Still Time To Be Bullish?

I think what we're seeing is a maturation of the asset class, which means for you, the listener, the important takeaway is just to be more patient with positioning and let things play out.

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Welcome back to another ThousandX podcast.

Excited to be talking with you, Jonah, again. Sorry I was feeling a little under the weather the last few days, but feeling much better now, especially because of the price action. How are you doing, Jonah?

Doing good. My portfolio's close to all-time highs, so I'm feeling happy. I think what's interesting is that there's some commentary on X about how everybody's expecting one last pump before the cycle ends. People are getting tired of this cycle because it isn't a face-ripping 10x-er like maybe the previous one was, where everyone was just getting rich on everything, and even a monkey throwing darts could end up with some pretty substantial bags.

Bitcoin's been ranging for a while, and altcoins have been hit or miss. Some of them have been amazing, while others have just been kind of meh. I think what I would ascribe all of this hesitance on X to is impatience and, I would say, general—it's not amateur hour, but—immaturity. Why should every cycle have to be the same, and why should every cycle have to conclude with insane, parabolic, upward, melt-up price action?

I don't necessarily think that's the case. I think we may be in for a 6- or 7-year cycle where we're just in an upward, choppy grind for years as crypto gets widespread adoption, and all of the bullish fundamentals that happened in the last 6 months—the bullishness of those deregulatory actions and institutional adoption—start to proliferate by osmosis into the crypto ecosystem. It could just take a while and be less aggressive.

I'm not throwing in the towel. I don't think there's going to be one last pump and then it dumps. I think this may just be a little too slow for the moon boys out there. What do you think?

Yeah, I think it has been slow for the moon boys. It's been slow for everybody. It's been a choppy grind higher. Things have tended to move a little more slowly this cycle, except for Oracle today, which is up 40%, which is crazy. We'll get to that.

You get these 5% to 15% days from a lot of assets, but you don't get the 100% moves where everybody crowds into the same coin for 3 weeks—the kind of absurdity that you saw in 2021. I still remember when BNB went from about $35 to $400 in the span of 4 weeks. You're just not seeing that. Even something like Hyperliquid took months to rebound from that $9 sell-off level to the $50 that it is now. It took months and months and months to accomplish that.

I think what we're seeing is a maturation of the asset class, which means for you, the listener, the important takeaway is just to be more patient with positioning and let things play out. I can give you 2 separate examples of this that happened recently.

9 days ago, I tweeted out that I was overweight Solana and that I was long because of the new stuff we'd heard about the cash component of these digital asset treasuries that are coming up. The new component is that they're raising cash. Some of that cash is being used to buy locked SOL, so there is some circularity there, but at least 80%, as far as I'm hearing, is earmarked to buy fresh Solana on the market, with 20% or so reserved to buy that locked SOL. That was very different from the other structures.

I got long Solana around $195, and we chopped for a bit. The news did not immediately come out. There was a bit of chop, and even now we're only up 15%. It's not like the thing doubled. I still hold on to some of that Solana, but I took off most of the overweight position that I held as the trade. It took almost 2 weeks to play out. That took some time to get into the markets.

Another good example of this is the Galaxy trade that people have been talking about. Today, it traded from $30 down to $22, back up to $27. It's been ranging, but I'm still bullish on the stock. I'm still bullish on the asset, especially now that Oracle has done very well. I'm bullish on the idea that this data center is going to provide a ton of value to Galaxy, that it isn't being priced in effectively by the market, and that they're going to be able to sign a bunch of contracts moving forward and increase the value of the stock.

But it's not instant gratification, right? You're not getting into an asset and having it immediately go up 75%, which is happening more so in the memecoin circles. Another great example of this trade was the PUMP trade. A lot of people said, “I think accumulating it between $2 billion and $3 billion is a great trade,” and it took a while. It took a few weeks for that thesis to play out.

What I'm trying to explain to the listener here is: build some conviction in a thesis and sit in it. You might not want to be trading ridiculously actively on a week-to-week basis as you might have in a prior cycle. Talking about what is enticing in this market, it's stuff where you can get some sort of edge on the market and say, “I think Galaxy's AI data center is undervalued,” or, “I think Pump.fun is going to be like Uniswap versus SushiSwap. I think BONK's going to fade and PUMP's going to come back, so I'm just going to accumulate and wait.” That happened.

