Markets Hit A New All Time High, Whats Next?

Our take has always been that the U.S. economy is strong. The U.S. economy is growing. Tech is an accelerator. Tech improves earnings per share. Tech will actually end up increasing the productivity of the American worker and not necessarily destroy jobs, but it might actually even create jobs.

And that's been our stance from the beginning. Our stance on the Iran war from the beginning is that it will be volatile. There will be things that happen that look scary, but it will eventually resolve higher, and it will resolve in favor of the United States.

Good morning.

Good morning. What's going on, J-Bone?

It's another A-Bone. Another beautiful day.

A-Bone? No, J-Bone works way better than A-Bone. J-Bone looks better than A-Bone.

A-Bone is better.

Why are you inserting bones into places they don't need to be inserted? I don't understand.

Yeah, let's leave the bones buried. Let's put them back.

Let's leave the bones to the wayside. No, no more bones.

Anyway. What was it? Wait a second. We've been live for 1 minute.

It has been a while since we have live-streamed to you. It's been a while since we've talked to you, and that's because there are some very exciting things happening behind the scenes. We have been hiding under a rock, working away to see if we can bring you guys more shows every week. Imagine that.

Basically, we'll tease it here first, but starting at some point in May, we're going to be expanding the show, talking more, live-streaming more, and being a little bit more on the feed. One thing that we realized, generally, is that there's a lack of real financial live-streaming about the stock market and about what's going on.

We saw TBPN kind of crush it, and we're like, wait a second, this works better for trading. Because if we only record once a week and we only go live once a week and something changes, you're not getting our updated opinion. You probably want to hear more about what we're thinking.

I got a really nice comment the other day from somebody that said, “Avi, we use you guys as a counter. We use Jonah as a counter, but Avi, we actually take you seriously.” That made me feel very happy. Thank you.

Yeah, that seems to be the trend of the online hate. It's like they know how to hit me where it hurts, right? They're never like, “You guys suck,” or, “Hey, Jonah, I just don't like your opinion,” or, “You're an idiot.” It's always like, “Jonah, you're the weaker link in the podcast. You're the loser. We only listen because of Avi, and you're just hanging on by your fingernails.” These guys are so mean.

Don't let the haters get to you, Jonah. I love you. I think you're the best. I think you're the greatest.

1. Is The Market Rally Broadening Out?

I love you, too, man.

You're a special man. I love you, too, man.

We have to keep podcasting.

And for all those [expletive] out there that called Jonah mid-curve, I want you to know that he's richer than I am.

Not for long.

I mean, forget the fact that he's a decade older. That doesn't matter. It's irrelevant, right? He's wealthier than I am.

I think, forgetting about wealth and money for a second, one thing that I will say is that I am wrong a lot. But the best traders I know have always had periods of having a bad run. You can't just make money every year unless you're either not really a trader and more of a mathematician who's just solved the market and you've got some sort of high-Sharpe systematic strategy, or you're not taking that much risk.

Maybe you're just an investor and you just ride the S&P higher every year, and it goes up all the time, and you haven't had a bad year yet because there hasn't been a real crisis. Personally, I'm not saying I'm having a bad run. My portfolio is currently at its all-time highs, which is pretty awesome.

But I have had some bad calls recently. I faded the oil crisis, the Hormuz crisis, earlier than I should have, and I took a dirt bath for a little while. It was bad.

Jonah, that's okay. The reality is that not that many people did an incredible job trading this. In fact, that's why people watch: because I think that we share our wins and we share our losses, and I'm not afraid to tell you when we did well and when we did poorly.

But I think the key to remember about this market is what we've been saying for a long time. Starting with the AI doomerism—you remember when the market got jitters because of AI doomerism and people were saying that everyone was going to lose their jobs and that spending was going to collapse after the Citron article, which was, by the way, predicated on being 2 or 3 years in the future—but between that and the war, our take has always been that the U.S. economy is strong.

The U.S. economy is growing. Tech is an accelerator. Tech improves earnings per share. Tech will actually end up increasing the productivity of the American worker and not necessarily destroy jobs, but it might actually even create jobs. And that's been our stance from the beginning.

Our stance on the Iran war from the beginning is that it will be volatile. There will be things that happen that look scary, but it will eventually resolve higher, and it will resolve in favor of the United States. So far, so good.

You can make an argument that the Iran war—maybe it's not geopolitically resolving in favor of the United States, which I do disagree with, by the way—but what we're seeing now is a complete repudiation of the idea that these things are going to impact the stock market in a big way.

In fact, for the first time, and this is really important, we are seeing breadth in the market, and that's a very good thing.

What's your metric for that? How do you track it? I mean, look at the S&P ex—the S&P 490 ex the top 10. Mine is the equal-weight S&P.

Yeah, sorry. The equal-weight S&P is also great. The equal-weight S&P has been performing better. The Russell has been performing better. Commodities have been performing well.

Basically, what we're seeing is a rational market. We saw software companies get hit aggressively hard. Software is doing poorly. That makes sense. Software is getting hit really hard by AI. But we're seeing the rest of the market do very well.

