Return of Retail: Where's The Fast Money? | 1000x

Hello, hello. You've got Avi and Joni here. I want to welcome you guys back to the now-real inaugural first episode, second episode of 1000x podcasts. We took a bit of a hiatus for a few months there for a variety of reasons, but we wanted to make sure that we could bring you this content consistently and via a consistent platform that you guys can come to and expect that we're going to be regular with our talks and appearances. We took a few months to figure out what that would look like. We'll be coming to you for about 45 minutes to an hour every two weeks, talking about our takes on the market, and I'm super excited about it. Most of the people who pull up this podcast, at least for the first one, probably know us from either Twitter, a previous podcast, or other podcast experiences, so I won't waste too much time on introductions. Your time is valuable, so we can hop right in.

I'm excited too, Avi. Glad to be doing this. Episode zero was a good chance to workshop how we're going to do this podcast. Since then, it's been a pretty busy market. We were bullish, and we were right: crypto's price pretty much doubled over the course of our hiatus. Now it's off 10–12% in what looks like a scary retracement. A lot of people in the market are asking themselves, “Is this just a return to the $27,000–$28,000 range that we had since the banking crisis, or is this the beginning of a fresh downtrend that's going to wipe out a lot of wealth?”

I tend to think it's the former. I think people often get pretty worked up about regulatory headwinds, fire sales from perceived liquidations, Mt. Gox, and everything else. I think most of that is frankly priced in. People often ignore the second derivative of the information: Is the regulatory climate going to get worse or less bad from here? Can it even get any worse than this?

I'm more of an optimist; that's my bias. I think the regulatory climate will become less restrictive rather than more restrictive, and I think the market is more than robust enough to absorb the upcoming wave of liquidations. Short-term chop is possible, with a bit of amplitude, but there's not much to do in the near term. Medium to long term, I'm still pretty bullish. What do you think?

It's tough, and I'll give you the 3 things I'm thinking about right now. The first is that, on the way up, it was very hard for me—maybe less hard for you—to identify the type of buyer who was buying after $28,000 and $29,000. Who were the people coming in and really hammering it?

From $20,000 to $25,000 or $26,000, based on the way the market was trading, the average order sizes going through, and the way CME open interest was trading versus open interest on Binance, OKX, Huobi, and all these other platforms, you could make the argument that it was high-net-worth individuals, large macro funds, potentially people from Hong Kong and Dubai coming into the market, and people betting on the digital-gold narrative.

Gold 2.0 was ripping as well. Gold went up 10–15% from the bottom of the banking crisis. I think a lot of those buyers dissipated around $28,000. You just didn't see that type of activity in the market.

What we were betting on at that point was retail coming in and pushing it higher—maybe pushing it to $33,000 or $35,000. You get above $30,000, and maybe retail mania comes back in. What actually ended up happening is that a lot of people, including ourselves, were positioned a little early for a potential rotation from Bitcoin into altcoins, expecting retail to come in. That didn't materialize.

So the first question is: Who were the buyers on the way up? We kind of knew until $28,000. We bet on retail coming in after $28,000 and pushing it to $30,000, but retail only managed to push it a little higher. It didn't extend to altcoins. There wasn't retail there for altcoins.

The second question is: How do you know that? What do you look at? What should listeners look at to see, “Hey, is retail starting to FOMO into this asset?”

Unfortunately, for me, a lot of that is hindsight. Looking back, the biggest altcoin moves from the large caps were 15–20%. There wasn't a ton of rotation from Bitcoin into altcoins, there didn't seem to be a massive increase in volumes on derivative products on Binance, OKX, or Huobi, and in hindsight, I didn't see retail come in in a large way.

Now we have a situation where Bitcoin is trading at $27,500, and my question is: If retail probably isn't going to buy the dip because they didn't buy the breakout—and retail tends to buy breakouts more than dips—then you have to bet that the first set of buyers are going to come back into the market and drive this higher.