Or, “I think that this adoption of ENA is going to continue to kick off the flywheel and continue to massively grow, and therefore I'm going to get long.” Hyperliquid is another great example of this. Even though everyone knew it was doing buybacks, it still traded from $40 to $45 for a substantial period of time, allowing people to get in and get that 20% to 25% trade.

It just wasn't the hot coin of the moment, and it was going to take a little bit for the sellers to sell to the new buyers for the average entry price to go up. Then it started going up again, and now it's trading really well. I guess patience is the key here. Find specific assets. I think Syrup is going to be another one that we've talked about for a while. You kind of just have to wait it out; it will prove itself.

This is not the market to be chasing flash-in-the-pan stuff right now. This is a market where you can actually invest. Another great example of this could be BNB. I think there's a slow burn on BNB right now. I see no reason why it shouldn't trade over $1,000 in short order, given the fact that you have the U.S. government and the CFTC coming out and saying that they might open perps to U.S. investors. That's huge.

Huge.

Obviously, Binance cares a lot about the token, and Binance has still stuck around and is still doing extremely well. If there's even a shift from a 5% to a 30% chance that U.S. investors get access to Binance, BNB should be at least 10% to 20% higher right now. That's actually a position that I have on in the book right now.

Interesting. My book's pretty limited here. First of all, I agree with your take. It basically goes back to your old framework of value and momentum, right? Is there value? Can investors reasonably expect a 2x to 3x bagger in the near term? That's value. Is there momentum? Is the thing trending up? This is the Avi framework.

Maybe we should add a third thing in there, which is fundamentals. Now you have the golden triangle, the holy trinity: value, momentum, and fundamentals. I was looking at Pump. I have a Blockworks Research account now because they sponsor our pod, so I just pulled it up there. You can see that they're doing $1.3 million to $2.5 million a day in revenue because people are still launching shitcoins with reckless abandon.

We thought this was a last-summer thing. It's not. All these green bars are pretty recent, and their buybacks reflect that. Maybe there's a 1- or 2-day lag, but it looks like they're taking most of their revenue and doing buybacks with it. If they buy back $1.5 million a day, that's $500 million to $600 million a year worth of buybacks. That's a pretty substantial percentage of their float. I think it's—what is it? Yeah, that's a lot of their float.

I don't have their market cap committed to memory. FDV is like $5.5 billion, and market cap's something under $2 billion. They're really buying back a significant percentage of what's out there.

As weird a trade as it is, even if you don't believe in it, you can still invest with that value thesis because it's 1/10th the price of Hyperliquid. There's momentum—no denying that—and the fundamentals are there, and you can literally track it on a Blockworks dashboard or any other dashboard. As soon as the fundamentals disappear, you'll know. You could see if they have a couple of bad revenue days in a row, and you can start to think about it.

It's kind of like that ETF tracker that we use to trade around the Bitcoin ETF and the ETH ETF. You just watch it every day and monitor it. So: value, momentum, and fundamentals.

A couple of other things you mentioned: Oracle stock. Holy moly, Larry Ellison is the richest guy in the world now. Who saw that coming? Oracle's kind of like a dino coin to me. That thing has been around since before I was born, and it's still going. Hats off to Larry Ellison. What an absolute gangster.

Oh, yeah. And richest man in the world now, which is pretty cool. One of the things that I really liked about what he did in the whole story is—I don't know if you know this—but I think a little more than 10 years ago, his stake in Oracle was 27%. He got it up to around 40% because Oracle kept buying back stock, and he never sold his stock back. He never took part in the buybacks.

They just destroyed the shares that they bought back, of course, and he continued to increase his ownership of the company, which I thought was awesome. One of the things that actually reminds me a little bit of what I think the Ripple guys are doing right now is Ripple equity.

So, if you go look at Ripple equity where it trades right now, I think it's trading—

Ripple equity or XRP?

XRP—Ripple equity. Okay, so Ripple equity. Oh, I guess it's trading up. It's trading at around $137 on the secondary markets. They're doing a stock buyback for substantially higher than that right now. They just sent it out to their equity holders, and pretty consistently over the last, I call it, 2 or 3 years, they've just been buying back their stock.

