Market Meltdown, Altcoin Carnage, & Crypto's Next Chapter

I see my timeline is full of despair. This looks really bad, but things are down like 10–15%. What’s going on? Then you go look on TradingView because, okay, something clearly happened. You go on TradingView and you see these wicks.

Wicks like I’ve never seen. I’ve never seen wicks like this. These liquidations and sell-offs—I mean, this was insane. I was yelling at my phone, trying to get back to the computer quickly enough. But they all feel so grim, and they’re always buys.

A lot’s happened since the last roundup we had. Sometimes you just get punched in the face.

Yeah, I mean, that was one of the most crazy days, not just because of the price action, but because of how I found out about it. I actually barely noticed because I was off the desk that day, which was a horrible decision, but I had to be. It was one of those things where I checked CoinGecko and went on Twitter, and it was like, “Okay, all right. Yeah, I see my timeline is full of despair. This looks really bad, but things are down like 10–15%. What’s going on?” Then you go look on TradingView because, okay, something clearly happened. You go on TradingView and you see these wicks.

Wicks like I’ve never seen. Even COVID—I distinctly remember trading COVID. I was glued to my desk for 24 hours straight the night of March 12, 2020, and it was a slow cascade. Bitcoin started at about 7,700 and bottomed out at 3,000—a massive dip, way bigger than this dip—but it was a cascade, and you felt like the world was ending.

But you also understood what was happening, right? The NBA just shut down its season. Donald Trump got up there and said that there was this virus taking over the world and that it was coming from China.

And we were sitting there going, “Okay, this is serious.” This time it was just boom.

Right. One tweet from Trump. It’s always Trump. It’s always Trump. One tweet from Trump, and the market falls apart.

Yeah, it was insane. Then you look at the different exchanges, too, and the wicks are so different. Obviously, it looks like people have been doing a lot of postmortems on the timeline over the last couple of days, trying to figure out what happened, and it seems like a lot of the pain came from Binance.

It was actually an interesting debate I was listening to a couple of hours ago at the conference here. We had Jordi Alexander debating this idea of whether synthetic dollars can create the next Luna-style crash, and they were going both ways. Jordi was arguing that it is going to be the next kind of Luna-style crash. I was on the other side of things, arguing that it was more just idiosyncratic risk on the Binance side, where they did not hardcode to Tether USDT, whereas something like USDC was hardcoded in terms of the U.S. dollar.

But only as of recently.

Yeah, only very recently. So that’s where a lot of the pain happened. We’ve learned since then—I saw a headline that Binance has since refunded people who got whacked by that USDe depeg where it was not hardcoded. My read is that the market was primed; positioning was stretched. We’ve seen open interest elevated for a while, and we were going back and forth on the last couple of roundups, just saying, “All right, we can see the macro backdrop, and that’s still bullish in my view.”

We can get into this, but it was clear where we were going. You just have to navigate the positioning dynamics. We were trying to do our best, but at the end of the day, you get one really negative, out-of-nowhere Trump tweet. That’s what happened.

Yeah, I mean, one thing that I’ll say about the stablecoin stuff is that it’s really a function of liquidity. What happened on this wick was a function of liquidity. At the moment that everything came apart, nobody was there to buy. If you have huge amounts of liquidations coming down the pipeline, every buyer is going to wait. So it all happened very quickly. There was a cascade, but at the end of the day, it was technical.

The positions that were liquidated were mostly delta-neutral—actually, a lot of positions like these. Whenever you see a tweet out there talking about a market maker blowing up, market makers are delta-neutral. Generally, for every long, they’ll have a short paired against it. They’ll be long Bitcoin and short Zcash or something like that, which would have been a horrible trade that day.

What happens is that when the market starts collapsing in on itself and there’s no liquidity, their long will get liquidated. That means they’ll be uncovered on their short, which means they also have to offload their short. But liquidity is kind of all over the place.

What doesn’t happen is what happened with Luna. When Luna collapsed, they had billions of dollars of Bitcoin on their balance sheet that they needed to sell to cover their losses. Market makers don’t have huge inventories of outright long positions to offload on the books.