That means high-net-worth individuals and people betting on gold. But gold is now trading poorly, equities are trading okay, and there's actually been a decoupling of Bitcoin from equities in the wrong direction. Before, there was a decoupling in the right direction.

My view is that the type of buyer who propelled us up is likely no longer present. Bitcoin trades in a very trend-heavy fashion. We trended all the way from $20,000 to $30,000, and we've seemingly broken the trend now.

If I had to put a gun to my head and say where Bitcoin will be in a month, I'd say $24,000. That's not a massive move for Bitcoin. I'd put it at a 60% chance of $24,000 and a 40% chance of $30,000.

What that means to me is that I probably don't want to be in altcoins. I probably want to hold a reasonable amount of cash, and I want to be cautious with my buying. I think the original high-net-worth buyers are going to look for value levels, and I don't necessarily think that $27,000 or $27,500 is that value level.

It's kind of just that post-banking-crisis range. It's not really something where you say, “Wow, this is a real generational buying opportunity.” At $24,000, I think you'd attract some people—certainly the people who are saying, “Maybe I'm a little too late. Should I have bought when it was trading at $30,000?”

I have a bit of a tinfoil-hat thesis about who the mystery Bitcoin buyer was. My conspiracy theory is that, as part of the de-dollarization narrative—or, to abstract away from that phrase for a second—governments like China hold $10 trillion worth of U.S. dollar-denominated securities, cash, and cash equivalents.

They're looking at what happened last year with the Ukraine war and what the U.S. Treasury effectively did to Russia's U.S. dollar-denominated assets. They took them. Those governments are thinking, “Maybe we should let a little bit of this U.S. dollar-denominated exposure roll off and reinvest it into other things.”

You can see that happening in gold. The Chinese central bank publishes its holdings on a delayed basis. You don't know whether the data is perfect, but its reported holdings are going up; they're not staying static.

If central banks are accumulating nondollar-denominated bearer assets like gold and reducing their U.S. dollar-denominated holdings, they're probably doing something similar with crypto: a bearer asset and an alternative investment. That was my hunch, especially when Bitcoin started outperforming during the Asia session rather than during North American stock-exchange hours over the course of that last leg up from $28,000 to $30,000.

Now that buying is absent. Usually, when you have a big buyer in the market—an elephant in the room—and prices don't seem to reflect fundamental reality because flows are driving prices, one of 2 things happens. What definitely doesn't happen is equilibrium. Either the elephant in the room is bigger than everybody expects and the market takes off, or the elephant gets sleepy, walks back into the jungle, falls asleep, and prices come back down. I think the latter is what just happened. I don't know—is that crazy?

No, I don't think it's crazy. I remember us talking about this offline, when we were looking at the balance sheets of China and India. There has been a lot of gold accumulation. I don't necessarily know if I'd go so far as to say that governments themselves are buying, but it's possible that government-funded vehicles are buying through a couple of layers and allocating.

What I think is absolutely true is that the banking crisis caused a lot of people in Silicon Valley to buy Bitcoin. It caused a lot of high-net-worth individuals to buy. It also reinvigorated the narrative for people overseas.

The opening of Hong Kong to crypto is very important. In June, they'll be allowing retail trading in Hong Kong. That's anecdotal, but it probably led to reasonable amounts of buying from Hong Kong, because people saw, “I can access crypto again. I can buy crypto again. Maybe I can front-run the smaller retail tickets once it's opened up to them.”

Then you look at what was happening in Russia, with foreign reserves being frozen. That's always in the back of your mind, especially as things heat up between the U.S. and China. There's a lot of confluence for why you might get allocation to crypto, and it had to come from somewhere.

I also think that Changpeng Zhao buying probably helped a bit.

I don't know anything about that, but that's an interesting theory.

At this point, I agree with you that Hong Kong is super relevant. It's a good reminder to all of us, in any market, that unless the G20 nations get together and ban this stuff, it's a global market. One government—even one as powerful as the United States—can't necessarily control this market effectively or unilaterally.