By all accounts, it's been a phenomenal trade for them. They did, I think, their first buyback at around $60, their second buyback at around $80, and now they're doing one at $250. They just keep buying back, and the stock just keeps going up. All the equity holders max out. It's basically fully subscribed each time.

It tells you a lot about how bullish the insiders are. They see everything that's going on, and they're ridiculously bullish if they're willing to buy back here. Where do they think the stock is going to go? That's the question. Obviously, when you're stuck in an illiquid stock like Ripple, this is kind of your only path to liquidity other than shopping it around on the secondary market.

Basically, everybody takes it because of that fact: “Okay, well, I have no idea when I'm going to get liquidity.” They cap it at 5% of the overall float, so you can sell up to 5% of your Ripple stock. All this to say, I think Ripple's probably planning on going public soon, and that's probably pretty good for the price of XRP and for everything Ripple-related.

So they're traders. They know what they're doing. They're not buying it back because they want to—

Hold it for the long haul. They're just going to IPO and sell it to other investors.

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There's so many of these companies that just break my trading brain. There's Ripple. Have you seen the Tron chart recently?

No. Tell me more.

It is the smoothest chart in crypto. Pull it up in TradingView or CoinGecko or something. I've looked at the weekly chart, and I've never seen a chart this smooth in crypto. No token appreciates like this.

It hasn't been on my radar because I've dismissed it as a cult-of-personality coin around His Eminence, Justin Sun. I've also dismissed it because it's basically the fastest chain for Tether, so it's just a crime chain.

But now that I'm thinking about it, you have Justin Sun and the other big crime family of crypto, the Trumps, kind of getting into bed with each other. As on-chain GDP grows, crime on-chain will grow. None of the other stablecoin chains—Plasma or Tempo, which we should talk about, the new Stripe and Paradigm decentralized, air-quotes chain—are going to compete in the crime space.

Tron might just remain a monopoly for crime on-chain. They're kind of like Monero, or what Monero wanted to be, for transferring value between sketchy actors with no KYC. So I don't know. I'm just looking at the chart—

It's just so easily trackable. I think that's the issue.

But looking at the chart, I think that's more a function of Justin Sun propping up the prices. For the record, I'm not suggesting that listeners go and commit crime on-chain. None of this is investment advice. I'm not suggesting you buy Tron.

I'm just saying, Avi, this chart has the best Sharpe ratio I've seen in our space ever. I kind of want to buy it. What am I missing?

I don't think you're missing anything. I think the only thing you're missing is that it's an amazing Sharpe ratio in a bull market, and that in a bear market—or in a drawdown—he has no capital to actually defend this thing.

It does look manipulated. It's too smooth.

And so it probably sees a 70% to 90% drawdown—probably more like a 95% drawdown—if Bitcoin goes down 30% for more than a few months. But, hey, maybe it's a good long. It could be a good punt.

I feel like I haven't heard anything. So, if I were to construct a Tron trade thesis, the way it would go is this: There are a ton of different chains coming out right now—Stable, Plasma, and one that I'm forgetting the name of. Stable and Plasma, at least, are trying to attract the Tron stablecoin market. They're trying to steal away—

Yeah, Tempo, right? That was the other one.

They're trying to steal away the stablecoin market from Tron. That's kind of explicitly what these chains are built to do, at least at first, and then they go for the stablecoin market at large. But in the beginning, Tron is the easy, quote-unquote, target.

As they attempt to attack Tron and steal away Tron's largest value-add, Justin Sun is going to have to do some pretty crazy stuff to keep Tron at the forefront of people's minds. That probably includes pumping the price pretty massively. Therefore, once these chains go live, you long Tron, and that's your crime. That's how to long crime. That's the way of longing crime.

What do you think?

Without committing it. Yeah, exactly.

Without committing it, you're longing the probability that Justin Sun is going to commit crime to keep his chain relevant.

I mean, as more of the world moves on-chain, more crime will move on-chain. How do I long crime? Crime is a really good business for criminals.