So you don’t see this ongoing issue where the market continues to bleed out. You get this one big technical blowup, and then the market works through the liquidations and reverts to normal. That’s why you saw a lot of the more trader-oriented people take sides over the weekend, saying, “Okay, this is right now a technical sell-off. It could turn into a fundamental sell-off if Trump keeps pushing China, but right now it’s not.”

That’s where I stand even now with Bitcoin. I think it’s at 114, 115. We’re done with whatever happened, in my personal opinion.

Yeah, that was your read.

Yeah.

Well, one, it’s always a funny observation with these liquidations and sell-offs. This was insane. I was yelling at my phone, trying to get back to the computer quickly enough. But they all feel so grim, and they’re always buys.

That’s one thing: every time, there’s a different reason in your head or in the narrative—“Why is it happening? Is this the end of alts forever?” Some of it obviously is, but it’s always the buy on these cascades because, just like you said, there’s so much technical selling. Even if it was catalyst-driven or exploit-driven, or whatever the ultimate explanation becomes, it’s just tons of either forced or voluntary unwinds of positions that, at the end of the day, are technical. We’ve seen the bounce.

My observation over the weekend, as well as in the media, was that I’m watching Bitcoin and it’s not even moving. I mean, it’s down a couple of percent, and I’m like, I’m quick to feel the fear, and then, yeah, we’re back.

I know you talked about this on 1000x, too: crypto participants don’t even really own Bitcoin anymore. Even though it’s a top-performing asset, it’s the ETFs, and it’s a different market. Part of it probably has to do with the average participant just gambling on all this.

But that is incredibly bullish. The bottom tick on Coinbase was 107, maybe.

Yeah, I think it was like 102.

And so I’m looking at it, and I’m sitting there thinking—even over this weekend—“What do you buy?” On the one hand, the safe play is Bitcoin because it just sucked up this liquidity. It wicked to the December 2024 highs for a second and came back to a higher low. So I’m just like, “God, man, that is so bullish for Bitcoin.”

But then you don’t get as much of the reversion play as you see with some of these alts that are down 34%. You could get levered up.

Exactly. So then you get wiped out, and you get right back to the game. But—

Yeah, compared to something like ATOM, I saw it trade at basically, literally, zero.

That was my biggest takeaway. With that level of liquidation, obviously the carnage was in alts. But everybody’s cross-margin; everyone’s got to sell. You’re selling the baby out with the bathwater.

1. Ads (Kraken OTC, Peaq)

It’s like in TradFi when there’s a big, bad day, everything’s the same on a sheet of paper across assets. Gold’s down 1% or 2%, and that’s your signal to buy. You see big sell-offs in traditional assets and you’re like, “Okay, if gold got hit—the safe haven in this case—it’s like, holy cow.”

2. Has Anything Fundamentally Changed?

Yeah. So, I guess the big question now is: You zoom out and you’re like, “All right, so what’s changed since the last time we talked a week ago?” Obviously, there were, for a moment, some fundamental changes. China came forth with trying to squeeze the rare-earths market, and that led Trump to come forth with 100% tariffs.

You’re like, “Okay, that’s a fundamental change,” but then, as he does, by Sunday it looks like they’re trying to off-ramp that again. So you have to pair that with being the catalyst and also this fundamental change, but it does look like we’re going to walk back a little bit. The big question now is that Trump–Xi Jinping summit at the end of the month, and you’re like, “All right, we have this air pocket where they can still escalate and be able to still de-escalate afterward.” So there’s still that potential tension tail risk, but at the same time, when I look at my macro framework right now, nothing’s changed for me. I don’t know what you’ve got to say.

No, nothing’s changed, because I think these tariffs—which I align with you on—Trump has consistently walked them back, and I think he will continue to consistently walk them back, because the reality is an actual trade war between the US and China is catastrophic. And Trump, as you can see, I think a lot of this you just have to understand the guy: He cares so much about his image. This is why he’s trying to go for the Nobel Prize. That’s why he’s always talking about the stock market, right? He cares a lot about his image, and the one thing that he doesn’t want to do is be responsible for some sort of catastrophic meltdown.

