, I think it would require a specific attack on Bitcoin to send Bitcoin much lower, because I think the policies would actually cause people to flee to Bitcoin.

I see. So, just get capital out of America in any way possible?

Correct.

So, my take on it is: bad for equities, but expanding the deficit is good for Bitcoin. So, good for Bitcoin unless there’s also an attack on Bitcoin, which is a very reasonable possibility, unfortunately.

So, I think we’re safe until late 2026, whenever the campaign starts to heat up. At that point, the big issue is also going to be the midterms. If Trump does not do well and does not get Trump Republicans elected, and if the Republicans falter in the midterms and there seems to be this upwelling of support for these AOC or Zohran Mamdani-type figures, we could see the markets shake a little bit.

But, yeah, I agree—basically until then.

7. Macro Outlook

I mean, we’ve been talking about this, but the Iran war is a nothing burger. The Abraham Accords are moving forward with Syria and Lebanon. Incredible stuff, honestly.

The Ukraine war stands where it always has, which is not impacting the market in any way, shape, or form, and people are flailing about trying to get things done. It did impact the market at one point, but it hasn’t in a while. I take your argument there.

Yeah. In the beginning, it impacted the market massively. In the last year and a half—as has anything in the last 2 years—it has not impacted the market at all. You have the Middle East calmed down, and Bessent’s playbook basically seems like they’ve landed the plane.

This is as good a time as any for the market to just keep on trucking.

Yeah, basically, the biggest risk factors I see are the midterms.

Or overextension.

Oh, I see what you mean. If prices run too hard?

Correct.

Here’s my crystal ball in front of me. Here’s how I think it plays out: for the balance of this year, I think we get at least a ceasefire, but probably a permanent peace in Ukraine by the end of the year.

I think we get a bunch of rate cuts, probably because either Powell gets pressured or a Ukraine ceasefire draws commodity prices lower, OPEC collapses, and then Powell has no choice but to cut because inflation is low.

I think we get some AI-related acceleration in growth and deflation, and just lower costs across the global corporate economy.

I think there's probably another ceasefire in Israel, in the Gaza war. I think Trump is going to start to look like a Nobel Peace Prize candidate instead of a giant orange monkey clown, which will trigger a lot of people. But I think markets send. Then I think what happens from there is you start to see the midterms shaping up politically next year.

The Democratic Party—I think the Democratic Socialists take over that party. So they will win some elections, but at the national scale, their popularity will continue to decline. Trump will cruise into the end of his presidency looking like a freaking genius unless something totally out of left field happens.

That said, I think as the Democratic Socialists start to take over their specific wing of the political spectrum, as that gets priced in, and maybe as their presidential candidate starts making noise, I think the knee-jerk move on BTC is going to be lower. I think that's the dip to buy, realistically. I think you buy that with both hands, depending on the price, of course, but if it's still under $200K, I think you buy that dip in 2026 or 2027.

Meanwhile, just to finish this thought, I do want to talk about socialism briefly. I think socialism works at a very small scale. I think as long as the group of people that basically own the fruits of their labor is small enough that they can all kind of row the boat in the same direction and coordinate with each other, I think it works really well. Take, for example, a kibbutz, right? That's a good system.

8. Opportunities in Betting Markets

Or, at a larger scale, technically, a company likely called Vitol, which is owned by its employees and has no outside investors. That's a socialist system too, right? And that works really well because it's a couple thousand people. It's when you try to scale that up to the size of an entire country, with hundreds of millions of people, that it doesn't really work anymore. So, yeah, that's my thinking on that.

You know what's the real frontier? Speaking of these things that I just predicted, I tried to pitch this to you earlier in the call, but you were on a roll with something else, so I want to pitch it to you now. I think the next frontier market, now that crypto is mainstreaming itself—it hasn't yet; don't worry, listeners, there's still plenty of crypto opportunity—but the next real frontier is betting markets.

I was looking at Polymarket at the New York City mayoral election: Zohran Mamdani beats Cuomo in the primary, and I think an entire day went by without Eric Adams really ripping into him. It just lagged. There's still dumb stuff happening in betting markets that you can kind of play into.

Oh, I see. I see what you're saying. I thought you were saying investing in betting markets.

No, I think there's a ton of inefficiency in betting markets. If you're very interested in a topic, you tend to have much better information on the topic than the betting markets do, which is interesting. If you go look at the betting markets on—I forget exactly what it was, and I forget what the exact odds were—but on the U.S. strikes on Iran, if you were paying attention, I think you could have priced that at 80% when the markets were pricing it at 30%.

