Picking Winners Post Trump Trade | 1000x

Now, one thing that I will say, just to finish the thought: he freaking legitimized Solana right there. If you're a Solana holder, you can feel damn good about your bags for the next 4 years. The casino is called Solana, and Trump just created a massive game at the casino called, you know, Trump, Melania, and Barron.

Avi is in an undisclosed location in the Swiss Alps. I'm still in France. Major, major congratulations are in order, Avi. I'm so happy for you.

It's an amazing thing, honestly. I found the best girl that I could have ever possibly hoped for, and I'm overjoyed. Thank you guys.

I'm thrilled for you guys. Massive congratulations, and enjoy the unfettered fun now, because once the kids start showing up, oh my God, it gets pretty crazy.

For those of you that saw the tweet, just know that's tongue-in-cheek, because family is always the main quest. Family's number one—the best quest.

It's funny: hypergambling with crypto becomes harder and harder as you have more and more people sharing your life with you. When you're solo, it's easier.

Yeah, it's true. You can't, but it also instills a sense of pride in your work. At least it has for me, where you actually want to work harder. It gives you some level of motivation to get in there and grind it out, because you have a concrete reason for it other than yourself, which is often a lot more motivating.

Yeah, I bet. That's why I think most of the world's most successful businesspeople are married—or have been married, anyway. Massive congratulations to you and your leading lady.

Next up on the docket, before we get into the markets: the Bankless guys wrote us an open letter. Avi, I don't know if you saw it, but apparently something we said last week upset them. I'll quickly say my piece, and then you can say yours.

Basically, to recap last week, we had a discussion about the AIC token and how the insiders sold a bunch of tokens on day 1 into the hands of retail investors. As soon as they were able to buy the token, it crashed, and it was just a bad look.

First of all, I liked the Bankless podcast for a long time. I listened to it as I was preparing for my professional career in crypto, and it helped me learn about the space. They've definitely onboarded a lot of users, which is good, so props to them. I met them briefly at Permissionless, and they seemed like really nice guys, so there's no personal animosity, and I don't want any beef with them.

You and I just call it like it is, read what we read online, do our research as best we can, and say what we feel about it. That's what we do on this podcast. I think I was unfair to them in my representation of things because I didn't represent their side of the story. I just represented the side of the story that's on the internet.

Shortly after we recorded, they published their side of the story and included it in their open letter. Unfortunately for them, I don't think it looks any better. Nobody knows what actually happened during this; nobody knows the ground truth. But if you assume that their version of the story is the ground truth and everything else is wrong—which I guess is a viable assumption for this conversation—their version of the story doesn't look any better than what we were talking about.

They sold $50,000 worth of tokens instead of $500,000. They say it wasn't their fault because it was Bankless Ventures, and they had no idea what was happening, so they passed the buck to their team, their junior guys, or whoever. Basically, I don't know. It's very confusing.

They're big boys. They're the biggest podcast in the space, and they don't need to engage with a minnow like us. But at the very least, we should have given them their side of the story and some airtime. At worst, their side of the story makes them look worse than what we were talking about. I don't get it. What do you think?

At the end of the day, you always have to consider both sides of the story. I think when things are on-chain, it's important to get the facts right. We did overstate how much they sold and ruined their reputation. They didn't ruin their reputation for $500,000; they risked their reputation for $50,000, so that's on us.

Just go to the open letter and read it. It's a very respectful, well-written open letter. I think we can put this behind us.

What I will say is that there are a lot of people in this space who are grifters, and it's up to you to come to your own conclusions as to how people act, how they respond to things, and the actions that they take. You need to come to your own conclusions.

I think one of the worst mistakes that you can make in this industry is assuming that people with large accounts or large followings are on your side or are actually trying to help you. The reality is that this is a very small percentage of people. Oftentimes, it's people who have already made it—people who are not consistently posting or talking about small-cap coins or posting trade setups. Those are sometimes the worst offenders. I say sometimes, not all the time.