Additionally, I think that he understands that the market could be in a precarious spot if earnings start coming back badly. I think everyone sort of understands this. So that’s the other side of it: I do think, maybe a little contrary to what you guys have discussed—or maybe you agree with it—that we’re in a position where if earnings for 1 company come back, it’s okay; 2, you’re looking at a little bit shaky; and 3, you’re thinking, “Okay, so this rapid growth that we’ve seen from this AI boom, is that unraveling? Let me get out.” So it’s really important to see continued growth right now in a way that it probably wasn’t 6 months ago, when you did have some bad earnings calls. So that’s the only other thing I’m nervous about. I’m wondering what you guys think about that?

I think they will be okay. I think I agree with you about this patch. A lot of the data I look at is forward-looking economic data, and it points to a pretty Goldilocks-type environment next year, starting even as soon as January. The government shutdown added a wrinkle to this because you have nerves—not loud nerves, but nerves—around a growth scare, and this patch is not helpful.

Mhm. I’ve read some pretty credible things that they might use this as an even bigger DOGE, which is still a risk of permanent layoffs. So I think that’s sort of in the backdrop. And then, when you just take Friday’s price action, we cut through—I mean, it was indiscriminate selling.

Yeah.

Crypto started to sell off first, and one of the first things I wrote was, “The best trade here: We covered our longs,” because I was long. It got whacked.

Good move. A good move to cover.

But I didn’t put on a short. I was messaging some buddies. I was like, “Short Mag 7 here,” right when it came down. Because that’s the other thing here: why he sort of has to TACO is, you know, 40% of our stock market is the Mag 7, and they have 20% to 30% of their revenues from China.

So you want to pick a big battle here, sure, but then you’re going to take a big hit, and they can’t have that. So you have that backstop, and I still think that area is the most at risk. I actually think Bitcoin outperforms that going into year-end, but navigating this, I still do think there’s escalatory potential, because if you’re China, why aren’t you turning the knife here? I do think they de-escalate ultimately, but you kind of depend on the business from China. That’s such a key point that—

I’ll tell you a story. My dad’s an old-school guy. He’s an economist; it’s where he comes from. So we’re talking about the tariffs, and he’s saying, “I don’t understand.” He’s a really smart guy, in my opinion. He goes, “I don’t understand. How can we have all these massive tariffs and the market just keeps going up and up and up and up and up? Somebody’s got to pay for it. The consumer’s got to pay for it, the government’s got to pay for it, or the company’s got to pay for it.” And the answer is—

None of the tariffs affect the things that are driving the market right now. They don’t affect the Mag 7. Who cares if Ford blows up tomorrow? The market is not down that much, right?

And they probably get bailed out anyway.

Right. So that’s sort of the tension here. And that’s why the market reacts so forcefully to China tariffs: That’s the one that matters. The rest of the tariffs, they actually could be net beneficial for us in terms of raising money for the government, and these companies that are getting hurt are not the drivers of the stock market right now.

Yeah. And then you add in this layer right now of this—you keep hearing about the K-shaped economy, but I think it’s really true. I’ve been saying this recently and I’ve been getting some flak for it, but the stock market is the economy. And I truly believe that because, in this K-shaped world, yes, the bottom leg of the K is struggling right now, near-recessionary.

But the reason why we have higher GDP growth is because asset owners—their stocks keep going up because the Mag 7 keeps going up—then they keep spending, and that creates higher GDP growth, and then they keep spending and consuming. So even though, yes, tariffs might hit that lower K, they’re not the ones spending and driving GDP growth. It’s the Ponzi of equities going higher, giving more income for rich people to keep spending like crazy. So you just have this continuation.

This is 100%. Look, and I’m sure you guys experience this too. I know myself: If I look at my portfolio and it’s up a lot, I’m getting that extra guac. It’s like I’m contributing to the economy a little bit more.