The market is doing what it's supposed to be doing, which is predicting the future, or attempting to predict the future. That's the key. You have to look out: Where are we going to be in 6 months? Where are we going to be in 12 months?

What the market is saying is that this war and these AI fears don't matter right now. In fact, we probably don't even have close to the level of compute that we need in order to be successful. We probably need to build out 10 times the amount of compute.

There's a joke about Llama 4: We can't release Llama 4 because they don't have the compute for it, not because it's so great.

Yeah, I saw that. This is all just like the Llama 4 thing. Uh-oh, we're altruistically withholding it so that we can patch all the zero-day vulnerabilities.

It's actually just that they haven't purchased enough compute. I don't know if that's true or not, but directionally, I think what's happening right now is that we are still in the early phases of building out infrastructure for this AI revolution.

Less than 30% of the workforce uses it day-to-day. I forget exactly what the number is, but I think it might be less than 15% of the workforce uses AI day-to-day. There's a lot of space that this can expand into, and I think we are going to see that expansion.

That means that I'm invested. I'm still invested in the Nasdaq. I'm still invested in semiconductor ETFs. I'm basically invested across the board.

TobbyR Talks 7887 said the phrase that I've been saying for a while: This could happen. This is a lockout rally, right? When you have a lot of fears and you climb the wall of worry, it becomes very difficult for the average retail investor to rebuy because they think that they almost bear-hole themselves.

People consistently bear-hole themselves. This is something you really need to avoid. I was right for a short period of time. I shorted the market, and it went down 5%. I thought it was going to go down 10%.

Then it rebounds back to your entry, and that's where people get stuck. Psychologically, it's very difficult to say, “I was right, but now I'm wrong.” It's, “I'm still right, and this is an irrational bounce.”

To me, I've fallen prey to this many times. That's what's happening right now, and that's why I think this rally has legs: because there's still a lot of people who are not allocated to the market.

There are a lot of people who are far less allocated to the market today than they were pre–Iran war. Once I see euphoria, and once I see everybody talking about the fact that the market is looking good and that we've gotten past all of these bad things, and nobody brings up the Iran war for a few days—maybe a week—I might start chipping away, taking some chips off the table.

But until then, we’re good. And we’ve been saying, buy Bitcoin under $70,000. Don’t get shaken out of the market. Intel was such a huge win for us. Oil was obviously a loss.

But overall, I think the thing we’re trying to articulate to you is that the things you think right now are overvalued or overbought based on technical time frames—one, a lot of them aren’t. So, for example, Bitcoin actually looks very good technically.

Bitcoin looks underbought. We’ve got to talk about this.

2. The Niger Delta Avengers

Underbought, and we will. I mean, Bitcoin is doing incredibly well. We have a Telegram chat called the 1000x NDA.

The NDA doesn’t stand for non-disclosure agreement. It stands for Niger Delta Avengers, my favorite warlord group. It’s something we talked about at some point on the podcast. We should have been hashing that out for a long time. We should. We should rehash it.

Basically, the Niger Delta Avengers embody the ethos of what we’re trying to share with our listeners, which is: be a financial entrepreneur. So if you are lucky enough to be born not in a swampy rainforest region of southwestern Nigeria—

Is it a rainforest region? It’s kind of jungle-ish. I don’t know if you’d call it a rainforest. I’m not an ecologist, but it’s just a lot of trees and monkeys and wildlife, but also a lot of oil under the ground. It’s called the creeks. This is where the Forcados Stream of oil comes from.

Basically, it used to be a nice, pristine kind of national wildlife refuge, and now it’s become this horrendous ecological disaster because of the mismanagement. Basically, oil just runs through the rainforest now because of the bad extraction techniques they used.

Anyway, these Niger Delta Avengers—what makes them so interesting is, I just think, if you’re a young, smart, hungry, ambitious person in America or in Europe, the way you make money is by working hard, going to a good university, getting a good job, getting some experience, and then just working your way up in the world.

If you’re that young, intelligent, entrepreneurial, hungry person from this ecological disaster region, with just warring tribes chopping each other’s heads off, how are you going to make a buck? How are you going to make money? Well, you form a warlord group called the Niger Delta Avengers. You amass a bunch of weaponry and wear scary balaclavas over your heads, or whatever those things are called. Take a bunch of pictures, start a Twitter account, and then bomb pipelines, ransom oil infrastructure, and do it in— We got a presentation on this one year at Vitol, a PowerPoint presentation by one of our guys.

Can we get that PowerPoint presentation? Oh my God, I wish I had it. Is there any way we could get that PowerPoint presentation and put it up for the viewers?

We were at an offsite. It was crazy. We were at an offsite at an undisclosed location, which I will not reveal. And everybody was like—

You knew where you were?

Yes, okay. Thankfully, I did. They didn’t blindfold me on the way there.

They didn’t blindfold you and pick you up over their shoulder and drag you out to some rainforest?

