How To Make It This Cycle | 1000x Live

Guest

I think there are a ton of opportunities suddenly that I haven't seen in over a year cropping up in these little pockets of the market. I've been super bearish on altcoins versus Bitcoin, and I've allocated accordingly, but now I think that's changing. This is the time to lock in. It's not an accident that I've slicked back my hair and dressed like Steven Seagal today. I'm focused and paying attention.

Is this you locking in? Okay, you know what, guys, I'm getting excited.

Guest

I'm trying to make a point here. You're screwing with my momentum.

All right, guys, how many listeners of the 1000x podcast do we have in the audience? Let's go.

If you're a listener to 1000x, you know that this is all financial advice. You should be listening to what we say onstage and making investment decisions based on it, right? Is that right, guys?

Guest

That is absolutely 100% wrong. If you ever listen to anything that comes out of our mouths, you will lose money. That is a guarantee. That's the goal of today: we're going to try to make everyone lose as much money as possible.

I actually want to start by asking you guys about the general macro environment. We were going to end up talking about memecoins—I know we were joking about the last time we did this live panel at Digital Asset Summit, when we talked about memecoins because that's all that was going on in March. Then they died, and here we are, and they're back again. But before we get into the degeneracy, I want to get your take on the general macro environment.

Over the course of the last couple of days, we've seen China have its all-in Mario Draghi moment, where it's throwing the kitchen sink at the economy from a policy standpoint. We've also entered a rate-cutting cycle here in the United States. Jerome Powell cut rates by 50 basis points, and I want to get a sense from you guys: Where do you think we are in this general liquidity cycle?

Guest

I think we are on the eve, or the doorstep, of a major asset rally. I am conviction-long risk assets, especially crypto, because I think this smells a lot like a smaller version of what the governments of the world did during COVID.

Once you see people start to step on the gas, make monetary conditions easier, add liquidity, cut rates, and make things more friendly to investors, you usually get this weird in-between time where things are supposed to take off, but they're not. That's your chance to jump in and get long.

Right now, the major uncertainty that crypto participants and investors are facing is the U.S. election in November. Markets hate uncertainty, but markets hating uncertainty is an opportunity for you to dive in, just like the uncertainty of COVID was an opportunity to dive in right before the money printer turned on.

To speak quickly about the election, if they're already turning the money spigot on again, we've seen this movie before, and neither Kamala Harris nor Trump has any plans to turn it off. It's just a question of who can spend more and who can spend faster. They're both going to go crazy. Now is the time when you have to close your eyes and dive right in.

I'm a little bit more tempered than you, Jonah. I think we're definitely in an environment where things like equities can do extremely well, based on everything that you said. But we're here because we're talking about crypto, and the reason I'm a little bit more tempered is because I think it hinges a tremendous amount on the outcome of this election.

If Trump gets elected, then obviously everything that we've been talking about for a long time starts to come true. Regulation starts to become a lot clearer, and interest in Bitcoin probably goes up based on the way that Trump has been speaking about it. But if Kamala gets elected, then we're in for a period of difficulty, in my personal opinion.

When you look at the broader macro picture and where people are going to allocate their money, one of the reasons equities have done so well after the Fed cut rates is that the economy is doing well. The market interpreted this rate cut not as a panic cut into a weakening economy, but as a maneuver to land the plane effectively. We're almost there.

What that means is that companies producing real assets, real services, and real revenue will do well because the economy is doing well. Now they'll be able to borrow at lower costs and expand more effectively.

But for something that is nonproductive right now, like Bitcoin, what you really need to send it into the stratosphere is general stimulus—an injection of money for basically no reason other than fear into the market.

Paradoxically, my viewpoint is that a recession is probably the best outcome for this asset class. If we do have a recession, what ends up happening is that we get a V-shaped recovery because the Fed and the government push all their chips onto the table and say, “Okay, we're going to backstop this.” Then people feel comfortable gambling again because there's all this excess money floating around. So, to end this yapping with something a little bit concrete, I remain cautious and underallocated.