3. Friday Was a Turning Point

And that’s what’s really important here, which is why I think he walks it back. But I don’t want this bullishness to get misconstrued by the people that are trading meme coins and altcoins, because I genuinely think Friday was a turning point for altcoins.

Yeah.

I think that it’s going to take a very long time for that exuberance to come back to the markets in the useless stuff. The good stuff, where flows are actually going, is doing really well. BNB is doing ridiculously well because Binance is doing well, and I think a lot of it is off the news that Trump’s considering letting CZ operate in the US more freely, considering pardoning him. I don’t know if that was real or not, but looking at allowing them to have a presence in the US was real.

They just got a potential investment from China Renaissance Bank for $600 million. So things are looking up for Binance. BNB, as a proxy of that, is going to get flows, and it could actually turn into an institutional asset, which is what’s happening right now: As the market institutionalizes, the stuff that can get big-money flows is going to do well.

SNX does well because people are nervous about Hyperliquid, and they’re like, “Oh, this thing’s ridiculously undervalued, and Kain’s a good guy, and DJ Ping turned into a meme coin, and he really likes it, but it has a real product.” It’s filling a real niche, which is, hey, maybe there’s worry about these other decentralized platforms.

Let’s try SNX.

The vast majority of other things out there—what’s a Cardano going to do now?

Right. You saw the reaction. For the people that were levered long Cardano, are they going to get levered long Cardano again?

Yeah, probably. I mean, yeah.

Okay, fair enough. Fair loan, or they’ll show some rough links or send to get a few bucks and then put that back levered long.

But they’ll long it from down here after the dribble, not from—

Maybe I’m being too optimistic, because this is what I want to happen. I want—

We say this every time, and then we’re 6 months later, and it’s like—

But it’s 6 months later. That’s the key.

Yeah, yeah. 6 months. The marginal bid for alts is dead now. That money was just in meme coins and going to perp DEX farming, and then you had all these new people trying to learn how to perp DEX trade and stuff, and they got carried out. So that money’s gone.

But the institutional flows, which are driving Bitcoin mostly, all that stuff is fine. They’re not on Hyperliquid. They’re not perp trading on even Binance or anything. So, there are ETFs.

ETH was fine. Yeah, it’s higher than—

If this had happened 6 months ago, ETH would have been down like 90%. I mean, ETH has a bid now, and that’s really what I think.

Thank you, Chairman Lee. Thank you, Chairman Lee. Thank you, VNR.

The counterargument, just to play devil’s advocate—I probably lean more toward your guys’ take on that—is to go through the positioning of these alts. Leverage is obliterated, and in a lot of cases, funding is still negative, so there’s squeeze potential.

And the other thing is, say we get a break in a couple of weeks or a month, and Bitcoin has a real move, and we’re moving again in an upward-trending environment. I kind of think that all the people who just got wiped are doubling down and trying to make it all back. Are they going to go 4x on Bitcoin to do that? Probably not. They’re going right back, probably, to the same games.

Yeah, they shouldn’t.

I’m not recommending that, but our job is not to tell people what they should or shouldn’t do. Our job is to try to predict what they might do.

Yeah, it’s fair. It’s a fair point.

4. Risks vs Trading the Rebound

And so I guess the big question now, just to play the terror scenario of this whole thing, is that obviously everybody’s thinking about 2022, when it took a few weeks for the dead bodies to start to float up to the surface. It took a few weeks to understand how that cascaded into 3AC.

So, okay, maybe whoever got carried out is still trying to get some loans quietly right now to stay solvent. I could also see the argument that we haven’t seen any forced selling. You’ve got to wonder: do we see more forced selling? Do we see these dead bodies start to float up in a couple of weeks, and could that hamper the rebound? I don’t know what you guys think about that.

It’s definitely possible. I would say that it doesn’t—I don’t think it’s going to be anything like a 3AC or an FTX situation, because in the 3AC situation, you had this 1 player that accumulated a massive loan portfolio and just completely blew up. No fund today can get to the same size in the market, relative to where the market is on leverage, and then blow up in the same way.