No, no, I didn’t, but it was baller. Basically, everybody from around the world on the oil team was presenting what they were working on. I was like, “Here’s the nerdy mixture of physical and financial that I’ve been working on.” People were like, “Okay,” golf clap. And then this guy—basically, our West Africa guy, who’s like Nicolas Cage from Lord of War, just flying back and forth between Switzerland and wherever—he was given honorary citizenship to Sierra Leone. Think about that. What do you have to do to become an honorary citizen of Sierra Leone just because they think you’re so awesome?

Anyway, this guy was presenting what the Niger Delta Avengers did to shut off production from the Forcados pipeline and FPSO. Basically, these guys—this isn’t basic scuba diving. This isn’t Scuba Steve stuff. These dudes went 60 meters underwater with all this crazy equipment—

What the fuck, Scuba Steve? What are you calling me?

You’re from another generation. You forget. Forget about it.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Anyway, so he’s like the Crocodile Hunter. What was that guy’s name? Steve Irwin?

Yeah, Steve Irwin.

Yeah, okay, go ahead.

Look, you gave an opening 15-minute discourse on markets that was intelligent. Allow me my 5 minutes of discombobulated Niger Delta Avengers.

So these guys go 60 meters underwater and completely dismantle a pipeline—utterly take it apart. They don’t just bomb a little section. They just ruin a lot of it. Then they stick all these crazy undersea mines all around it so no repairman is willing to go try to fix it. And then they’re like, “Only we can fix this. You must pay us $100 million.” And they just tweet stuff. And then they’re like, “All right, all right, Nigeria, the government of Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari, we’re going to bomb more stuff if you don’t do this.” And eventually, they got paid off, right?

So basically, my point here is: do what you’ve got to do, right? If you want to make it up in the world, hopefully you’re not from the creeks. But if you are, be entrepreneurial in either case, and that’s the ethos that we want our listeners to—

Not commit crime, per se, but—

No, no, definitely, definitely, we are not advocating crime. I want to be 100% clear. The 1000x podcast does not condone or commit or urge anyone else to commit crime. Yeah, we are anti-crime.

However, in Nigeria, you have to think outside the box. In what would be considered crime in Western business culture, it’s more just basic entrepreneurship in the creeks. So—

What is that? Like, picking up an AK-47 and walking into a store: crime or entrepreneurship?

Most of the world would consider that crime, right? But hold on—here’s the difference.

It’s called not starving to death.

Yeah. Pick up an AK-47, get 3,000 of your friends to pick up an AK-47, and walk into a gold mine: crime or entrepreneurship? Harder question.

Yeah. Let’s get a picture of these guys. I’m going to share it. Hold on. Niger Delta Avengers. I miss their Twitter account. Those guys were crazy. Hold on. Let me share my screen here.

What? Please do.

Allow. All right, Niger Delta Avengers. Here we go. You see that? Look at these guys. Just a bunch of friendly dudes.

Yeah, that’s the lore behind our group chat name, by the way. That’s why there’s an NDA in it. Look at this. Who wouldn’t want to pay these guys, you know, $100 million? “Call for restructuring.” Wee. I’ve got to take a screenshot of this so that when people ask me—

Oh no, it went away. Want me to put it back?

Bring it back. You know, I have to say, I’ve got to take a screenshot of this because sometimes people will ask me—they’ll ask me, “Avi, what do you do for a living?” And I’ll say, “Well, I’m an investor. Mostly I invest in the markets, and actually, as a side hobby, which is now about to become a much bigger part of my life because we’re going to be streaming multiple times a week.” Yep. They ask me, “What is your stream about? What’s your podcast about?” And I tell them—

Hold on. I’m going to screen-share it here.

I tell them the financial markets. And if anyone is tuning in after I’ve told them that our podcast is about the financial markets, I don’t apologize, because this is effectively the financial markets. This is discussing entrepreneurship. People always ask me, “Avi, what’s going to happen when AI takes over the world?” AI is not doing that. AI is not shooting AK-47s in the air, taking over oil fields. We have a bit more time.

This is the creeks. If you grew up in Cleveland, good for you. You can take a safe, easy, nonviolent path. Imagine if you grew up here. This sucks, right? If this is your homeland, man, how are you going to make your money? The world is a big and complicated place, and we can’t just superimpose our Western business values onto every region.

Oh, hold on. I’ve got one more image for you. It really is the creeks. I mean, look at this. This is a real disaster, this place. Now, check these guys out, right? Like—

Wow. I guess they’re more business casual. What is that? An Ecko? This is good branding for Ecko. Ecko Unlimited.

Is that the brand that I know? I think I used to have something from there back when I was 8 years old. Yeah, I mean, you wouldn’t find outfits like this at Blackstone, but—

It’s like a famous—it’s like the rhino. It has the rhino as the logo. Yeah, that’s right.

Ecko. Streetwear. Anyway, my point here is there’s something similar going on anywhere in the world. You’re confronted with your unique situation, and you have to make the most of it.

Crypto is a way out for a lot of people because anybody could access it. There was opportunity everywhere. You didn't have to pick up an AK-47 to get the money. It was a global free-for-all.

Now, just pivoting to crypto for a second, I'm not sure—should we probably get back and talk to the markets? I mean, here's just 1 second on the markets.