There are a lot of things like that. Zohran Mamdani was another one. Just being in New York and talking to people—and having eyes when you're in New York, and you walk around and see a shit ton of people on the streets canvassing for Zohran Mamdani, and you don't see a single goddamn person canvassing for Andrew Cuomo, and every single one of your friends who is liberal is ridiculously excited about this guy—you know, I think I saw that when he was at around 25%. I didn't catch the initial run-up, but I do think that there is a lot of edge here, actually.

It's not something where you're going to go in and say, "I think this is 100% going to happen, so I'm going to buy it at 50." You have to just trade, right? You have to look for the misplaced odds. If you think something is 100% to happen and the odds are 60%, that's actually a worse bet than if something's priced at 8% but you think it's 80% likely to happen, right?

Yeah. It's like, it actually kind of makes it almost easier than trading in that way, because you have specific percentages. When you look at a price—if you're talking about $67 WTI, what does that mean? What is that pricing in? We don't know what that's pricing in. This is actually a little bit easier because you know exactly what it's pricing in.

But it's cool. I think the other opportunity in betting markets is to—listeners to this podcast will know that unchanged Brent crude oil prices mean that Iran is just screwed, right? But the "Will Iran be screwed or not?" market on Polymarket is probably way off from oil, which is a market that prices in a lot more insider information than Polymarket, which is just a bunch of degenerates gambling on stuff that they don't understand.

I think if you're a good student of broader crypto and broader macro markets, you will constantly identify opportunities on Polymarket and Kalshi that are just wacko. But what I did want to say also is that I think the betting market world is still super inefficient because it's hard to spin up a new market on these things.

There should basically be as many markets on Polymarket as there are tokens on Pump.fun, right? Anytime somebody wants to launch a new market, they should be able to. Last month, I invested in a stealth startup that's doing basically—you know, it's a former Polymarket and Kalshi guy who basically created an AMM for betting markets, and it's going to get listed on some of the larger platforms.

Any market that gets put on this will be listed on some of the larger crypto trading venues out there once he's done launching, once he's out of stealth. Basically, I love that idea. I think pretty soon there will just be this Cambrian explosion of—rather than stupid memecoins—actual markets with an oracle that's efficient in allocating truth at the end of the bet to the winners and divvying up the profits appropriately.

That needs to exist, and it's in the pipeline. People are building this. I think while Polymarket is relatively limited right now, you can expect that the universe of opportunities in betting markets will explode soon. Anybody who's been in crypto markets and traded other asset classes as well will have an edge over the people who just show up to bet without ever having really traded anything before or having listened to any trading podcast before, et cetera. So that's my take on that.

I do love this take because it gives me more of an excuse to spend an inordinate amount of time on Twitter consuming slop. So this is good. That's where I get a lot of my—what should I be monitoring at any given point in time—and then I actually go to other sources to monitor it.

9. Making A Name for Yourself

I mean, the other opportunities—I hung out a bit at EthCC because we're just doing our summer here in France. Basically, the people that I spoke to there—the vibe at this conference felt very different from some of the conferences that I've been to in the recent past. We're firmly out of VC mode and firmly into the revenue meta, which is going to last forever.

These people are talking about ways that they can bring money on-chain and extract some of it. They're talking about ways that they can build new trading businesses that link TradFi to its on-chain equivalents and clip pennies here and there by arbitraging them. The people that I met with are talking about dashboards they've built to help ICOs basically track what their market makers are doing with pinpoint efficiency and 100% truth, as opposed to just finger-in-the-air guessing. Real freaking products.

Tokens are basically just equities at this point. Equities are tokens, and the lines between them are getting blurred. So, to your original point in this podcast, Avi, it's so freaking true. Going into crypto at this point, people hit me up on Twitter all the time asking the same thing: "Hey, I'm 27 years old, I'm an HFT quant, and I'm thinking of taking a dive into crypto. I feel FOMO. I spend all my days on Crypto Twitter."

It's like, just don't. Just be the crypto-savvy guy that knows how to do what you're doing, and you'll probably win. And I do think that focusing on crypto blinds you to the other opportunities out there.

I made an investment in a robotics company that I think is going to do particularly well. Looking at space companies, for example, one of the bigger wins this year was RKLB, which I think tracks SpaceX quite nicely because they've got a good contract there. You have to make the determination: Are you a trader, or are you a crypto trader? I think the right determination is that you should be a trader. You should just be a trader, and you can have a focus on crypto.

You can spend 80% of your time trading crypto, but I do think that you need to start building the ability to trade and invest elsewhere. How do people do that? How do people get a look at those types of investments, some of which are private? The best ones usually are. I think a lot of this is actually public markets now.

But with that being said, let me take you back a little bit. One of the reasons why people got into crypto first is because it was so much easier to build a name for yourself in crypto than it was elsewhere. There's something called the halo effect, right? If you're good at one thing, people just kind of assume you're good at other things, and it's sometimes completely incorrect.