It's really important to understand that the crypto VC game is won by people who get into projects early and sell them when they're overpriced. That's the game, right? You get in on something before it goes public at a $5 million valuation. The reason somebody lets you in at that valuation is because they get your megaphone and your voice.

It comes out at a $100 million valuation because you pumped it up, and your edge is not the fact that it's actually worth anything or that it's actually going to be a good project in 2 years. Your edge is the fact that it's going to come out at $100 million. That's what I don't like about this game, and that's why I don't really play it as much.

I try to keep my investments in things that I'm willing to hold and not sell.

You make a really interesting point about the relevance of knowing whether somebody's made it when you're trying to assess how helpful they will be in partnering with you. In my commodities trading career, you can't really do it at the junior levels. At the junior levels, when you're looking for a job, you just take what you can get.

Once you have some experience and become a desirable asset to a variety of firms, one of the best ways to determine how well they'll treat you and how generous they'll be with your compensation—I call it the LandGlide test.

LandGlide is a site that aggregates all property records in the United States into 1 clean user interface. I would look at whoever I was interviewing with, or whoever I was going to report to, when I was considering new jobs. I would look on LandGlide to see what type of property they owned and what they paid for it.

The reason why is that if it's some guy acting big with a big title, but he lives in a $1.1 million row house in a random part of Chicago, he hasn't made it. Meanwhile, if it's some dude with 3 houses and $30 million worth of real estate, that person's made it. They're probably going to be less stingy about paying you, see it less as a zero-sum game, and try to make the pie bigger rather than looking at it as just this small pie.

I think the LandGlide test applies to crypto as well. You're right not to correlate the two: follower count does not equal merit. It's hard to know in crypto, I guess.

I also think the relative seriousness with which people take posting is a good indication of how wealthy they are, to be completely honest. I take a little bit of pride in the irregular schedule of this podcast, which basically tells you that we have other things we should be doing, but then we get on this podcast and try to make it work for you guys.

Last year it was maybe this week, maybe next week—maybe Tuesday, maybe Thursday. The fact that I regularly won't post on Twitter for 2 weeks because I'll just be doing other stuff is a good indication.

Dude, you're making me look bad here right now. I've never done Twitter before—at least not until recently—and now I love Twitter. I post all the time, making me look terrible.

It's fine. It's recent. I was also like that in the beginning. I was also poor in the beginning.

1. Trump's Meme Coin Launch

So what's really going on over there? I'm bored. Did you blow everything up? Did you try to short $TRUMP?

Oh, yeah. Speaking of tokens that are questionable, let's transition from AICC to $TRUMP. Oh my God, what the fuck? I talked to a couple of hitters who went to the Trump Inaugural Crypto Ball, and apparently they didn't get the leak. He just dropped it, or his team just dropped this thing, at around 9:00 p.m. Eastern on a Friday night.

Obviously, being in Europe, and because of Shabbat, I was sleeping with my electronics turned off. I missed it and woke up to a huge missed opportunity.

You know what sucks? I went to bed at around 2:00 a.m.

I think it came out at 4:00 a.m., your Swiss time, and that was really annoying because I woke up probably around 9:00. I was going through all these messages, and one of my analysts texted me something really funny. He goes, “There’s a huge liquidity suck because of this Trump thing. Once it blows over, it might be a buy opportunity for alts. Once it stops draining liquidity, we might get a bounce.”

I was like, “What do you mean?” He goes, “Once Trump stops draining liquidity.” I was like, “What do you mean, once Trump stops draining liquidity? What has Trump said or what has Trump done?” In the 3 minutes it took me to go from that message to going on Twitter and figuring out what had actually happened, not once did it cross my mind that this man had launched a meme coin.

I mean, it’s so crazy. That’s a wild story.