There might be market makers that take loans all the time. It’s very possible that there were market makers that blew up, and they do have debt, but it goes back to who’s net long—who’s massively net long, has debt to repay, and is going to need to sell outright assets to repay that debt? There aren’t that many people. Even the people that blew up probably weren’t massively levered long outright. Even the DATs aren’t levered in that sort of way.

No, the DATs are equity-funded.

Yeah, they’re fine.

The DATs are fine for now. I mean, the prices might have moved, but none of them got liquidated, as far as I know. That would be crazy. It’d be interesting to see what the market opens at on those DATs.

Actually, in half an hour, I’m going to be jumping on the stream here for a DATs State of the Union panel, which is great timing. I’m excited to dig into that one. So, we’ll get some takes on how they think about the state of the union. But yeah, as it stands now, I don’t see why they would be a force seller.

No, they’re equity-funded, and those management teams will hold on for dear life. They’ve got incentive not to let go of those.

I think, yeah, that was the big lesson in 2022. I don’t think we’re at that scale of a—potentially, this could have been a capital-destruction event equivalent to some of the 2022 events. But the big learning there was: don’t jump the gun, because you have to wait for at least a body to float to the surface before you have a green light.

I kind of lean toward the next 2 weeks. You can wait for confirmation or just be patient, because I do still see a period—from a flows perspective, an earnings perspective, and a corporate-buyback blackout perspective—where I just don’t see a mad rush to get back in.

But I wouldn’t expect anything huge there. There’s an argument to be made, though, that if things come back fine, you’re not going to be able to get back in because so many people just degen.

And I tend to be an optimist when it comes to these markets and err to the side of getting a little bit early rather than getting in late, because it also psychologically makes it easier to hold that position and actually get in that position.

Because of what we just saw with this huge amount of de-risking, both in TradFi and in crypto, if the market continues to tick up and doesn’t revert over the next day or 2, I think you start to get some real FOMO back into the market and people start buying back in.

If you got liquidated—

To lose money, have the market go down, and then have it bounce right back—that’s one of the hardest things psychologically. You get this—1 of 2 things happens, because I’ve seen this happen to fund managers and friends.

You either turn into a permabear and go, “This market’s a scam. Everything sucks. I’m going to short.” In that case, you’re short; you’re upside liquidation fuel. Or you’re like, “I can’t miss out on the next run. I have to get in right now.”

Yeah. And I think that’s why you’re—I’m almost the opposite. I kind of want to move fast into the market now. If things don’t move up quickly, then I’m almost like, you know, that’s the way I’m thinking.

Yeah, your entry matters, too. Because if you’re buying up here after the big rebound—it means a bounce, but—

5. Ads (Kraken OTC, Peaq, Katana)

I agree. Bitcoin carved a beautiful low. ETH carved a beautiful candle. You have to see what stocks do. Even if stocks chop, we could be in a scenario where stocks are down a couple of percent from the highs at the end of the month and Bitcoin’s kind of back to highs, and nothing happened.

6. Gold vs Bitcoin Correlation

Oh, I was going to say, we haven’t talked about gold.

Yeah.

And I think the reason it came to my mind is because of what you said: Bitcoin can go back to all-time highs with equities down because gold is still ripping.

Yeah.

And it’s like the thesis is playing out before our eyes.

Where’s capital going to go? We’re flush with it right now.

Central banks keep buying gold as well. The higher gold goes, the better relative value Bitcoin looks. I remember when gold was—when it was $2,000—it was what, like $12 trillion or something like that? It was $12 trillion when it was $2,000.

Yeah. And Bitcoin’s almost there. It’s within shooting distance. I would have said, “Oh, man, maybe Bitcoin doesn’t have great risk-reward because if we’re comparing it to gold, it’s actually getting pretty close to that $12 trillion.” Gold’s $25 trillion now.

And so now we have a much larger ceiling. That’s what makes me pretty bullish on the market in general: We have massive tailwinds still.

For sure.