Anyway, WLFI was a great buy if you got into the presale. Everybody could get into the presale, which is kind of the crazy part. Not a lot of people did, but everybody could. That was a great win. The thing's basically been sideways since. I think it's probably a good buy soon.

At some point, I'll probably start scaling in as a quick trade to get 25% to 35% out of that trade. Sort of like how PUMP did it. It's the classic trade: You wait for all of the initial supply to work its way out, and then there's some sort of trade in there.

So, are you running a complex book right now? My book is pretty simple. I've got mostly Bitcoin. I've got some ETH and Solana on leverage, and then I have a slug of Aerodrome, and I kind of don't have anything else.

I would say, just personally evaluating my own performance recently, trading performance has been kind of mediocre. But the trading piece of my portfolio is relatively small right now because I'm so stupidly bullish on overall price action that I want to be heavily invested in the benchmarks with light leverage.

I'm not actively trading around most of my portfolio.

I'm actively trading around a small portion of it. But that active trading has been kind of bad. My last big trading win on size was Hyperliquid; I closed that out. It was a nice four-bagger in a couple of months. Then I made a little bit of money on ETH. I guess technically I'm positive mark-to-market on Solana, but in small size relative to my portfolio. And I'm doing all right on Aerodrome.

But in general, I'm not seeing the ball as clearly as I'd like to be for a trading portfolio, so I'm minimizing my active trading. I think the reason why I'm not seeing the ball clearly—and I'm going to expand this out and then pitch it back to you as a question, Avi—is because I think I have an edge in picking mega-trends. I think I have a good edge in picking assets for mega-trends and weathering volatility and sitting through it. I also think I have an edge for identifying exogenous macro crap that sends our space lower and assessing whether or not it's going to stick.

For example, in April, both of us were pretty bullish despite the tariffs for a variety of non-consensus reasons, and we were both right. So, I think we—I think both of us have an edge there: bottom-ticking the curveballs that come in from outside of crypto, bottom-ticking the price action that results from those curveballs, I should say. But I guess where I don't feel confident is when the benchmark is ranging, which Bitcoin technically is. It's ranging from $105K to $120K. I don't feel like I'm good at picking altcoins that send while Bitcoin is ranging.

I feel like I'm more on the fundamental side of that trifecta we talked about earlier in the pod, where I can sit in stuff, but I'm not in—I'm not in and out of things very effectively. So, I'm trying to do what I think is prudent, which is minimize my in-and-out trading because it's a weakness or a blind spot. I'm kind of curious how you structure your portfolio. Are you spread across tons of alts waiting for the boom? Are you actively trading?

No, I'm actively trading. I'm trying to figure out, okay, what are the trades that I want to have in my book that I think are going to outperform? It starts with: do I think Bitcoin's going up or down? We are ranging, but ultimately, if I think—so many people have tweeted over the last 3 weeks that this is cycle top—then I basically don't want to be trading at all. I just want to be in cash and forget about the market.

Do you believe that, by the way?

No, I mean, that's what I'm getting to: I don't believe that. I think people have continuously gotten too bearish on this market and continuously tried to call the top. The reason that people continuously try to call the top is because, no matter what they say out loud, they believe in the cycle theory, and they're trying to call the top of the cycle. But basically, I don't believe in the cycle theory. I don't believe that $115,000 per Bitcoin, only 50% higher than where we got in 2021—maybe 60%, I guess, 60% higher than where we got in 2021 because we hit $70,000—I don't believe that that is the fair value for Bitcoin, given all that's been happening.

I think that we can continue to go up, and I think that we've spent enough time around prices close enough to this that we're not going to get a massive sell-off. Basically, you look at the realized value of the Bitcoin that's held by your average individual, and the price is reasonably high. It's not like Bitcoin had this incredible rally and left everybody in the dust, and then now everybody's sitting on unbelievable UPNL. Basically, even the people that bought post-Trump election have sold a substantial amount or turned it, and their average price is much higher. So, I don't think that we're in a situation right now where Bitcoin's going to sell off massively.

Yeah. MVRV-Z is only 2.

Exactly. The statistics just don't tell me that we're in for trouble. I think people are pattern-matching. They're basically just using the chart without looking at actual statistics. The chart looks similar to 2021; everything else looks radically different. When that is the case, I tend not to just go by the chart. That tends to be wrong.