I was so confused by that message. I was like, “Once Trump starts draining liquidity? What did he do?” I think, first of all, there is no comprehending what this man was thinking launching this coin. I get it when he launches a perfume—that’s hilarious and kind of tongue-in-cheek. This thing—

Yeah, so basically anybody with any shitcoin in their hot wallet sold it immediately to ape into TRUMP. Everything that had recently been popular—all the AI coins, all the other meme coins, anything that people had in their Phantom wallet—got sold instantly in a rush to buy this coin.

When something this huge launches, you don’t have a lot of time to wait for a wire to clear into Coinbase and then wait the 8 days it takes for Coinbase to release your funds to send to Phantom. You just take whatever capital you can on-chain and get in. At least that’s how good trading works, right? When there’s an amazing trade on the board and it’s not going to last long, you lift the offer. You don’t try to get the mid or get a better price. You just trade. You pay the vig. That’s what people did.

So it really torched the altcoin space, sent TRUMP to $70 billion, and then, Avi, you’re going to learn this once you get married: Sometimes your wife will rain on a really great parade. Sometimes she’ll be the party pooper—not often, but sometimes. Melania showed up and ended the fun, and TRUMP went from $70 billion down to $40 billion.

Unlike some other people who we discussed earlier in the podcast, Trump hasn’t dumped any coins on retail yet. Technically, that makes him less of a scammer than most. I was expecting him to sell at least something at these crazy valuations. What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, the other thing that really pissed a lot of people off is that it seems like a lot of people didn’t get into it. When we woke up, the thing was trading at $15 billion and it went to $70 billion. That was still a solid run that you could have captured. There was a 6x in there—or 5x, whatever—but there was a huge move right there.

I think it really got under a lot of people’s skin that they didn’t ape into it at all. Once it came out, they were like, “$15 billion? That’s crazy.” But maybe it’s going to reach parity with DOGE.

One thing that I’ll say is that I think the launch of Melania and Barron—I have no real information on it—but it’s possible that launch happened because they couldn’t extract enough money from the first launch. It seemed like they were locked up.

What I will say is that there was a lot of sketchy behavior. There were a lot of wallets that got in very, very, very early and then held and made hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s possible those were affiliated wallets. While it seems like he might not have sold, it’s very possible that he did and we just don’t know—or his affiliates sold, and we just don’t know.

This is a crazy precedent to set for a world leader to launch a meme coin. I know this has been talked about ad nauseam on Twitter, but this is an insane precedent to set: You’re effectively extracting value from your followers. Is TRUMP going to exist in 10 years? Probably not.

This is nuts. It’s such a bad look for the space. What we were expecting was a bunch of day-one executive orders, a pathway to a regulatory framework, and maybe a strategic Bitcoin reserve in the first 100 days. Instead, what we get is an unannounced, pre-inauguration scam coin launch that pissed off the crypto community, including the builder community, because obviously this is not what crypto is about.

If you’re trying to build decentralized payment rails and value-transfer rails, that’s not why people take this industry seriously and commit their careers and livelihoods to it. Equally, one of the developers was posting screenshots of his Phantom wallet with 8-figure gains in it, kind of flexing, which I think is a bad look from the perspective of insider trading.

The cabal—it’s just a terrible look. You’re not supposed to do this when you’re the leader of the free world and you promised to make the space an integral part of the economy. It has an air of grift, grifting. Obviously, the official wallet hasn’t dumped anything yet, but there’s probably a whole lot of grifting going on around the edges, like you said. Finally, even the supposed insiders—the people who are part of this inner crypto council circle—weren’t given the heads-up either. It just leaves a bad taste in everybody’s mouth.

Now, the one difference between this and other forms of value extraction—you did mention the phrase “value extraction”—is that it could be considered a form of political donation. What’s the difference between donating $1 million to the inaugural fund and YOLOing $5,000 on TRUMP? It probably made some of his base a whole lot wealthier as well.

Maybe let’s just think of it as somewhere between a total scam, which would be a disgrace for the United States of America and for crypto, and the next line of Trump products. This is the Trump lottery.