He knows Ecko, but not Scooby-Doo.

Yeah, I'm not 48 years old.

Neither am I.

Fuck you, Avi. Hold on.

That comment made me laugh pretty hard. That's a good one.

3. The State of Crypto

Oh, anyway, yeah, so Bitcoin is very likely going to go up.

The state of crypto is just an utter mess. Bitcoin, Hyperliquid, and potentially SKY could benefit from U.S. stablecoin issuance, and maybe Syrup. But we should probably talk about the hacks.

I've been talking to a lot of people in DeFi who have dedicated their lives to this thing, and the issue is that with all these new tools coming out—all these AI tools—it's easier than ever to screen for vulnerabilities. Yes, it's also easier than ever to protect against those vulnerabilities.

But what people are realizing is that this is the classic approach crypto has taken over the last decade: They constantly reinvent the wheel and then figure out why the wheel has spokes. That's kind of what happens.

Why was there T+2 settlement for a long time? To make sure that you're not making a mistake, right? Because back then, you had pieces of paper. Obviously, once you get better at checking for mistakes, then you can speed it up.

But one of the reasons that things aren't completely permissionless, that there's not just a fully automated system running the entire financial world, is because mistakes happen. Malicious people will try to do malicious things to you, so you need to have a layer of protections on top of that.

That's why I have always been of the mindset that the value add of all of these decentralized platforms is the fact that one person can't unilaterally make decisions, and no one person has all the necessary alignment. They can't make a bunch of decisions about the platform. They can't change the algorithm on you overnight. There are certain things that are static and have to be agreed on by everybody.

But when it comes to financial applications built on top of these platforms, those don't necessarily have to be decentralized. That's my take, and that's always been my take: The applications themselves don't necessarily need to be decentralized. It's the base layer that needs to be decentralized.

I think what we're going to realize very soon is that most of DeFi, unless they make that pivot, is very unsafe. There are hardcore people in DeFi who say, “But who cares about a 20% haircut to 5% of collateral?” The answer is that the rates are not high enough to justify that risk at all. You're not getting paid enough to compensate for that risk.

Yeah, no, I have a slightly different view. I agree with you on that last point wholeheartedly. I started my career in credit trading. I worked at Lehman Brothers. If the yield is too high, there's an asterisk somewhere.

You're not supposed to be like, “Ooh, look at this bond that's yielding an extra 200 bps above what its credit rating should imply. Let me just buy that one.” I'm sure you encountered this at GoldenTree, too. No, there's probably something wrong there.

On the flip side, DeFi is like that upside down. You go on Aave and it's like, “Ooh, I can borrow at 3% against my ETH.” First of all, ETH is way shittier collateral than U.S. dollars. Second of all, if you want to go and borrow on margin on your Schwab account, you're going to be borrowing at 6% or 7%, and something's wrong, right?

You're taking all kinds of risks you don't understand when you lend at 3% to somebody on Aave. Something's off, and it always has been. To me, DeFi is not DeFi. It's clearly CeFi. That's what the KelpDAO hack made me realize.

If it were truly DeFi and it were like, “All right, composable money, money Legos, whatever they called it,” and everybody were just putting out different structures that allow you to borrow and lend against various types of collateral, and it were a complete free-for-all, you were taking all the rug risk onto your own balance sheet, accepting whatever may happen, and getting compensated with crazy percentages—like Anchor Protocol—fine, right? If you're just taking the risk and getting paid a huge yield, fine.

But Aave, I think, institutionalized DeFi and made it seem like, “Okay, wow, this is really stable, low interest rates. It almost looks like JPMorgan, except it's decentralized. Wow, incredible.” I think that lulled the entire so-called DeFi space into a sense of complacency.

Then some random hack—Lazarus, by the way. Props to them: $7 billion. North Korea is the biggest exporter of rugs in the world, man. It's unbelievable. Iran exports terrorism, Turkey exports rugs—and real rugs—and North Korea exports digital rugs.

So, basically, what I'm—just to finish my point here. Sorry, I'm ranting a little bit.

Rant away. This is the Jonah rant and the Avi rant podcast, I guess.

Yes, we rant. So basically, KelpDAO, right? First of all, what the fuck is KelpDAO? Second of all, I'll retweet this, but I highly recommend a tweet about this topic, which I feel like we have to share. People don't understand what happened here, and I think it's important to share it.

I'm going to share my screen. Avi, we need to talk about this. This guy is Zach.

Yeah, let's see.

He goes, “Look, guys, it's actually really straightforward. A bunch of people staked their ETH on the Ethereum blockchain to earn yield, except they didn't want their capital to be locked up. So they actually staked with the liquid-staking protocol called Lido, which provided them with a liquid-staking receipt token called stETH.

“Except they decided to juice their yield further by depositing their stETH receipt tokens into a restaking protocol called EigenLayer. Except they didn't want to lock up their capital, so they actually restaked with a liquid-restaking protocol called KelpDAO, which provided them with a liquid-restaking receipt token called rsETH.