It’s very rare. I talked about this in my LP update call last week. It’s very rare that gold is doing what it’s doing while risk assets are at all-time highs and moving higher. It’s a very rare thing.

I don’t think we talk about debasement—we talk about fiat going to zero—but I don’t think we quite even really understand how big a problem it is. Normally, gold is a safe-haven asset, a beacon in a storm, and people are rotating capital from a stock-and-bond portfolio into it. It’s like we’re seeing every boat rise. And that’s, to me, a sign of the actual liquidity and debasement issue: All these assets are rising on a nominal price basis, and we’re underestimating what that means for nominal prices in general.

To me, that’s why Bitcoin is like this on 3-year time frames, because nominally it is inflating—aka, the denominator is deflating—and that is a strong enough tailwind for 15% to 20% a year. Then you get the big, you know, Saylor front-run, where we’ve effectively been in Bitcoin and haven’t gone anywhere since December ’24. Think of that: 10 months, and the price hasn’t gone anywhere.

What’s the move going to be when we get out of here? We’re talking about a November 2024 or an October 2023 move, in my opinion, when we come out of this.

The hard part is 10 months of consolidation.

The hard part is how messy that process is because of all the leverage we’ve talked about. With gold, you look at CME positioning, and it’s super muted. It’s just constant buying from central banks in China. Then, with Bitcoin, it’s like last week we saw that breakout to all-time highs, and then it’s like, “Psych!” Everybody goes max long on leverage on the breakout, open interest explodes, and then you get 1 negative tweet and the whole thing just implodes. So everyone’s like, “Is it over? Is this the 4-year-cycle top?” And you’re like, “Oh, my God, dude.”

I think that is key: Now you’re going to get all the people who think, “All right, the 4-year cycle is over. We had that moment. It aligns with the timing.” My read is that 2026—if you look at that macro backdrop—hasn’t changed an ounce for me. You’ve got the Big Beautiful Bill stimulus finally kicking in for good, and you’ve got Jerome Powell getting replaced. Regardless of whether they can control the Fed, you’re still going to have a super-dovish Fed chair.

7. Is the 4-Year Cycle Over?

So that’s all going to happen. I think you’re going to get the people who are cycling out for the 4-year cycle, and then 2026 is going to keep bringing in that institutional bid. They don’t really care about the halving cycle that much, right? They’re not—

If anything, they’re going to do the math and realize, “Whoa, that’s bullish.”

Yeah, exactly. So they’re going to keep bidding, and then 2026—I think it’s going to catch a lot of people off guard.

Yeah. One thing about the 4-year cycle, and I’ve talked about this on a previous podcast on 1000x, is that it looks completely different. The 4-year cycle was driven by attention and adoption. That’s what it was driven by at the end of the day. People would talk about Bitcoin because of the halving. People would get excited about it. Bitcoin was hugely underowned by the entire world, and so you’d go through these boom-bust cycles of massive adoption, a couple of people falling off, massive adoption, a couple of people falling off, all centered around the attention cycle of the halving.

If you’re at home and you’re watching this, or if you’re watching it later, go on TradingView, put on a weekly chart of Bitcoin, and put it on log. Tell me: Does the last 2 or 3 years look anything like any other period of Bitcoin? There’s no parabola. There is no 100% move in a week.

It’s actually a pretty gradual rise higher because what’s happening now is, I think, we’re past the attention phase. Now we’re in the slow adoption phase. Everyone in the world knows what Bitcoin is.

And you look at Bitcoin vol just like this at the same time.

Bitcoin vol is now—you can see high 30s, 40s on options.

It’s like we’re in the slow adoption phase right now, and the allocation phase.

Everyone knows it’s not the attention phase anymore. So my view is that it can follow what gold did. You see gold went sideways for a while around that $3,000 or $3,300 level, went sideways for a while, and then straight-line up to $4,000. I think if Bitcoin manages to stay above $100,000 for the next month, you buy it and you can see $200,000 in the next 6 months.

I mean, basically, unless it completely collapses, this thing is about to rip because of that dynamic, right?