One thing that I will say, just to finish the thought: He freaking legitimized Solana right there. If you’re a Solana holder, you can feel damn good about your bags for the next 4 years.

The casino is called Solana, and Trump just created a massive game at the casino called TRUMP, Melania, and Barron. I view the support for Solana the same way that people would say that SBF supporting Solana means that it goes up in a straight line. As long as he’s aligned with it, that’s great, but he’s also introduced a risk. If he ever decides to do anything not on Solana, Solana is going to dump so hard you can’t even imagine.

With that being said, he’s probably not going to launch anything anytime soon, so I think we’re probably out of the woods on that. But I don’t view it as him giving his stamp of approval to Solana for the long term, because what you always have to remember is that Trump is not a pro-crypto president. He’s a pro-Trump president.

He’ll just do whatever it takes to be good for himself. Whatever is going to be good for him is what he’ll support. If, at some point, he starts getting a huge amount of flak for this meme coin, there’s a 30% chance he disavows it and says, “That was my team. I like crypto. I like Bitcoin, but that was my team and I didn’t really know what was going on. I would have put a stop to it if they had just asked me.”

He’ll find a way out of it if it starts looking bad for him.

Oh, he will. He’s also famous for not having a paper trail, so there’s no wallet tracking that can be traced back to Trump’s individual trading decisions. You bring up a very good point there.

What I will say is that, if we can assume as traders that our framework for assessing Trump’s market-related decisions for the next 4 years should be, “Does this decision help Donald Trump get closer to having his face put on Mount Rushmore, or farther away?” He’s clearly optimizing to be put on Mount Rushmore. He wants his legacy to be “greatest president of all time.” He wants people worshiping statues of him.

With that framework in mind, we can also assume that he’s acutely aware that dabbling his toes into crypto is more dangerous than creating Trump-branded bottles of wine. SBF is sitting in prison right now for a big scam, and Trump is no stranger to legal proceedings, so I think he’s got to be aware of that.

I don’t think we can expect this to turn into a huge debacle. I think it’s somewhere between a national embarrassment and an eyebrow-raising moment. At least this time, unlike the ICO boom, unlike NFTs, and unlike the brief moment in 2021 when people thought crypto was going to go mainstream, crypto is sort of coming of age in the sense that the gambling use case is really at the forefront.

2. Ledger Ad

Trump owns casinos. This is, to me, a Trump-branded game. As sad as it is, that’s all there is to say.

I hope my comments didn’t make you think that I was saying this is a bad thing, because it’s very much not necessarily a bad thing. All of the good things have been thoroughly discussed everywhere else, so I wanted to provide some level of temperance against where it could go wrong.

This is unambiguously, as it stands right now, a very good thing. The reason it’s a very good thing is because it’s drawing a tremendous amount of attention to crypto. Huge amounts of the dumbest people in the world have just become very wealthy, and a lot of that money is going to be recycled.

When people make these kinds of gains, they tend not to hold on to them. They tend to continue to gamble them. That money recycles very well. One thing that really stood out to me was just how poorly the entire rest of the market did, and that has everything to do with what you said in the beginning: You didn’t have time to wire money in. You just had to sell whatever you held and get into TRUMP somehow.

I think we’re slowly going to start to see money come back into these other arenas. I do think this makes it a huge buying opportunity for AI coins—not necessarily for meme coins in general, because I think meme coins are going to be outcompeted by Trump. If your idea is, “I want to buy a leading meme coin,” you have to allocate to TRUMP now.

Whereas AI agents have a real product, a real narrative, and real building. The only thing is that speculation has been drawn away right now. Virtuals’ revenue is down 99% from the highs, and a lot of that is just because the hype cycle has passed and people have stopped talking about AI. That tends to make it a really good time to go in and buy. Once people have stopped talking about something, that’s when you should probably be allocating.