“Except they decided to juice their yield further by depositing their rsETH tokens into a lending protocol called Aave, so that they could open a leveraged looping position that borrows ETH against the rsETH collateral and restakes their ETH into the rsETH, which is then deposited as collateral.

“Except it turns out that rsETH used a cross-chain bridge called LayerZero that was hacked by North Koreans, causing rsETH to become undercollateralized. Now these looping positions are stuck and unprofitable, everyone is pointing fingers at each other, and also DeFi is a very serious industry.

“So to me, that just sums up in a nutshell how ridiculous this market has become.”

That's what this market has become.

And to be fair, it was like this in 2021. You will find me on podcasts in 2021 telling you this is really stupid. Except in 2021, there was yield.

No, but it was a great way to make money. That's the point, right? The point that I was getting to is that it was phenomenal yield.

People make a mistake here, and this is actually a very big mistake that people make because they don't understand the dynamic of why the yield existed. It was very novel for companies to issue what was effectively equity in such large percentages of their company to users of their platform.

It was as if, for every dollar that you put into Robinhood, they had allocated 40% or 50% of their entire company equity float to the people who deposited on their platform. That's why the yield was so high.

What it turned out was that none of these people had sustainable business models. One, it's not sustainable to run a company if you give away so much. The cost of customer acquisition was far too high, right? If you were giving away 50% of the equity of the company you were creating just to have people deposit and use your product, you were actually going to end up not incentivized, especially if you ended up with 10% of your company. It created these perverse dynamics, but that's where the yield was coming from.

The yield stopped for those reasons. It stopped, number 1, because people realized that these companies didn't have viable business models, so the equity tokens—we're talking tokens here; I'm just using equity as a comp for tokens—went to zero because they didn't have useful business models.

People stopped giving away so much of their company because it was unsustainable. And, number 3, crypto obviously lost capital. The valuations were massively inflated in 2021, so now they come down, and obviously the yield is going to go down.

This is really the main reason. Fast-forward to today, and your yield is unfortunately going to look very similar to the yield you can get in traditional finance. Look, Michael Saylor's offering you 11.5%, and I actually think that product is safer than a lot of DeFi.

Yeah, and the other thing about it is crazy, because I don't think that product is that safe at all.

No, it's not. But this is why the yields are off.

And then when all of that stuff happened with KelpDAO, it wasn't like, “Okay, well, it's all just on-chain programmable money. I guess North Korea has your money now, and it's all over.” Instead, it was more like, “North Korea has your money, and then the head Security Council—the very dystopian, Fahrenheit 451 name at Arbitrum—is freezing funds. Aave, out of an abundance of caution, is freezing funds, and KelpDAO gets to—whoever KelpDAO is, it's probably a couple of 57-year-old dudes in a coworking space somewhere—decide whether this hack gets socialized to a bunch of people with a big blast radius, or whether it gets more narrowly targeted at a smaller group of people.”

I'm not a security researcher. I don't understand the ins and outs of this. I'm not one of those restaking, restaker-recycler guys, so I'm not personally in this. But to me, it sounds like a bunch of random clowns making decisions with other people's money, which is sort of what TradFi is—except in TradFi, it's not random clowns. It's institutions you trust and people on top of them, like Jamie Dimon, not the guys in the coworking space running KelpDAO.

Final note on KelpDAO: for the last time, crypto founders, take inspiration from Ray Dalio, who named his fund Bridgewater, or Ken Griffin, who named his fund Citadel. Citadel: a bastion of security with big walls. Bridgewater: a bridge over troubled water.

Did you know that kelp is the fastest-growing plant on the planet?

Well, that's cool, but it's also a slimy green weed.

Yeah, it does. I love it. You and I have eaten kelp together. We eat seaweed salad all the time, man, when we go out.

Yeah, dude, you're probably going to have some kelp later after this podcast.

I've got to go to that kosher sushi place and get some sushi.

Sekai. Awesome place. Glorious, phenomenal place. Catch me there.

Anyway, my point here is: don't name your protocol after something that sounds like it's just going to fall down under pressure. Try to give it a—anyway, I'm done. I'm sorry. I think that's good. I think I'm going to try to wrap this and turn it into what the people want to hear, which is what's happening with the market.

The answer is that I think this hack is actually very good for crypto, because we're going to see even more reallocation of capital away from the things that don't work and into the things that work. The things that work are Bitcoin, which works great, Hyperliquid, and Syrup. We're going to see—Hyperliquid is on top of Arbitrum, though, and Arbitrum is a big question mark for me now.

Hyperliquid's not on top of Arbitrum. It's not going to be on top of Arbitrum—not for long.

Although one thing that I do have to say: first of all, Perp is doing extremely well, and I'm still very bullish on Perp, because I think people want access to Hyperliquid but can't get it right now. They don't want to go on-chain, and so Perp's the only way to do it. I'm very bullish on Perp.

This is not to shit on Hyperliquid, but I found the experience of trading on Lyra, their competitor, to be so much easier solely because of the deposits. You just log on, and you can deposit anything at any time onto Lighter, and it just turns into USDC. It's great. It's a really interesting product.