I haven't heard the recession-bull asset thesis, which I find very interesting. Then there's the outcome of the election. I feel like there's been an enormous amount of airtime dedicated to this, and I'd like to inject a little bit of my own opinion and maybe push back a little bit.

It seems so consensus that if Trump wins, we're going to Valhalla, and if Kamala wins, it's nuclear Armageddon—winter is coming and all that stuff. I don't know. Every single time I've seen everyone so lined up on that consensus, it hasn't turned out correctly.

I don't have the gray hair that Jonah does—in the good way, Jonah—but every single time I've seen everyone so lined up on that consensus, it hasn't turned out correctly. What's the other side? Why might this not actually matter that much?

Guest

My best guess for price action—and you can quote me on this—is that on a Trump election, you get a massive candle in Bitcoin. That candle gets sold into. People panic out because nothing is actually going to happen in the first year of the Trump presidency, or maybe the first 6 months, to make this asset class go up.

Then you probably get a lot of fear and disillusionment, and that's probably when you actually want to buy. Whatever happens on election night, if Trump gets elected and we're up 15%, I am basically selling everything that I can possibly sell.

Oh, I disagree. I'm buying it from you. I'm buying it right out of your order book. I disagree so much. Obi was saying before we were doing this panel that we have to create some drama and act like we're feuding, so yeah, you're wrong.

That's crazy. It's a fight night, guys.

No, not that kind of feud. We're both super athletic. You're wrong. Say it again.

The reason why I think you're wrong is this: Let's say we go into election night trading at $65,000 a token in Bitcoin. Trump wins, and we're up to $75,000 a token. I'm buying $75,000. I'm playing for $150,000.

Markets price the future, and the immediate thing that would happen on day 1 of a Trump presidency is that Gary Gensler goes back to academia. What happens on day 1 of a Harris presidency is different.

You've seen a lot of turnover in the Trump administration. You haven't seen that in the Biden administration. I think the powers that be—you listen to right-wing conspiracy sites or media outlets, and they'll tell you, using phrases like “the deep state.” I'm not going to do that because I'm not really a partisan person; I'm more of an independent.

But I do notice that in Democratic administrations, you tend to get lots of consistency and stability in terms of staffing. I don't think there would be much change at the SEC, which basically means you have to price in another 4 years of a legal and regulatory stranglehold on our industry if the Democrats win, versus cowboy mode if Trump wins.

I think there's a big difference there. If you price in the net present value of 4 years of one or the other, that's worth tens of thousands of dollars in the price of Bitcoin.

I actually have a question for the audience because I want to make a point that pushes back a little bit. If you think back to 2 years ago, and then today, in the context of your crypto portfolio, who owns more altcoins today than they did 2 years ago? Raise your hand if you own more altcoins today than you did 2 years ago.

I assume—well, raise your hand if you have a crypto portfolio. Okay, you see? Everyone owns Bitcoin.

What ends up happening if Trump gets elected, because of the regulatory certainty you're going to get in altcoins, is that I guarantee every single one of you who didn't raise your hand is going to sell some of your Bitcoin for alts because it's going to be a much better environment for altcoins.

I hear this a lot in oil markets: “Everyone is long diesel; everybody's short propane.” No. Everybody in this room is long Bitcoin. If you look outside of this conference center, out on the streets—the mean streets of Salt Lake City—you'll find some people who are probably a little bit cautious.

I'm not banking on this room's participation. I'm more hoping that outside capital comes in with more regulatory certainty.

Guest

Definitely, outside capital comes in. I think a little bit more comes in, but this is a point about Bitcoin and altcoins. Even here, at a reasonably crypto-native conference, a lot of people have consolidated their portfolios into Bitcoin.

Good trade, by the way. If you did that, that was the right decision, because Bitcoin dominance has just gone straight up. Altcoins have basically done nothing all year.

What about memes?

Guest

Memes have done really well.

The meme segment of crypto is kind of divorced from a lot of the rest of crypto. It's a lot of people who don't own anything but memes. Their entire portfolio is memes.