I completely agree. I tweeted something to that effect yesterday. I think promising projects that could be the base layer for a variety of different agents that cross the chasm into the mainstream—in particular, Virtuals and AI16Z—I think these levels are starting to get tasty now.

I obviously bought Virtuals below here and AI16Z above here, but, like you said, I don’t think this was a frothy peak moment for the market. If it were, you would have seen fresh capital allocating to TRUMP and all the other coins going up in sympathy with it.

Instead, people just rotated from their existing meme coins into TRUMP. I do think this is kind of a nail in the coffin for WIF, GOAT, and a lot of these random, no-utility meme coins. Over the long run, though, some of the more interesting projects that are actually building and shipping things people will use—like the Eliza framework, just as an example, or maybe Hyperliquid—have a great entry point here.

You’ve just had a technical sell-off, not a fundamental sell-off. I know I probably look ridiculous talking about fundamentals and meme coins in the same sentence, but a technical sell-off is when you have a bunch of capital exiting the space for exogenous reasons that have nothing to do with the thesis itself.

A fundamental sell-off would be, “All right, new regulation has passed that renders this type of investment less worthy of your time or makes the risk-reward way worse.” This is really the former. It was a technical sell-off, a big liquidity vacuum that drove this thing.

I do think it’s a great investment opportunity for the other AI coins. I also continue to expect that AI mania is coming sometime this year. I don’t think we’ve seen anything close to what mania looks like.

As a barometer for AI mania, here’s an interesting thought experiment: Everybody follows a constellation of accounts on Crypto Twitter. Rewind the clock to when TRUMP was trading at $60 billion or $70 billion near the highs. Look at those hours, and then cross-reference them with the tweets you got in your feed from various accounts shilling that coin and saying it was going to go higher.

Those accounts that were telling you to buy it on the highs, when it was obviously turning into something unsustainably and ridiculously expensive, are the mania accounts. Use those accounts as a barometer. When they start shilling something that’s just 10x, then you know you’re in mania mode and it’s time to reduce.

When the accounts that were shilling TRUMP at $70 billion and telling you it was going to 10x from there start telling you your AI coins are going to 10x after they’ve just 10x’d, that’s when you get out. We’re not even close to that right now. None of those accounts are even talking about AI. Why? Because it hasn’t rallied 100% in the last 24 hours.

Yeah, as they say, wealth is made in bear markets.

Wealth is found in bear markets and then made in bull markets, right?

Sorry, got that wrong.

Important distinction there.

Thank you for correcting me.

That’s okay. I think this can go for a bit. I’m still bullish on TRUMP, funny enough, because I think there are still a lot of people who aren’t in it.

If Trump’s team isn’t completely incompetent—and this is maybe giving him a bit too much credit—then they’re going to figure out a way to add value to this meme. They’re going to figure out how to do something.

Let me talk first of all about why I don’t want to touch this Trump coin with a 10-foot pole. I don’t understand it. My meme coin framework is: If you’re early, ape as fast as you can. Sell your other shitcoins to buy the new thing. If you’re not early, tread with extreme caution.

By the time I turned my phone back on Saturday night, I was clearly not early to this, so I’m remaining disciplined and avoiding this thing like the plague, but watching it interestingly, as you would watch the spread of a plague.

Let me attempt to construct a scenario where Trump gives TRUMP utility and the thing continues to rally. Imagine—although the ethics of this are questionable, which is just his modus operandi at this point—that he announced he was going to give 80% of the proceeds from TRUMP sales to the US Treasury or to the establishment of a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

If he in some way basically said, “I’m going to take the value creation that I’ve enjoyed from this launch and give it to the American people,” then I could easily see foreign governments, companies, and people seeking to curry favor with him by offering to invest in this coin.