Yeah, the deposit experience on Hyperliquid is terrible. Also, Ethereum in general—Kyle Samani tweeted about it, and I agree with him. Ethereum's roll-up roadmap is flawed. Roll-ups are just centralized sequencers. Like, I—

Well, this is old news, Jonah. Everyone knows that roll-ups are centralized.

It hasn't been old news.

It's old news.

What's happening at Arbitrum? Offchain Labs doesn't even look at it anymore. Look, my point is that it's old news, but this KelpDAO thing was the kick in the nuts that makes it very clear and present how bad that roadmap is, right? We could debate it; it was all philosophical. Now it's like the Security Council of Arbitrum is just making arbitrary—it should be arbitrary—decisions about capital.

To me, that's not the ethos of Ethereum. Capital cannot migrate back to the mainnet of Ethereum because it's just too slow and expensive. So, at some point, it's like: is Solana sufficiently decentralized or not to host financial applications without Anatoly just—

4. What’s Driving BTC Higher?

It's sort of irrelevant. That's what I'm trying to articulate: today, it's sort of irrelevant. What's relevant is that Bitcoin is going up.

As a trader, you have to predict flows. You have to predict where people are going to put their money, and that involves understanding whether people already have their money in an asset, whether it's on the sidelines, or whether they're not even looking at it. Throughout the entire Iran war, throughout the entire time that the market—the Nasdaq went down, the S&P went down—you saw software collapse, semiconductors collapse, and Intel go from $50 to $42. You saw the market taking it on the chin because a lot of people were allocated to these sectors.

What happens when you look at something like Bitcoin and it doesn't go down? You have to start realizing that there just aren't that many sellers left at the price point we're at. Bitcoin's going to $150K.

$260K, $270K.

Well, hold on. I agree. But then you add on the fact that there's now a reflexive dynamic with this STRC, where effectively people deposit money into STRC and get paid an 11.5% dividend. MSTR is also issuing more stock and buying Bitcoin.

They're buying Bitcoin with the deposits that people are putting into STRC and then selling stock to issue the dividend. That's what's going on, right? That dynamic is very reflexive, because it allows people to front-run the buys. People know that Saylor is going to be buying every single week now, and if Bitcoin goes up, more people are going to deposit because it actually feels safer. They'll be able to issue more of the stock itself.

They might even be able to increase the dividend if Bitcoin keeps going up, and so it becomes a more attractive product as Bitcoin goes up. Bitcoin has already basically shown you that it has a lack of sellers, and Saylor is eating through all the sellers at these price points, too.

That's why, if you look at Bitcoin, it's not doing the classic Bitcoin move where it parabolas up. It's actually staircasing up. It's because there are sellers at these new price points, and Saylor is eating through them. At some point, we're going to run out of sellers, and people are going to realize, “Instead of fighting this trend, I'm going to ride this trend,” and we're going to get some sort of blow-off top.

That's my bet: we're probably going to get some sort of blow-off. Then, on the way down, it's going to look bad—escalator up, elevator down, as they say in commodities.

I agree with you. I think we can get a blow-off top now. One of my mistakes last year was expecting a blow-off top for Bitcoin, and so was everybody else, which makes that impossible.

Now, I think most of the world is like, “Crypto is such a joke. I'm not touching this.” While that is true for most of crypto right now, I am genuinely disenchanted with DeFi and a lot of crypto at the moment. It seems so ridiculous and not what it promised to be.

But that doesn't mean that all of crypto is bad. Bitcoin is more bulletproof than ever. This hack proves the importance of decentralization. Nothing is more decentralized than Bitcoin. The world is literally getting shredded apart into hemispheres, and Bitcoin is going to be the mechanism by which things are transacted. Cargoes are getting turned around over USDT.

To me, ultimately, Bitcoin is the story, and people are ignoring it. Now you can have a blow-off top because it's not a consensus expectation, right? There aren't, like, 50 million whales waiting to sell megasize on every pop, which is kind of what was happening in 2025. Now everybody's looking the other way, which means you can get a quiet, sneaky fuck-you Bitcoin rally.

Don't get locked out is all I'm going to say.

Yeah. And the rest of the stock market, again, is doing well. We're at the highs. The S&P is rallying like crazy. The Nasdaq is rallying like crazy. We're getting one real sign of health in the market, which is really just a sign of risk tolerance. It gives them money they're willing to allocate.

Are these headline trades that have been happening? You saw the Hims headline trade, where the RFA comes out and says we might reclassify peptides, and Hims—which is effectively a reseller of a lot of men's-health and women's-health products—currently sells erectile products.

Yeah, I think that falls under health, Jonah. You just wanted to say “erectile” on the podcast. “Erectile.” I told him—I told Jonah—if he could get away with that, I'd give him $100.

The Hims trade tells you everything about the health of the market—no pun intended. And also, we're getting these crazy moves. Avis is one of the craziest moves I've seen in a very long time. I don't know if you've been paying attention.