When China banned crypto, it was obviously negative for crypto a few years ago, but the U.S. really stepped up and things took off from there. Now you see the pendulum swinging back the other way. Hong Kong is deregulating just as the U.S. is bolstering its regulatory efforts.

In my opinion, I don't want to speak too strongly in case people are listening too closely to us and we get too big, but I think it's a massive strategic mistake for the U.S. to make right now. Everybody else is actually very excited about it. Even the U.K. is excited about it.

One thing that's going to be very interesting is that our internal opinion is that there's probably going to be some resolution, either positive or negative, to the Ripple lawsuit in the next 2–3 months. There's some decision point coming that's going to give the market a lot of information about how the case is going to go.

If the headline is positive, you probably want to buy not just Ripple but as many altcoins as you possibly can, especially the ones that have been deemed high-risk securities. DeFi probably does very well that day. If it's negative, continue holding no altcoins, because right now you probably shouldn't be holding that many anyway.

That's an interesting point. Crypto is one of those markets that's nascent enough that you still have some time to react to news. In TradFi, if OPEC comes out with a decision to cut and you're trying to click “Buy” on the NYMEX, you're just too late.

Meanwhile, you seem to have an amazing track record of reacting to these things. What sort of time frames do you see them play out over? If there were a decision in that lawsuit, or perhaps some sort of guidance that came out of Washington, it might be too late to trade XRP. How would you think about rolling risk out the curve into altcoins?

I think about it as 2 axes. Time isn't really one of them. It's price movement and the relevance of the news. Price movement is generally correlated with time, but not always. Sometimes you get pretty slow reactions.

Generally, the more complicated the news, the more edge there is. For example, if the Ripple lawsuit headline says that Ripple has settled for a fine, that doesn't really tell you that much. You need to figure out exactly what happened. Did they settle without admitting guilt? Did they say it was a security at the time of issuance but isn't a security now? Did they say it's a security at the time of issuance and is still a security, and then pay a fine and shut down?

You have to understand what is good for the market and what is bad for the market. That comes out in the docket, but it might not appear directly in the Bloomberg headline. You might actually have to open the PDF and read through it.

I've noticed that, in crypto—and this has generally become better over time, as it would in any market—things take a while to be digested by the market. Some things also happen inefficiently.

One example is that every Dogecoin move caused by an Elon Musk tweet has reverted within 48–72 hours. The hit rate on that trade is insanely high. If you sell Dogecoin 45 minutes to an hour after an Elon tweet about Dogecoin, your hit rate is around 90%. You can actually play it from both sides.

I remember one example from a few months ago, when the market was ripping. SAND had announced a partnership with Saudi Arabia to invest in one of its games. I’m forgetting the exact details of the news, but it went up 6–7% on the news.

That was on a day when Bitcoin and Ethereum were ripping. When we saw it, we were late to the news, but it was up 6–7% on a day when the market was ripping aggressively and the theme of the moment—the animal spirits of the moment—was centered around Dubai and Middle Eastern money. It was still probably a good trade because it was within 5–6% of the benchmarks. That's spitting distance from the benchmarks; it's not that much.

So you buy it, it ends up 20% higher, and then you clip that. If it had happened in a market where Bitcoin was down 1%, I probably wouldn't have taken that trade. You have to contextualize it within what's happening in the rest of the market: How many people are staring at this stuff, and how much money is there to move around?

I'd say that now is a market where you need to be very careful with those types of trades, because there doesn't seem to be a lot of trading interest.

Retail interest is what you have to monitor. Back in the day, there was the Coinbase premium. If Coinbase traded above a bunch of other exchanges, you knew that retail was buying. Maybe one day we'll get a Hong Kong premium.

Listeners should try to develop some metric for retail-driven strength to use as a barometer. Should you be trying to do these riskier altcoin trades, or should you stick to Bitcoin and Ether, stay disciplined, stay patient, and wait?