It's very NFT-like. A lot of buckets of crypto trade based on beta to Bitcoin—ETH, Solana, and so on, although that's breaking a little bit with ETH at the moment. But NFTs were just on their own planet, their own universe.

There were actually 2 cycles to NFTs that feel super similar to me to the current memecoin meta. In the beginning, there were a couple of NFTs that exploded—Punks, Apes—and those things went parabolic. Then there was a lull, followed by an explosion in dispersion. There were tons of different collections, and they were all going up a little bit less because there were just way more of them.

That's where we are with memecoins, to editorialize. We had the first run with the Bonks and the WIFs, and there were a couple of blue-chip memes—which sounds funny to say, but whatever. Now it feels like there are a million of them.

How do you guys feel about that?

Felix Hartmann

I participated in one meme that I could identify with and wrap my head around: Jeo Boden. That was a fun ride for all of 15 seconds.

At the same time, our friend of the 1000x podcast, Ansem, says it very well: You're not supposed to compare these to investment assets. You're supposed to compare them to a casino or a lottery.

If Gen Z realizes that instead of going and buying a lottery ticket at the gas station with billion-to-one odds, they can fire up a meme with a funny cat picture and get rich quick maybe 1 out of every 1,000 times, that lottery is going to get played all day on a global basis, much more frequently.

I buy into that framework. I think it's intelligent. In the absence of regulatory clarity for the more—air quotes—“real” use cases for crypto, as Chris Dixon said earlier today, that's a real outlet for some of the desire to accumulate wealth in our space that's allowed right now.

I'm not bullish on memes as a basket. If you equal-weighted all memes, you would basically lose all your money. I'm bullish on the idea of memes and bullish on the concept of trading them if you can get in early on one that actually has some virality attached to it.

I agree with you, and I do want to step back for a second and talk about bubbles and mentalities toward assets like memes. A lot of people outside the crypto world view crypto the same way that people in the crypto world tend to view memes: “This is nonsense, it's a complete bubble, it's going to collapse at a certain point, and then it's going to die.”

I think that's the wrong mentality to take. With everything in life, there's a way to win. You just have to think hard about it and try to find your edge.

Even if you think memes are the worst, most horrific thing in the world and they're all going to die and go to zero, there's a way to figure out how to invest in or trade these things properly. You can figure out, “Okay, if a group of 100 memes exists, how do I rule out 70% of them and invest in the 30% that show promise of potentially going up in the future?”

As George Soros said, if you see a bubble, don't run away. Pour some fuel on it, light it on fire, and double down. Figure out how to win that game. That's the mentality I take toward memes, even if you believe these things won't have any future.

I happen to believe that they will, for one reason and one reason only: There is a massive wealth transfer occurring over the next 15 to 20 years from Boomers to Gen Z and Millennials. Candidly, we love to gamble. We love to put our money into things that might 100x or 1,000x.

You can see it when you look at DraftKings, and you can see it when you look at casinos. The reality is that this is the best casino that has ever existed in the history of the planet. It's candidly a lot of fun.

Even if you don't believe in real utility, there's a wealth transfer to people who believe it's going to be fun. There are going to be a lot of people on the sidelines looking at it and saying, “Oh my God, I can't believe this is happening,” but there is a market.

Felix Hartmann

I agree, and my advice to people who are interested in memes would be: Don't buy WIF. That trade is already played out. Buy something early. Get in if you're early to the parade.

There is no fundamental value attached to these things, as we all know. If you're trading a psychological, bubble-type asset with no underlying value, you can't be the greater fool who buys the highs.

The best way to ensure that you aren't that guy is to ignore literally every meme that has existed for more than a week or 2 and try to get in early on some of them. People who get shilled on things like WIF and Popcat, or whatever else is up a lot, are being kind of stupid.

Memes as a space are interesting. To Avi's point about the wealth transfer, that is a big infusion of cash that's going to be ongoing. Trillions of dollars are going to be transferred, and it's going to make the COVID stimulus look like a drop in the ocean.