One thing that kind of pissed me off is we should have brought this to your guys' attention weeks ago, because the squeeze started 2 or 3 weeks ago. It's just now that people are talking about it. I mean, if you look at the weekly chart, it's been up for 5 weeks straight. Why? Why up? I'm just kidding. I'm sorry. I'll stop trolling.

Yeah, no problem, Avi. You're all welcome, Avi. This was supposed to be the institutional crypto—this was supposed to be the institutional markets podcast. Given that we're about to launch a whole media empire with lots of shows, I wanted to have a little fun today. No, I mean, before it all gets shut down.

Yeah, but this Avis rally, for example, I think also signifies—look at what happened with GME. Do you know what the forward return of the S&P was for the next 6 months after GME?

No, I don't even know how to—I would normally try to guess, but I don't even have an intuition.

Well, GME happened in January 2021, and so we basically got a full year of bull market before—actually, a full 2 years of bull market after. But a lot of people are saying, “Oh, man, I'm nervous that maybe what's going to happen is this is a blow-off top. This is the final straw. If this can happen with Avis, then that means the market's really unhealthy.” And I'm just here to say: post-GME, we went up 30%.

That's—I have an actual serious thought. I would caution against using Avis as a barometer for market health.

Yes, it doesn't really track. Now, I do have a rethink on Avis. If I'm going to do some trades, I think Avis is a fantastic short. And I share a name with this thing, and I'm telling you, it's a fantastic short.

Every time I used to see it as a kid, I would say, “Look, it says Avis. Avis. It says Avis,” which means that it sucks and you should short it. I'm serious. I actually think the move is playing out. Maybe you can take a bath; it'll go up another 20%. So when I say short, I don't mean take every single dollar that you own and sell this thing. I mean gingerly scale into a short.

If you size it correctly and gingerly scale in, I think that you probably—it's probably not going to go past 1,400. You can probably establish 20% of your short position here. And in 6 months, this thing is probably trading at—my guess is going to be 300.

Because the thing is, with these short squeezes, they do materially change the game. They materially change the cash position of that company. I mean, you can raise a ton of cash. But that's sort of the key: Avis can go out there and literally quadruple its share issuance and just sell it on the open market.

That doesn't really happen in crypto. So when people say all of the supply is held and there are more shorts than there is supply, that's not a forever situation. And I think that's what some people forget if they're not professional traders: these companies can issue as much stock as they want, basically, at any moment.

Yeah, and so you need to be very careful. It's centralized finance. Just a committee can get together and make a decision that impacts everybody, which is increasingly how DeFi feels to me. Previous hacks have been like, “Oh, well, the space is growing. It's vulnerable, whatever.” This one, I'm like, “Okay, this is just CeFi.”

5. What Stops This Bull Market?

Anyway, I've been joking a little bit in the last few minutes on the pod, but I have a more serious thought about broader markets in general. As a commodities trader, I always try to reduce complex situations to the fulcrum underneath them. At what point does this very complex situation, with tons of input variables and output variables, become just a binary, sort of black-and-white thing?

That reductionist mindset—you risk oversimplifying complex situations, but often you really get to the root of the problem. I'm going to attempt to apply that framework here to the stock market and to crypto as well.

You were mentioning earlier that people get nervous about Avis or get nervous about this or that, nervous about Hormuz. What should we be nervous about as market participants? We're obviously sitting here trying to generate alpha, but we're also riding beta. We're in a bull market and have been since the 2008 financial crisis. What should we be worried about?

And frankly, I'm not worried about anything except socialism and redistribution sweeping the political climate in the West. I think you're supposed to fade everything except socialism. You can have bad timing on your fading, like I did with the Iran war, and still come out on top if your trading expression is right, which I did. I didn't short oil futures; I just bought good assets on the cheap. They went down a lot further, and I ate it for a while. Now they're all back on the highs, and I'm feeling great.

Why? Because this Iran war is not socialism. Obviously, you have to underwrite some black swans. You have to underwrite Mythos getting released and then people using them to take down society. You have to underwrite quantum hacking everybody's JPMorgan account. You have to underwrite a nuclear war. But aside from black swans, for the most part, nothing's really going to tank this market over the long run other than a wave of politicians getting elected with a mandate to take wealth out of the hands of liquid risk-asset holders and deposit it into the hands of people who don't have it.

You're starting to see that in housing markets around America—a bit of socialism—and you're seeing what it's doing to housing prices. I would not be bullish on LA or New York real estate here. I've certainly been bearish on London real estate for a while for the same reason.

Generally speaking, for the markets that we care about on this podcast, it's still full-blown, turbo-capitalism mode. All of these little things that come along—the Iran war, the oil crisis, whatever—they're all kind of transient to me. And with interest rates well above zero, there's plenty of financial engineering that can be done at the Fed level, at the Treasury level, at the ECB level, and at the SNB level.

Even after interest rates go to zero, you can do QE. There are just so many levers available that I don't get worried. I encourage everybody I know to buy dips and to invest with confidence in assets, especially assets like Bitcoin that outperform during periods when they should be underperforming against these backdrops.

But keep a very close eye on the Barack Obama and Zoran Momdani alliance—reading books to preschoolers together and doing photo ops. If that sweeps the Democratic Party and those guys get elected in a blue wave—both houses of Congress and the executive—then we can get nervous.