Interestingly, to your point, Avi, in retrospect, the best opportunity of the year would have been one I was too scared to capitalize on at any reasonable size: the dip buy during the banking crisis. On-chain activity was going crazy. People were swapping stablecoins into Bitcoin and Ether because Bitcoin and Ether seemed more stable than the stablecoins.

There was clearly a shift in the paradigm from, “This is a correlated macro asset,” to, “This crypto-asset thing might actually be fulfilling its promise as a banking-system alternative.” People who saw that coming had a real opportunity in the benchmarks that didn't play out too quickly to react to.

I think we might have another one of those opportunities coming down the pike, possibly as the debt ceiling approaches. Crypto people aren't necessarily as focused on this as Treasury traders or TradFi participants, but this one seems real. Avi Felman

What are you seeing with the debt ceiling, Jonah? What worries you?

In 2011, the United States of America was downgraded from AAA—not because of an inability to pay, but because of a potential unwillingness to pay. That was a big deal. Gold began a 20–30% rally—I forget exactly how much—and a lot of markets tanked while gold went up.

The government technically shut down in December 2019. They kept paying their debt and servicing their coupon payments, and they repaid the principal on Treasury bills. They just shut down government services. They subordinated government employees and their salaries to servicing the debt, putting the debt holders first.

Now we have a situation where the political vitriol is just as high, if not higher, than it was then. Unlike then, interest rates aren't zero. Mom and Pop are holding money-market funds trying to earn 4–5%, and people are holding Treasury bills. Billions and billions of dollars of short-term securities roll off every month.

If the government were actually to default—if there were a standoff in Congress that resulted in no resolution whatsoever—you would have an unprecedented event in financial history, whereby the supposed risk-free rate would no longer be risk-free. The United States government would say, “We owe you $100,000, but we don't have that for you right now. Wait a week or 2 until we figure this out in Congress.”

What do you think gold or Bitcoin could do in a scenario like that?

It doesn't look like that many people are worried about this, unless I'm not paying attention to the right place. What are the timelines in your head for when you think this would become a real issue?

Right now, a Treasury bill expiring in May yields 3.3–3.4%. A Treasury bill expiring in June yields 4.5–4.8%. You've got 150 basis points of differential in yield for government securities with a 1-month difference in maturity. That tells you pretty much all you need to know about the trepidation around the date when the United States might potentially default.

It was supposed to be late June or early July, but they've moved that forward because tax receipts were supposedly underwhelming. I can't believe they're even discussing this. It's in every major newspaper on the front page, but the markets aren't necessarily getting roiled yet because we've been through a few of these that resolved in an okay fashion.

I think in that scenario, it would be interesting to look at the exact historical analog of what gold did during that period.

Both times, it was real. Gold moved 30%.

Okay, you confirmed that. Nice.

I bet Bitcoin would do quite well in that scenario.

Me too.

If you look at the correlations between Bitcoin and gold, and Bitcoin and equities, they've basically flipped over the last month. Bitcoin is now much more correlated with gold than it is with equities.

If that causes gold to rip, Bitcoin rips. It would probably catalyze a decent amount of high-net-worth buying. The one thing I worry about with Bitcoin—and this has been discussed a decent amount, but it's important to discuss it more—is that the supply-side story is still quite large. You have government sales of Bitcoin and Mt. Gox sales coming through.

My take is that it would be similar to what happened before the banking crisis. I think it pushed up the floor of Bitcoin. A lot of new holders came in because they were worried about the banking crisis, and some percentage of those holders will become long-term holders and stick with the asset for a while.

That doesn't necessarily mean this thing goes up in a straight line. I would bet that something similar happens: You probably get a 15–20% move in Bitcoin, followed by a retracement to a level higher than where it was before—maybe a 20–30% move, depending on how serious it is and how much gold moves—and then some sort of retracement.

The story of Bitcoin has always been that it really rockets when retail gets involved. For the next month or 2, potentially 3–4 months, we're probably going to trade sideways to lower unless we get a massive catalyst like this.