A lot of that will go into gambling on memes because that's what younger generations do. I talk to younger commodities traders all the time, and all they want to talk to me about is crypto. They don't want to talk about oil. True story.

My thinking is that, as that wealth transfer occurs, there's a saying on Twitter: “You have a few years to hypergamble your way into elite status, or you become a wage cuck for the rest of your life.” It's an obnoxious statement, but it's kind of true.

My personal arc has been to hypergamble in the way that was available to me in my early 20s, which was to try to become a trader on Wall Street. You don't need to go to a good college to get a job at Lehman Brothers—unfortunately, I got one there—but you don't need to go to an elite college to hypergamble these days.

Crypto is the world's trading floor. I do think we'll see a lot of younger people try to turn a $25,000 or $50,000 inheritance into $500,000, like a gentleman Avi and I spoke to earlier today.

Is there something more to this? I hate being this guy because I hate VCs trying to over-intellectualize memecoins, but as a consumer of memes outside of crypto, on my social feeds, I use them because they're funny. They also tell me what the zeitgeist of culture is at the current moment.

After you watch a presidential debate, there's the news, which I basically don't listen to very much anymore. Then I look at my social feed and see what the meme artists are doing. I look at who they're making fun of, and I'm like, “That person lost.”

It's kind of silly and stupid, but comedians are also really good at this. Comedians are really good at figuring out who the incumbent in power is, and they punch up. They feel it instinctively, because if you punch down, it's not funny.

You can always tell who's in power by who the comedians are making fun of. It's something like that with memes. You almost squint at memes and think, “Is this some kind of market-based algorithm for attention?” It's so early, and you really have to stretch to make that argument, but it kind of looks like that to me.

I do think you're right. The only thing I'd point out is that there's hyper-fragmentation in terms of memes and content on social media and online. The stuff you see is not the stuff everyone else sees. There are thousands of little subcultures and subpockets.

It actually makes me worried about the country when you have these pockets that don't interact with each other or talk to each other; they just view their own information. This has been discussed at length, so I won't talk about it here.

I do agree with you that memes tap into something more visceral. They tap into the unspoken emotion of what a country, town, or city is feeling at that moment, and that emotion is expressed through humor. That's important to pay attention to.

If you look back at 2016, a huge driver of Donald Trump's campaign was his online presence. All the crazy memes posted on Reddit would go extremely viral. I remember that pretty vividly. It got people talking about Trump in a really big way. He had this massive online presence.

We started this podcast because we used to talk to each other on the phone, maybe once a week or once every 2 weeks, for an hour, and we would always come away with actionable insights. That's one of the things I like to do on the podcast, and I think it's why we've managed to garner an audience.

We don't like to just talk at a high level. We like to talk about what you're going to do with it. To make that concrete with the meme discussion: What really resonates with people, and when does it resonate with them?

One of the best ways to figure out what you should be allocating to is to look when you're in a low, when the market is down, and when nobody is talking about memes. Maybe Bitcoin is at $52,000 or $55,000, everybody's desperate, and everybody's scared.

Go into the channels, the Discords, and the Twitter chats. What is still being talked about? What still has community engagement? Who are the craziest people you can find who are still engaged with these projects?

That's when you find alpha. A lot of things that don't last lose everybody when things look bad. But if you can identify 5 communities that are still producing the craziest stuff when things look really bad, that's actually a pretty good signal.

Put it on your calendar. If Bitcoin is down 20% or 30%, run that exercise. You'll come out pretty happy.

I want to change the topic from memes. I want to ask you guys about a couple of things: AI, and then credit. On the AI side, let's start there.

How many folks in this room use ChatGPT, Claude, or something like that on a daily basis? How many of you use it more than Google now?

That's nuts. That's crazy. If you had told me 2 years ago that there was an application I was going to use more than Google, I would have taken the under 101 times out of 100.