I've seen it happen with me, for example. In the beginning, I built this audience on Twitter by talking intelligently about the markets, talking intelligently about trading, and talking intelligently about crypto. One of my friends came to me the other day and goes, “You seem like a really smart guy. I bet you have good relationship advice for me.” I'm just like, “What?” That's funny. But no, I'm not too bad at that. I'm sort of joking, sort of not joking.

I do think that you can build a name for yourself more easily in crypto than you can in other industries because there aren't as many experts. People tend to flock to crypto to build a name for themselves, and then they can branch out into other stuff more easily. If you already have a name for being the crypto expert, you've proved that you can be successful in crypto, so maybe people should take you seriously elsewhere. Sometimes it's true, sometimes it's not true. Obviously, I happen to think in my case it's true. In everyone else's case, it's not true, dude.

It's one of those things where I think, in order to get access, you just have to prove yourself valuable. The best way to prove yourself valuable is to write things. Today, anybody can go on Twitter or X.com and just write articles. I encourage you, if you're an aspiring person in the industry, to get online and start saying stuff.

There are a lot of random FinTwit accounts, as they call them, that were like a fucking second-year associate at Lazard, and they're just posting and have gotten a following of 50,000 people because it turned out that they're really smart. I encourage you to put your ideas out onto the public forum, and you're going to get a lot of feedback. Send it to Avi and me. We're happy to give you feedback if you mention that you're a listener of the 1000x podcast and you pay us each $500. No, just kidding. Just tell us you're a listener.

Get your ideas out there in the public square. That's how I got started, putting my ideas out there in the public square. I also rode that halo effect pretty hard.

That said, I think there are 2 ways to become successful in life. You can work extremely hard, and, well, let's leave luck out of it. You can also get really lucky, but I don't really consider that success. Earned success comes either through very hard work or through lots of risk-taking, or both, right? I've never really believed in burning myself out, so I always preferred to take lots of risk.

Within the risk-taking sphere, there are 2 other paths here. The tree is branching out. Path number 1 is my path, and path number 2 is your path, Avi. My path: I stuck with the white-shoe firms. I took the golden path, right? I went to an Ivy League school, I went to Goldman Sachs, I went to the number-one oil trading firm, and did all of that, right? I checked all those prestige boxes.

Within those boxes, I took risk because I had good information, and I put myself as far out on a limb as I could. But you took a different path, which I think got you to your destination faster than I got to mine. Just going back to your tweet, you, like many crypto traders, took the risk of a lifetime by going into this weird niche industry that could have gone straight to 0 at the age of 21 instead of following the white-shoe path.

Once you were inside this weird niche industry, you just kept piling risk upon risk upon risk. You meet a lot of people like that in crypto. I met some of the world's best traders inside these white-shoe firms, but I've also met some of the world's best traders in crypto who are dudes that are just 17-year-olds with a laptop who crushed it on something and then kept parlaying it into more and more, like the GCR types.

I have a ton of respect for the street-smart type of people who just hustle their way to the top by taking risk. A lot of them work hard too, but none of them seem to be working so hard that they're just like the investment bankers I met, who were accumulating money by putting in hours and playing politics.

Ultimately, my advice to anybody at this phase, at this weird—let's call it—the final innings of crypto as a contrarian asset class, is to try and, like you said, dive into something new, become an expert, and then parlay that back into other markets via the halo effect: publishing, doing your thing, and hacking your way into the street-smart trader route that you took. I think that's really the best way to accomplish asymmetric goals at a young age, and I think there's more opportunity than ever for that.

No, you don't have to go into AI. No, you don't have to be a robotics PhD working on Optimus or at Figure. There's always a market somewhere. There's always going to be some crazy thing. I don't know. Maybe it's a commodity market. Maybe it's biodiesel. Maybe you're the guy hauling chicken oil from Chinese restaurants into some refinery that turns it into renewable diesel.

10. Final Thoughts

Probably not that. That's a mature market by now. But there are all these frontier markets that are popping up. I deeply believe in it. Abide by the frontier, basically. Buy the frontier. I think that's as good a note as I need to end on: buy the frontier. Always push forward.

Yeah, and we're going to try to help you find it. We're still going to talk about our shitcoins on this podcast. We love them, but we're going to try to find new frontiers for you guys as well because we don't want to be mainstreamed out either. We want to stay at the cutting edge.

I think some people took my post the wrong way. I had 2 glasses of wine and was feeling nostalgic, but I'm not going anywhere. I'm just not calling myself a crypto trader anymore. That was a very long-winded way of saying it, but that doesn't mean I'm going anywhere.

Good. I hope you don't leave me here, man. This is great. I hope you had a nice Euro-maxxing experience in Italy, and, yeah, I'll see you next week. Great talking to you, Avi.

All right, take care.