That sort of thing goes on behind the scenes all the time. I know this for a fact because I saw how the sausage was made in commodities. It’s the sort of, “Hey, we’ll buy your oil in exchange for you not enacting some policy that hurts us.” WTI—that’s Texas, West Texas Intermediate—is shipped out of various ports in Texas to all sorts of adversaries and allies alike in exchange for all kinds of favors and deals and smoke-filled-back-room-related pacts.

I could easily see TRUMP becoming a commodity that’s treated like that. If you see hints that’s starting to happen, then this thing could get pretty freaking big. I assumed that would happen with Bitcoin, but not this.

Here’s another question: Post-Trump launching this, are any other world leaders going to do it too? Is this going to spread?

I think Cuba is doing something with a shitcoin. I know Maduro created the Petro back in the day, but that obviously didn’t go very far. I do think it sets a precedent, though. It basically gives every other world leader permission to start messing around with crypto.

I’m just looking here. It looks like the Cuba coin was fake. It looks like it was hacked.

Oh, so they did? You are right: The official government did post about the Cubacoin, but then they rescinded it and said, “Sorry, there was an issue with our account.”

How Cuban of them.

Yeah, that was definitely their poverty-stricken marketing guy who was like, “Oh, wow, I can make it.” But not Cuba. Cuba hasn’t done anything, but likely Mark Cuban has.

Oh my God, he tweeted that he wants to have a meme coin that will fund the national debt. It’s pretty funny. He says, “If meme coins are the way, maybe I’ll issue one with a twist. Same terms as Trump: 20% float, same release schedule. One difference: All the revenue from the sale of the coins goes to the US Treasury.”

You know what’s really funny? He doesn’t get it. He goes, “All the revenue from the sale of the coins goes to the US Treasury.” What revenue from what sale of coins? You just sell it, so you have to sell in order to generate revenue, right?

This isn’t like a stock issuance. He’s thinking, “I’m going to issue these coins,” and blah, blah, blah, but I think he’s going to have to sell.

Yeah, also, that’s just called paying your taxes. If you want to give money to the Treasury, you pay your taxes.

Also, let’s say you wanted to give $1 million. It’s a way to pay your taxes but make money while you do it. Imagine if you had a scheme where all of the money that was used to give to the government was a credit on your taxes, so all of the money that Mark Cuban made from this thing was a credit on your taxes if you owned a coin.

3. What's Next For Crypto?

God, I should pitch that. Avi Felman 2028. I can see it coming. Avi for president.

Back in 2021, they branded crypto as Web3. It was amazing PR for the space. It legitimized some of the sketchier aspects of crypto. The word “meme coins” kind of does the same thing. At the end of the day, this should just be called Ponzi lottery coins.

Can you get in faster than the herd for some shiny object that attracts attention for 10 seconds—or maybe 10 minutes, or in the case of Trump, maybe years? These are all just Ponzi coins. They’re just Ponzi schemes or pyramid schemes. I’m not really sure which. Maybe a bit of both.

It’s so weird to me that this is what people are doing with crypto now. Fine, I’ll take it. The broader macroeconomy produces trillions of dollars of value from legitimate activities like farming, services, and trade. I guess some of that has to go into entertainment, and some of the entertainment budget is gambling. This is gambling, so that’s great.

But I would have expected crypto to take a slightly more legitimate turn under the Trump presidency. One thing that I’m looking for as a personal investor—Bitcoin is great, that’s great—but for everything else in my book, I’m trying to keep my finger on the pulse and monitor whether this space will ever veer back, outside of gambling, into slightly more legitimate-seeming things like payments and global trade.

Or are we just—I don’t know, Avi. I want to get your take on this. Is this it? Have we reached the iPhone moment for crypto, and the iPhone is just an online casino? Is that as good as this is going to get?

I would kill myself if this was the iPhone moment for crypto, but in some ways you’re not wrong. Specifically, you’re not wrong because we’ve been saying for a very long time that the whole point of crypto is gambling. The whole point of crypto is for it to go up and for you to be able to make 10x, 20x, or 30x your money.