There's obviously an enormous amount of capital getting plowed into this space, and I wonder how that impacts the capital that might find its way into crypto. We're not the newest, shiniest thing anymore. One of the things crypto had going for it was the idea that when they opened the liquidity spigots—which they have to do—the money was going to flow to crypto because, whether or not you really believe in it, you believe it's going to go up because we're the riskiest of the risk-on assets.

But now there's AI, and I wonder if it competes with investment in crypto. What do you guys think about that?

Dan Matuszewski

I don't think it does. From an investment perspective, the 2 spaces are separate, except where they overlap—TAO, Bittensor, and so on. Speaking about crypto as an asset class versus AI as an asset class, from an investor's perspective, those 2 spaces are orthogonal.

Crypto venture capital is its own practice and its own little world. Investing in AI as an individual is kind of impossible. For a retail investor, you can't get exposure to this stuff, and as an institutional investor, you haven't really seen benchmark mega-VC firms getting rid of their crypto arms to invest in AI.

There are a16z, Sequoia, and a couple of others. All that capital is available to both asset classes, so I don't really see the 2 spaces as competing. I see them as more synergistic in general.

I'm stealing one of your arguments here. If you're a retail investor and you want to invest in AI, you can't get into the best deals in traditional AI. You have to go for a TAO or something with a token because you're not an accredited investor.

To wrap up this thought, crypto plus AI is a meme. TAO is a memecoin for now, even though the use case is plausible. It's a 5-year bet. It's a VC bet. For now, it's just about what's going to get a good narrative, hype, focus, and attention. I don't think it sucks capital out of crypto.

At the end of the day, the people diverting their capital away from crypto to AI are in Silicon Valley. That's who's diverting it.

From the beginning, crypto hasn't really been a Silicon Valley thing. Most of the capital that came into crypto was from everyday people—from random people all across the world. Silicon Valley definitely had a part and has funded a lot of very interesting projects, but it wasn't the driver. They didn't build the asset class.

Silicon Valley built AI. That's their thing, and props to them for it. But they didn't do that with crypto. In the short term, AI diverts capital, but not really in the long term.

To the point that Jonah made—which he so kindly stole from me and then told all of you—you just can't get in. There's nothing you can invest in as an average person other than Nvidia and maybe data centers focused on AI. You can go short Duolingo, I guess, but other than that, there's not much.

The only place where AI really detracts from crypto is morale and sentiment. I remember when it started to blow up—was it late 2022? It was 2023, wasn't it? Gensler had basically started a big crusade against crypto post-FTX, and then AI just blew up.

I remember crypto as a community feeling really bleak and bearish. It was, “Oh no, now there's a new shiny thing and no one's going to care.” But what's encouraging about crypto is that there's something beyond just the technology.

Crypto keeps central banks honest. It's a foil to centralizing forces in the technology industry, which AI definitely represents. AI has this Skynet-like, sinister quality to it, and it takes so much money and compute to train one of these big benchmark models, like what Claude or ChatGPT are running on top of.

That doesn't feel very good. Where are the articles about AI energy? I've seen hundreds of these things about Bitcoin energy over the years. Where are all the articles?

Amazon just bought Three Mile Island. That's pretty baller. I can't even fault them on that. If you talk about putting your nuts on the table, that's a big one. It's crazy, but it's indicative of how much energy they think they're going to need and the competitive vector they want to pursue: cheap energy.

Moving on from AI, I want to ask you guys about credit. Part of the reason I think we went up so hard, so fast, and so viciously in 2021 was that you had desks like Genesis funding carry trades or arbitrages, which turned out not to be arbitrages.

They were essentially creating credit for people who wanted to go long or short in crypto. That space was probably the biggest casualty of the last bull market. Those businesses blew up extremely publicly: BlockFi, Genesis, Celsius, and so on.

We haven't really seen a credit complex get built out in crypto since. How do you imagine that coming back?

It exists. It still does. You're just looking in the wrong place. It exists on exchanges in a huge way.

Open interest across Binance, OKX, and all the places that allow you to trade futures has gone through the roof. You can look at the CME as well. I do think there's definitely still some risk there.