Because there are a lot of OGs that sold. The last 10 months have been wild. A lot of people got out, and whales are getting huge. I have to assume they’re addicted. I know that because—I mean, anyway, it doesn’t matter why I know that one.

I might be addicted.

Yeah.

It’s not just Bitcoin, by the way. It’s Ethereum.

If you look at the distribution we had—I talked about it last week—it’s a phenomenal amount of long-term unlock selling overhang. But, yeah, we’re primed; you just need to get the geopolitics settled down.

Either way, on a relative-value basis, when you plot it versus stocks and versus gold, I think people are seeing this. This reminded me of August 17, 2023. I don’t know if you guys remember. I remember it because I was just getting on a flight to a vacation in the summer, and I got off the plane and everything had gotten nuked 15%.

Yeah.

Nuked. Everyone was like, “What the heck just happened?” It was August 2023, and that was a massive clearing event before one of the biggest runs in Bitcoin’s history. It doubled in the next 4 months after that. I kind of think this was August 17, 2023, where everyone’s looking around like, “What was that about? No one really knows.”

And then all of a sudden you’re like, “Wait a second. This is a great entry for every single person who wanted to get into the asset class but couldn’t.”

Yeah.

But part of it is a rotation out of alts. When alts get wiped, people consolidate into majors, and they consolidate into Bitcoin. How much did they say was liquidated? $40 billion or something?

Yeah, $20 billion to $40 billion.

If you had $40 billion that shifted into Bitcoin, that’s going to send the price higher. If you got half of that—if you got a fourth of it—let’s say a fourth of that capital comes into Bitcoin because they’re like, “Okay, I’m out.” The total losses are nowhere close to that. Total losses are estimated at $3 billion to $5 billion.

Yeah. Right.

So there’s still a lot of capital out there that can get into Bitcoin. If these people—if you, the listener—have the courage to buy all my bags—

Yeah, exactly.

—and get long BTC, I’ll give you some numbers to back it up. I tweeted this, but for those who didn’t see: If you’re 10x long a 40-volatility asset, Bitcoin, you’re looking at about a 2% move a day, on average. The 1-standard-deviation move is 2%. If you’re long a 120-volatility asset, which is like Solana or another altcoin, you’re looking at a 7.5% move a day, standard deviation.

That means if you’re 10x long, there is approximately a 20% chance that you will get liquidated on an alt position and about a 0.001% chance you get liquidated on a Bitcoin position. The risk profile, to me, always makes a lot more sense to go bigger on the large caps than to basically take out leverage on the large caps, and to take out even much less leverage—like 3x or 4x long—on an alt versus a 10x long on Bitcoin. In my mind, those are comparable things.

Huge difference. You look at the upside over the last few years; it only adds more credence to that.

Because you’re not playing for the same alt upside you were 3 years ago.

Yeah. All right, we’ve got 2 minutes left before we wrap up and go to the next scene. But I just want to hear from you guys super quick: How are you navigating the next month or so? It sounds like we’re all kind of in agreement that you still have this pocket until the end of the month because of that possibility for Trump and Xi Jinping to keep going tit for tat higher, and then that off-ramp.

So yeah, how do you guys think about the next month or so?

8. Positioning for the Next Months

My answer is, I'm in the market right now. I'm a buyer now, and if nothing happens in the next 3 days, then I'm out. But I think now is the time to move fast, personally.

Yeah. I'm a believer that this move out of here, if and when we get it, will be dramatic and sustained. So I'm maybe in a little less of a rush. I'm sort of in scale-in mode overall, and if you get confirmation of a move higher, slam. Or if you get a pullback into value, slam, and kind of be strategic that way.

I think the biggest mistake you can make is taking this one-off event as shading or dooming the prior view.

Yeah, and kind of leaving the market, because these things always happen. It's darkest before dawn, that type of thing.

100%. Yeah. All right, that's all we got for this first segment. Avi, thanks for joining, man. Thank you so much. That was really fun. It was really fun, guys. It was awesome.