This is the ultimate lottery ticket. The Trump coin is the ultimate lottery ticket. It doesn’t get bigger than this. It’s basically impossible for any single person on the planet to create a meme coin that generates as much wealth as Trump did. Nobody has that kind of reach. Nobody has that audience.

This was the peak wealth-generation event of a lifetime, and you probably missed it. That’s okay. There will be others, but this was the peak one. When I say “peak wealth generation of a lifetime,” I mean the most amount of money made in the shortest period of time.

There will obviously be things that can make you more money because they’ll be worth more than $100 billion, but I don’t necessarily think there will be anything that goes up to $70 billion as quickly as this thing did ever again.

Trump is the most famous person in the world by an order of magnitude. Tribesmen in the sub-Saharan African plain know who Donald Trump is. I’m trying to think of who’s better known than Trump—maybe Jesus Christ or Michael Jackson.

Unless one of those 2 people comes back to life and launches a meme coin, you’re right, Avi. This was it. This was the moment that generated the most amount of wealth in the shortest period of time, and it’s never happening again.

I’m still processing this, and I don’t even know what it means for crypto. I still think it’s bullish, but I’m kind of embarrassed at the moment.

4. State Of The Market

Yeah, it’s totally nuts. The best thing that I can think of right now is just to buy BTC. Instead of the old BTC-meme-coin barbell that we used to talk about, now it’s a BTC-AI-coin barbell.

I like that. I like that a lot. ETH—forget meme coins. Seriously, forget ETH. Forget meme coins. It might be hard, and you might still hold them, and you might be down, but who’s buying them now? Who’s going to do that?

I think the best—I would make a slight modification to your trade idea. Let’s say you had $100 to invest in crypto. To me—not financial advice—I would say $80 in Bitcoin, $10 in Solana, and $10 in AI coins.

That’s a very lopsided barbell. Maybe your left arm is pressing a lot more weight than your right, but if you’re expecting the AI coins to 10x in mania mode sometime in the next 12 months, your barbell will be pretty even by then.

Maybe Solana will have 3x’d, the AI coins will have 10x’d, and your Bitcoin will have 2x’d, and you’ll be feeling really smart about yourself. Or maybe all this shit is going to zero. But if it is all going to zero, you’d certainly rather be in Bitcoin than some of these other tokens that, in the last 72 hours, went down anywhere from 30% to 80%.

Scary times, man. This is volatile.

Trump didn’t publish any executive orders on crypto on day 1, but he did say he’s going to free someone likely named Ross Ulbricht. I think he’s just getting his major-mandate things out of the way.

I do think he will reach crypto. It’s just not something he’s going to prioritize to the degree that he’s going to put it in his inauguration speech. It’s going to come. We just have to give it some time.

Alexander Good had a good tweet. He said, “For those of you that are incapable of basic analysis, no, he’s not mentioning any crypto during his speech because he just launched a meme coin that went to $70 billion that everyone in the United States heard about.” The dude has not given up on crypto.

And World Liberty Financial is actively buying ETH, actively buying TRON, and actively buying—I think—a few other things. Ethena. Pretty insane.

Oh my God. This is what happens when you put your Gen Z NYU kid in charge of crypto policy. It feels like we’re living in a simulation. This is all so insane.

For anybody who’s listening to this right now, nothing we say is financial advice. Tread very carefully out there. This is some of the wildest price action, volatility, and unscripted, unimaginable series of events that I’ve ever seen in any markets in my career. This is freaking wild.

I don’t know what else, Jonah. What else do you have for me? Should we just wrap it there and let you get back to your dolce vita?

I’m so happy for you, Avi. I’ll be back in the States soon, back to the desk working, but for now I’m going to enjoy these last few hours of dolce vita.

Bless. Love you, man. Great talking to you.

Congratulations, and honestly, I’m so thrilled. What a wonderful moment. Enjoy every second of it. It goes fast. Take care, Avi.

You too. Later.