It just turns out that the business of offering credit in crypto without other business lines isn't necessarily a good business. You'd make money, you'd make money, you'd make money, and then when everything unraveled, you'd die.

If you didn't have the money that all these exchanges get from your actual transaction volume, you ended up in a really tough spot. That's why I think nobody has tried to rebuild that business. People realized it's a really bad business to build.

Dan Matuszewski

I kind of disagree with that. I have a slightly more nuanced take. You're not wrong, and what I'm about to say is my opinion, not a statement of fact.

What I would humbly posit to you is this: When I was running crypto trading at DRW, we were power users of the crypto-lending industry. We traded with Anchorage, BlockFi, and others. We were neck-deep with all these companies.

From my background as a credit trader, what I'll say is that crypto lending is an industry. There's nothing unique to crypto about it. The reason all these companies blew up isn't because it's a bad business; it's because they had bad risk management.

If you implemented a proper risk-management framework, you could hold tokens on your balance sheet and lend them out without blowing up in a bear market, provided you've analyzed the credit of the people you're lending to and the people you transact with.

The problem with the crypto-lending industry was that it was crypto-native and the risk management was terrible. Everybody blew up in the bear market. What you need is somebody like State Street or BNY Mellon, which does stock lending and understands how to model risk, variance, and credit. That's what they do all day.

The expertise for that isn't crypto-native; it's TradFi. Crypto is just a widget with a certain level of annualized volatility, and you run your risk models on it.

This is another Trump trade. If the SEC becomes friendly to crypto and provides a framework, I think you'll see the TradFi lending industries that operate in other asset classes bolt crypto onto their existing frameworks and do just fine. Without that regulatory clarity, I think they're not going to touch it with a 10-foot pole.

I don't actually disagree with anything you said. When I say it's not a good business, it's because of the people who comprise it.

When you think about who State Street is going to be willing to lend to, it's actually a pretty small group of people, and their borrowing volume is going to be pretty small. There's a limit to the size of the industry right now.

If you want to go past that limit, you're lending to people you probably don't want to be lending to. So let's make a bet between you and me, and maybe the audience can monitor this. You can bet with each other as well.

Contingent upon regulatory clarity and an SEC that accepts crypto's existence—Harris could put one in there as well as Trump—by 2028, my bet is that the crypto-lending industry is flourishing and looks a lot like the TradFi lending industry.

Would you bet with me on that?

Dan Matuszewski

You have to define what “flourishing” means.

We're going to make Avi our judge. We can hash out the details over drinks. We can do a Polymarket on this. It will be up in no time.

Your definition of flourishing is different from my definition of flourishing. Let's make it his definition.

Are there any lawyers in here who can help us with this? No? Please, no.

I want to get a sense of where you see opportunity today. Broad question for crypto in general. Obviously, Bitcoin is kind of its own thing. Some people classify Bitcoin as its own special snowflake.

Maybe Bitcoin trades differently relative to ETH, Solana, or altcoins, depending on who wins this election. When you look out into the crypto world, how do you bucket opportunity and risk? What looks interesting to you?

Everywhere. If you're a trader, it's everywhere. This market is still remarkably inefficient.

If you do the work to figure out what the heck is going on with specific assets—and by “do the work,” I mean read some filings, read some blog posts, and go look at the data—you can find opportunities.

One great example this year was Helium. It started signing up thousands of users a day and began getting contracts with a lot of the large telecom companies. It was actually a pretty good service, and it was trading poorly until people started to figure this out. It took months.

Another example is that news is poorly digested by the market. If something comes out and the market hasn't reacted to it, you can put on some really nice trades.

An example was when the SEC appealed the recent Ripple filing, and it took 20 minutes for the price of Ripple to react. If you were paying attention, that 20 minutes was basically free money. These things exist in the world of trading.

In the world of investing, I like to think about what's going to do really well when everyone's eyes are on this asset class—which they're not right now. Where are people going to pay attention?