I wouldn't view this as a long-term catalyst to buoy the price of Bitcoin to $40,000. I'd view it as an opportunity to trade, similar to what the banking crisis was, with the additional benefit that it makes Bitcoin better over the long term by converting more people into holders.

You have a really good perspective on that. You've made a career for yourself not just by being long for the big upswings, but also by being nimble and getting in and out as appropriate.

I tend to focus more on the long term, because that's a framework you can cling to when things are going badly and you're staring at a bunch of red numbers. But it's important—for all of us, including us—to think more critically about how to lighten up ahead of potential problems and re-add when things look scary but are actually constructive.

There is some altcoin buying out there. Pepe just did a 1,000x. What the heck happened there? That's a wild one.

If I knew what was happening there, I would have been all in on Pepe. Did you buy any?

No, I just saw it and thought, “What is this thing?” It was alive for about 3 days, and then Pepe the Frog was worth $125 million.

I feel like these things do this from time to time. If I had to make a bet, I would bet that Pepe becomes the Shiba Inu of the next cycle. It probably does something so absurd that you hate yourself for not owning any.

Crypto tends to find one asset and pile into it completely. Then people probably forget about it for 12 months, and suddenly, in the middle of a bull cycle, when retail interest comes back, it does another 50x. Maybe it's down 90% first, and then it goes up 100x.

When we talk about retail, it's really about new money. I would bet that, if we ran the numbers on the owners of Pepe, the vast majority would be people who were already pretty deep into crypto.

With something like Shiba Inu, a lot of the people buying during the crazy bull run were buying their first token. They had been on TikTok, heard about Shiba Inu, watched a tutorial on how to get onto Uniswap, bought some Ether, sent it over, and bought Shiba Inu. The whole reason they bought Ether was to buy Shiba Inu. There was a meaningful amount of new money coming into the door.

Pepe is just an extension of people in crypto getting bored. I would bet it's mostly DeFi insiders.

So you think people are getting into these memecoins through Bitcoin and Ether? They're not just buying Pepe with fiat; they're moving value around that was already in the ecosystem?

That would be my guess for now. With that being said, I think the branding is so hilarious that it probably makes a crazy move in the next bull run.

Again, none of this is investment advice, but you're not wrong. What's crazy is that it highlights how actual wealth somehow got created there.

Crypto has this fantastic dichotomy between Bitcoin being geopolitically relevant and keeping central banks honest—there are even arguments that it's a dark horse for the next global reserve currency—and Ethereum being a world computer with fantastic technology and scaling solutions of remarkable complexity.

Then, on the other end of the spectrum, you have this. You could say it's bad or less worthwhile, but you could also say that there is a casino element, an identity element, or a community element in certain pockets of crypto that actually has value—something traditional finance completely ignores. Penny stocks don't take that into account.

I think it's an interesting phenomenon to keep tabs on, even if you're trying to pretend to be a serious professional, or are one.

You need to, because for better or worse, a big portion of the product experience of crypto is the ability to gamble and bet on these things. If Pepe does well, and a bunch of memecoins rip really hard, that's actually good for Ethereum if they're built on Ethereum. If a bunch of coins on Solana rip really hard, that's good for Solana.

One thing that has been striking over the last 6 months, especially post-FTX, is that effectively every other Layer 1 has died in terms of activity and interest relative to Ethereum and Layer 2s built on top of Ethereum. It feels like you have to be a massive contrarian at this point to bet on the app-chain thesis—to bet on something like Polkadot or Cosmos.

How would you elevator-pitch the app-chain thesis? What is it, for people who don't know?

The app-chain thesis is really about native interoperability and customizable blockchains. If you have a Layer 2 on Ethereum, that Layer 2 is effectively another layer on which to build a bunch of applications, but those applications still have to share the same block space. There's generally a set format for the data that exists on that Layer 2.

Every app has to interact with the same programming layer. An app chain is more customizable: You can have one chain per app and customize that chain.