So, basically, if I thought the market was going lower, then I would step away. What I'm doing now is allocating to the assets that I think have the best narrative for the upcoming 1–2 months that will be able to take advantage of Bitcoin price going up.

And those assets are, in no particular order?

Ethereum because of the DATs, Solana because of the DATs, BNB because of the DATs and because of regulatory issues, and Bitcoin because I think that Bitcoin is going to do well. I also still own, as part of my long-term bags, a little bit of SYRUP, and I do have a little bit of HYPE long right now.

Okay. So, you're not all over the place. You're pretty concentrated, and basically that is structured so that if Bitcoin trades to $120K, $125K, $130K, hopefully these assets massively outperform, or these assets can outperform while Bitcoin goes sideways. I'm looking for a 25% to 40% return on these trades from my entry points, at which point I'll just rotate them back into Bitcoin.

I missed the HYPE trade—or, sorry, not the HYPE trade, the Pump trade—despite talking about it, which kind of sucked. I was looking for it. I do think that this is as close to alt season as we've had in a while. Things are popping off. We're getting that tingly feeling.

Right. There are things that are doing well. So, I'm looking for more stuff that I think would be good to long. But if we're just talking about the last 7 days, we've had some pretty good performers out there. This thing was crazy, by the way. I don't know if you saw it. GIGA rallied.

Back to Pump for a quick second. I kind of missed it too, but just thinking about it intellectually, even though it's disgusting to people who got into crypto because they wanted to sort of decentralize the world and put power in your wallet instead of in the banks—all that mumbo jumbo, the anarchist stuff, too. Like, yeah, okay, fine. Memecoin gambling isn't really it. But at the same time, I like Pump because it's a real business.

It's basically the slot machines at the Wynn Las Vegas on-chain, at a global scale, and anybody can go gamble on a Ponzi whenever they feel like it, or create one and see if other gamblers come in. Pump earns $1.5 million a day in EBITDA, right? That's a real business right there. So, I kind of buy it. I think Hyperliquid is more sophisticated gamblers gambling on more stock-market-like things, but Pump is just straight-up Vegas on-chain.

Vegas on-chain could potentially be worth a lot more than where it's currently trading. It's pretty extraordinary. Yeah.

I guess your risk is that the hot new show in Vegas comes to town, and it's, like, a BONK or a launchpad that actually provides value to people who want to create more complex tokenomics or equities on-chain. Maybe there's a better product out there, or maybe Pump is just going to be one of those Tron-like chains that lasts forever. I don't know.

I like the founder a lot. I think he's smart. I think they're approaching this in a smart way, and I think that it makes sense for it to continue to hold the lead. I think of it now as this weird corner of crypto that we kind of touched when we went on Threadguy's stream, this memecoin/Gen Z streamer-culture overlap. That was so Gen Z.

And it was dope. It was cool to be on his stream. I think he's actually a very smart guy, and I enjoyed our conversations. He's got good takes. I think, for example, Twitch has just taken over streaming in the world of Gen Z, and they're probably not going to lose anytime soon.

I mean, even YouTube can't really compete with them. Amazon owns Twitch now, and they've just continuously grown. If you stream, that's where you go. You're live-streaming on TikTok or you're live-streaming on Twitch. I view that like—that's Pump.fun's niche now that they have streaming. You want to create a coin, you just go there.

That's where the visibility is. That's where the network effect is. That's where all the people are. You just go there. As long as there's this urge to gamble and create these coins, Pump's going to continue to do well.

I just think that gambling culture—we talk about this a lot on this podcast—but every day, literally every day, I come across another reason why gambling culture is going to continue to grow and why you need to figure out how to freaking invest in this. I'll give you a great example. I'm reading the New York Times, a propaganda rag, but I do read it from time to time. I'm reading the New York Times, and there's this article about this girl who lives in the US who won a house in Ireland via a raffle.

And so, Jonah, you might ask me, what do you mean she won a house on a raffle? Is this a company that was, like, buy our yogurt, and on the lid of our yogurt you get an entry for a raffle? No, Jonah. The owner of this house, instead of trying to sell the house, used the platform called Raffall, which allows you to sell raffle tickets to give away the house to the winner of the raffle ticket.