The 2 best sectors I can come up with are DePIN and AI. The question is how you invest. My answer has always been that you wait for an extreme in the crypto market and then allocate.

I always think it's a mistake to allocate when you're not at an extreme. Allocating on a day when Bitcoin is up 3% probably isn't the right move because you tend to get these pretty nuts days. It's about waiting for the right moment, getting a good entry price, allocating to the right sectors, and then waiting.

Doomberg

Normally, I'm a pretty sleepy investor in crypto. I've found that I do better when I just hold core positions. The last year and a half has really been about Bitcoin dominance inexorably rising, and I've been about 80% in Bitcoin.

I think that's changing now. I think there are suddenly a ton of opportunities that I haven't seen in over a year cropping up in these little pockets of the market. I've been super bearish on altcoins versus Bitcoin, and I've allocated accordingly, but now I think that's changing.

This is the time to lock in. It's not an accident that I've slicked back my hair and dressed like Steven Seagal today. I'm focused and paying attention.

Is this you locking in? Okay, you know what, guys, I'm getting excited. I'm trying to make a point here. You're screwing with my momentum.

Doomberg

Basically, what I think is that The Chief came on our podcast and shilled this—not financial advice, of course—and it really awakened me to the possibility that there are going to be pockets of crypto that take off like crazy, that do 100x.

I think TAO is an early indicator of that. It's notable that suddenly an altcoin can perform for basically the first time since 2021. I think there are going to be tens, maybe dozens, or more than 100 of these things.

To use Avi's framework, which I actually like a lot, you have to pick the right sector and then pick the fastest horse within that sector. You can't look through the Discord of every single altcoin.

You have to pick a sector. Avi said DePIN and AI. I would say RWAs, AI, and DePIN are the ones I'm focused on. There are a few strong horses in there, and once you see one start to break out—just before that asset class gets mainstream attention—you want to be in.

You don't want to allocate after a friendly SEC is installed and lays out a clear framework for crypto assets or RWAs. You want to be in before that happens. We're at the point in the cycle where, pre-election, you have an opportunity to pick winners ahead of a big ripper.

Final question. We've got 3 more minutes. How many folks joined crypto in the last year or 2?

We have only OGs here. I was going to say that the irony of crypto is that retail is positioned to make money at an earlier stage than almost any other sector in the world, which is awesome. It's great.

I also think that the majority of retail investors have probably lost money doing this. What advice would you have for someone who doesn't have the institutional training that the 2 of you do but wants to make money in the space?

It's all about patience. Today, we get very accustomed to making money very quickly in this asset class. You wake up one day and your portfolio is up 5x, then you wake up a week later and it's down 50%.

Things move fast, but you have to move slowly. If you don't have the time to spend 6 hours a day staring at charts, just relax and be patient. Do your research, make your bets, and then wait.

When things get absolutely nuts—when literally everyone and their mother is talking about crypto, celebrities are painting Bitcoin on their nails—that's when you know it's time to leave. If this podcast starts getting 100,000 listeners an episode, I'm out. I'm done. It's over.

Doomberg

I agree with the general thesis of Avi's comment: Don't overtrade. I've seen it in commodities and in crypto. That's how people chop themselves up and earn very average returns in extreme, parabolic bull environments, and lose all their money in other environments.

Not overtrading is key. Not using leverage is key. Having Bitcoin be a big part of your portfolio is key. Having liquidity to buy other assets when the prices look good is key.

Ultimately, I think the smartest way for new entrants to make money is to listen to podcasts, learn, and understand the fundamentals of the space. There are plenty of podcasts, including one called 1000x.

If you find that you're not interested in the space—that you're not drinking in podcasts and content and Crypto Twitter—it's probably time to dial back your activity, sit in Bitcoin, and do other things.

If you really care a lot, the opportunities will come. I found that in my commodities career, as my interest ebbed and flowed, I was always better at trading when I cared more. Gauge your own level of excitement before you start to trade. If it's objectively low, you should ease off the accelerator.