For example, if you have a trading platform like GMX that exists on an app chain, you might want to make sure that, when transactions are ordered, liquidation transactions get priority. That gives you a lower chance of getting liquidated on that chain.

If you're an exchange that isn't like GMX—if you're Uniswap, for example—you're built on a chain that doesn't have that built in, because there's no reason for it to be built in. It introduces more customizability, and you have native interoperability between the 2.

The main issues are that the user interface and user experience really suck right now, interoperability doesn't really exist at a high level, and it's more complicated to build your own custom chains. The developer community just hasn't gravitated there.

You obviously get a lot more security with Layer 2s and Ethereum right now. But I remember that even 2 years ago, people were not really bullish on the app-chain thesis. Maybe my information is outdated, but at a high level, it seems like people aren't really interested in it anymore.

I always like being contrarian. It is definitely a contrarian moment to bet on alt-Layer 1s, app chains, and basically any scaling solution or scaled Layer 1 that isn't in vogue right now.

What happened during this most recent consolidation cycle and bear market is that the market asked, “Who cares? You've built all these really fast chains, but is there even demand for Ethereum right now? Do we need all this block space? Do we need to invest time and effort building applications on these alternative blockchains when Ethereum works just fine for the rudimentary things we want to put on-chain?”

Maybe that was a valid thesis, but maybe the pendulum will swing the other way in the next 6 months. It's hard to bet on, though—very hard to bet on, especially given the decimation in altcoins.

I guess what I would look for as a leading indicator is real activity starting up. Solana is an interesting one because I think Solana is priced for failure. I don't want to say it's priced as a dead asset, because it's still valuable, but it's so tightly controlled by people who deeply believe in it that it's kind of priced for failure.

There is zero fast money in this thing right now.

Yeah.

Any hint of rejuvenation from Solana probably skyrockets it. I think it would take one big game drop. There are just no fast-money buyers in it right now.

There are people like Chris Burniske who sit around on Twitter and say, “Hey, Solana is actually a pretty good asset if you like Multicoin.” The only thing you really have to worry about with Solana is the forced selling from FTX.

The unlocks?

Solana is mostly unlocked, so it's more about potential redemptions from Multicoin. With FTX, it will probably take a year or so to actually start selling, as far as we understand it.

I'll double-check with my lawyers and follow up with a correction if I'm wrong, but that's the latest information we have. It's going to take a while to actually start selling those assets. At least in the short term, I'm not particularly worried about that.

NEAR is another one where I have no idea what's going on. It's hard to follow these things. They died a terrible death, in my opinion. NEAR was the greatest thing since sliced bread for a while, and then it faded into the backdrop fairly quickly.

I go back and forth on alt-Layer 1s. On the one hand, as you said, it's time to be a contrarian. They've been beaten up to a degree that Ethereum just hasn't, and I do think there will be another bull cycle. So put on a survivable amount of this stuff, hold on, and put your eggs in a few different baskets.

The other side of me wonders whether the existing offerings of Layer 1s have had their reasons to exist completely disproven. Have they fallen flat on their promises? Solana got taken out by a walking app. That was too much for this performant, vertically integrated chain to handle.

NEAR was supposed to offer an unbelievable user experience, and then nobody showed up to the party. I don't understand it. Just like $30,000 Bitcoin, it doesn't feel like a stable equilibrium. These things are either going to go up a lot or down a lot. They're certainly not going to float around in a correlated way with Ether and trade one-to-one.

I agree. The issue is that all the activity has migrated away, so these things are floating around with pretty inflated valuations. They're trying to work hard on the business-development side.

What it takes for these things to really take off is that they've lost the organic war. They've lost the ability to organically attract developers in crypto to build on their platforms and to organically attract retail.

They're going to have to win big accounts. For example, with Amazon's NFT platform, I don't know what chain it's built on, but whoever it's built on—unless it's a custom chain—probably does very well.

What if Snapchat decides to launch a chain and partners with one of the top Layer 1s that isn't Ethereum? That probably brings a lot of users to that chain.