What you do is set a minimum number of tickets sold and a price per ticket. In this case, the owner chose 150,000 tickets at $5 a ticket. So, why am I so bad at math right now? That’s $750,000 total. If you hit 150,000 tickets, the minimum threshold, then there’s a winner selected from that pool. They ended up selling 200,000 tickets. I think the house is probably actually worth $500,000.

But if they’d only sold 20 tickets, they would have had to honor it and sell the house, right?

No. If they sell below the minimum, you’re not obligated to sell the house. What you do is split the raffle winnings with the person who won the raffle.

This is—I’m going to sell my house like this tomorrow. This is incredible.

This is a freaking no-brainer. Avi, we have a platform. We could probably go out there and sell my house at a 50% premium. If you raffled off Beverly Hills real estate and set a minimum of, like, $10 million for your house—

There’s no downside.

Let’s bet on this, Avi. Let’s bet on this.

Either because there are some gamblers out there and they’re going to fucking run this thing up and pay twice as much, or you’re going to get twice the amount of money for your house because of this gambling addiction. If anyone out there is selling a house, look into this. This is crazy. The moment I read it, I thought, “This is a brilliant idea.” This is genuinely a brilliant idea.

So funny. Oh my God. I’m going to talk to my wife about this. We’re absolutely listing this thing on Raffall.

And here’s the thing: if you hit an obscene number—let’s say you set the minimum at $5 million, and there has to be $5 million. That’s the minimum you’d be willing to sell your house for before you actually let go of it. If it hits $4 million, you get $2 million, the winner of the raffle gets $2 million, and you can keep your house.

This is a joke. Obviously, I’m already doing the math. What is my reputation worth? Can I get away with this?

I mean, it’s not everybody knowing where I live. It’s just—

Why not? Gambling is everywhere else. Why not run a mini-lottery for everything? What if you ran a raffle for your net worth? I could say, “Look, guys, I’m worth X amount. I need at least a 10% return on this,” and then I’ll give you guys my money and get whatever. It’s like—

Don’t do that, because then you invite the crime. To go back to an earlier point on our podcast, you invite the crime. You don’t want to do that.

How do I invite the crime if I raffle off my individual raffle?

No, you just go and state exactly how much the criminals get if they capture you, handcuff you, and stick you in a hole in their basement in a cage or whatever. But I take your point.

Basically, my point with this whole rant is that gambling culture is not going away, and you guys should probably try to figure out a way to benefit from gambling culture. Robinhood, I think, is still an amazing bet for this. Pump probably is too, because eventually they’re going to realize, “Hey, instead of just running a casino where the only game is Ponzi schemes and meme coins, what if we add, you know, the equivalent of a blackjack table, a baccarat game, craps?”

What do those games look like? Maybe it’s Pump, right, where you just start your on-chain raffle and link your asset to it, like the house or the deed or whatever. I think that if you believe the founder is smart—and he probably realizes he’s running Vegas on-chain—he’s probably not going to want just one game in the casino. He’s going to add more games.

I think that’s an opportunity for investors and for gambling protocols to diversify beyond—I don’t understand why it is that the only game so far in the on-chain casino is a Ponzi scheme. Avi, maybe you can answer this: why is it that the only game so far in the on-chain casino is a Ponzi scheme?

Because it works. Basically, it’s because it works, and if it ain’t broke, why fix it? I think Axie tried to create other kinds of games on-chain, and the failure of Axie one-shotted a bunch of idealistic, on-chain gambling-game people. But I think there’s a huge opportunity.

I think there’s also just not a huge—I don’t know if there’s a huge overlap between those two. I think the old-school idea of casinos on-chain is clearly working to some extent. Shuffle and Rollbit continue to do well. I do like both of those names. I don’t own them right now. Maybe I should as a trade, but I think the overlap is smaller than you might think. That’s my take.

The type of person that’s willing to play blackjack is not the same type of person that wants to gamble on meme coins.

I think raffles are better on-chain.

Yeah. Right. Raffles are effectively what you need. Roulette might be it, right? You need to be able to 20x your money quickly. You need to be able to get this huge, massive payout for a low upfront investment. That’s kind of what meme coins are, and that’s why meme coins captured people’s attention.