I think I have to wrap it up. Okay, I got to run, but I think that was a phenomenal rant and basically characterized everything that I'm nervous about. The only thing that I would add is I have to pay attention to economic data.

I have this thesis and I have a theory that AI is not going to cause massive job loss and is not going to cause consumer spending to fall. But if you see credit card defaults start to go through the roof, you start to see spending—maybe on luxury items—go down a lot, and you start to see actual spending cut back, then that's going to falsify my thesis. Then I have to adjust, right?

6. The Future of 1000x

Trading and investing is all about adjusting. So really, this is about economic data and, more importantly, spending. That, to me, is the key. That, to me, is the crux of it. And speaking of spending, I love spending time on this pod with you, Jonah.

Love it. Anytime. I love spending time with you, too.

Yep. I’m very excited about what we’re building, both on the terminal side. This is version 2 of the terminal. We spent a while building the first version. Building an AI is really hard. We launched a product that was meh, and then we said, “You know what? Let’s just do better.” So we ramped up the spend and effort, and now version 2 of the terminal is legit.

This thing competes with any of the main AI engines and is probably better optimized for markets than any of them by a long shot. So we’re excited about the terminal, and we’re excited about what’s going to happen with the 1000x. We’re sort of spinning out from Blockworks and going out on our own. I don’t know how much we can share about our plans, but it’s going to be a bagger.

Basically, we are going to unlock a lot of underutilized potential in the blueprint of 2 practitioners talking shop. Right now, it’s just the 2 of us irregularly having trader-style market calls on livestreams. I think it’s going to end up looking a lot more like a channel, except instead of a bunch of journalists and talking-head clowns, it’s going to be real people who take real risks. That’s why it’ll be interesting to listen to.

100%. I think we realized that livestreaming really works for this type of content, and there’s no reason for us not to be doing it more.

I’ll be around. You’re the main guy on the pod.

He’ll be around. You’re going to see a lot more of my mug on the timeline and in clips. We’re going to flood you guys. You’re going to be sick of me. You’re going to be so tired of all the winning. You’re going to be so tired of the winning. It’s going to be great.

But we’re winning and winning and winning. We’re just going to win and win and win and win, and you guys are going to be along for the ride. Just as a reminder, Network Terminal is coming at the beginning of May, right?

Beginning of May. Yeah, the old dev’s fired. The new team—we have a PhD, a brilliant guy working on it. An absolutely cracked guy from New Zealand. Just a brilliant guy, and a professional, basically.

Maybe I’ll tell the story, actually. This is kind of interesting, and then I do have to go. Ridiculously serendipitously, we ran into a crypto fund that has been running a sizeable amount of money and had built an internal LLM for themselves to use. They were thinking, “What if we turn this into a retail-facing product?” But they had no idea how to do that. They had just built this really nice internal product.

So we basically spent the last 2 months working with them to revamp their internal LLM, which was already extremely useful, into a retail-focused product. We’re going to be launching it at the beginning of May. Again, 50% of those revenues are going to the 1000x token.

So you heard it. I just want the people who are actually listening to this podcast to get access to that information. There’s a shocking number of people listening right now, given that the Blockworks account isn’t streaming this.

Yeah, we are also leaving Blockworks to start our own network. We love Blockworks, though. It’s an amicable—it’s a very amicable separation. I think they’re great people. They run a great network. It’s just that we’re ready to take this by the balls.

It’s kind of like—not the way Brad and Angelina broke up. More like the way Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin ended up successfully co-parenting even after they ended their relationship, you know?

Wait, Gwyneth Paltrow was married to Chris Martin?

Yeah, she was married to Chris Martin.

The lead singer of Coldplay, Chris Martin?

That’s right.

Yeah. He’s not Jewish, so obviously it wasn’t meant to be. That’s why they broke up. Is she Jewish?

Gwyneth Paltrow is Jewish, yeah.

No, she’s not.

What? Dude, get your knowledge together. Learn who Scuba Steve is.

Yeah, seriously. Who the fuck is Scuba Steve, man?

It’s an Adam Sandler reference.

No, her father was Jewish.

Well, yeah, her father was—wow, okay. She grew up celebrating Jewish holidays.

Okay. All right. Wait, is her mom Jewish?

No, her mom’s not Jewish.

She’s not Jewish, then.

Okay, well, sorry. I take back what I said. I was wrong. You were right. She’s half Jewish.

Half Jewish.

She’s not Jewish. She’s cute. She’s—yeah, just adorable.

And so I guess think of Blockworks like Gwyneth Paltrow and us like Chris Martin, just going off to—

The guy—the guy that I’m supposed to have a meeting with in 20 minutes. I’m supposed to have a meeting in 20 minutes with a guy who’s supposed to be working on the network with me. I’m going to try to convince him to—

So I’m going to tell you guys who it is if we score him. It would be great to have him on the network. I’m about 20 minutes away from this place, and I’m looking at Gwyneth Paltrow. Great seeing you. Let me cue the media assets.