The winners of Layer 1s probably aren't going to come from massive organic growth. At this point, it will probably be a top-down, business-development-heavy approach. The organic developer growth is entirely on Ethereum and its Layer 2s.

Business development is harder when there's a massive regulatory headwind targeting the gateways, on-ramps, and off-ramps between fiat and crypto. It definitely makes it scarier for Web2 companies to dabble.

How's your day?

It's been nice. I traded some crypto. I didn't look at the markets as much as I usually do, although I always look at the markets for 2–3 hours a day. That was the extent of it today.

I actually managed to take some time off this weekend and a little bit this evening. It's Avi's birthday. I'm an old man now.

It's pretty exciting. I hope I never catch up with you, Jonah.

I think it's good to take a little break from the market sometimes. Crypto is just too much. At least oil would give me my weekends. This is nonstop, so you have to impose a little bit of a break; otherwise, you'll lose your mind.

I agree. Crypto is also one of those things that completely trashes your dopamine. You're constantly getting dopamine from something: either prices are doing what you want them to do, or you're feeling pain because they aren't. You're also constantly on Twitter or talking to somebody about it.

It's an overwhelming presence in your life, and it can make it hard to step back and look at the big picture unless you force yourself to take breaks.

Totally. Even 24 hours is enough in my experience. Sit with your own thoughts for 10 or 15 minutes, take a walk, and go outside.

How many people do I know who just don't do that? They don't give themselves any silence at all. At every point during the day, they're listening to music, looking at TradingView, or on Telegram or Twitter. This isn't a self-help podcast, though.

Maybe it should be. In traditional finance, 15 or 16 years ago, cell phones weren't a constant interruption. There was no Slack, and Bloomberg messaging was pretty much the most real-time form of market communication. Markets had hours.

Things were old-fashioned in a way. Now there's this nonstop barrage of information, dopamine, or the lack thereof. When it's tempting to click around and buy some memecoin because you're bored, I find it's ultimately time to step back, cling to a medium- or long-term thesis, and try to do less. That's how I avoid problems.

I think that's a very fair approach to the market. I also know that every now and then you keep Shabbat.

Yep, that's right. I heard you do the same every now and then. You already told me.

What else is going on in the markets today?

If you're in crypto, your long-term thesis has to be that there's some kind of financial relevance to this asset that exceeds gambling. When you see a 10.2% or 10.1% inflation print in the U.K., or what's going on in Argentina or Lebanon, those are little macro reminders of why Bitcoin is so valuable—or why you might consider buying it.

There are 2 things that have really stood out. On the monetary side, there's been a tremendous amount of strife over the last year or 2 in the macro world and in the places you mentioned. That really highlights why Bitcoin is so valuable.

The second point is newer: the rise of AI and all these deepfakes. There's going to be so much insane content that you won't know whether it's real. There was a song produced by AI that was a Drake copy and sounded exactly like him.

That verification—knowing whether you're a real human and whether a piece of content was produced by a real human. Is Ron DeSantis actually saying that, or was it faked? That can be solved in some ways by crypto. You can say, “Prove that you produced this video,” in the same way that you prove that you own an address with a digital signature.

That's a fantastic point. There is immutability. For the chains that have relevance today, you can prove that something happened with a timestamp and a settlement.

Those are the overarching themes to wrap up with. They're the 2 most interesting things I'm seeing right now in the crypto world.

To recap the markets, things haven't really changed in the last 45 minutes since we started recording. But if you put a gun to my head, I think Bitcoin is at $24,000 in the next month.

Gun to your head, Jonah: $24,000 or $30,000?

24.

Okay, we’re on the same page. Not investment advice, of course. None of this is—crypto’s risky. What a sobering thought from a long-term crypto bull. Just another reminder to stay safe out there, be disciplined, and not go crazy with risk. Tell our listeners: stay safe and have a good day, evening, or night. Enjoy yourself wherever you are out there. Thanks for listening.