You don’t play blackjack—or basically any casino game—to make hundreds of thousands of dollars unless you’re already starting with a reasonable bankroll. You hear stories of somebody putting in $350 and walking out with $50,000.

Yeah.

Right. That’s why you play the game. You put in at a $100,000 market cap, it goes to a $10 million market cap, and holy crap, you’ve made an obscene amount of money.

You know, it’s funny. I did that once with Boden. I ran it up pretty big, and now everybody—even my mother-in-law—is like, “Jonah, can you put some of our money in one of your shitcoins? You’re good at it.”

I’m like, “No, I did it once.” She’s like, “But don’t you talk about crypto all day? Isn’t that your job?” And I’m like, “Well, yeah, but I’m not going to be able to pick the right shitcoin for you. That just happened. I just got lucky once.”

Everybody, even people who are not gamblers, can emotionally connect with the whole narrative of putting $350 in and taking $50,000 out. I totally agree with you.

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In terms of building the on-chain casino, what are the games? This is the question. What are the games that offer a stupidly asymmetric return? It’s not poker. It’s not blackjack. Definitely Ponzi schemes, and maybe raffles too. Maybe lotteries with slightly different rules.

Robinhood is a good way to play gambling on-chain.

Robinhood just launched—or they’re teasing, I don’t know if they launched it—their social feed, which I think is going to be very, very, very valuable for Robinhood. It’s going to up the ante. We’re going to have WallStreetBets in and out. It’s pretty damn powerful, if you ask me.

Wow, really? That is pretty powerful.

Maybe I should own some HOOD. I felt like I kind of missed it, but I haven’t really cared that much. Maybe it’s still got room to run.

I think it’s certainly good for 30% to 40% from here if crypto goes on a bull run. Galaxy could double easily from $25 or $27, or wherever it’s trading now.

If we get into the hot AI space again—AI is kind of cooling off a little bit—I think it’s amazing how much of the AI narrative is tied to hype around the latest ChatGPT release. ChatGPT-5 was not that much better than the previous version. The hype cooled, and people adjusted their parabolic rallies into more linear extrapolations of the trajectory between ChatGPT-4o and ChatGPT-5.

AI is not a white-hot clusterfuck the way it was 6 months ago.

But I think it could come back. As we say on the podcast all the time, it’s about the second derivative of the narrative, not the narrative itself. If AI is kind of trending, but not mortgage-your-house-to-buy-AI-related-items hot, are things going to get worse or better from here?

I think probably better. I think this is a temporary trough in the AI bull run, a bear trap, if you will. So maybe there’s an opportunity to dip-buy the overlooked AI assets, both on-chain and in TradFi.

I agree. Hopefully, we’ll be able to find some, because one thing that I’m actually pretty excited about is the fact that we seemingly have some real products coming online over the last 3 months. I think there’s just been a lot of hype over things that are actually generating revenue and generating real usage, and figuring out where we place crypto into the overall world—what actually generates value from crypto.

Guff being one of them—we were just talking about this—but it’s done well. Bits Roll has done well, Hyperliquid’s done well. One thing that we haven’t talked about that’s done well is something called Cards.

I don’t know, Jonah, if you’ve heard of Cards.

No.

Cards. This was the trench-warrior win, and I’m hopeful I can find some other trench-warrior wins.

Didn’t Ansem shill us this, or was he shilling a different on-chain card game a couple of years ago when he came on?

He was shilling a completely different thing.

Oh, wow.

Cards is effectively a marketplace for Pokémon cards. Which makes total sense. If you think about it, there are all these card games out there that have a robust secondary market. I mean, the market cap of Pokémon cards traded is in the tens of millions, but nobody could actually define it because there was no central marketplace. It was all just on eBay, so there was no way to actually collect that data effectively.

Cards is becoming the place where you basically verify and upload your card, then turn it into a digital asset and trade it with other people on the platform. It’s doing a ton in revenue. It 10x’d in 2 weeks because basically nobody knew it existed, and if you go talk to the founder, you kind of see why. He’s just this heads-down grinder type.

Now I think it’s actually still reasonably valued, especially because they can probably expand to other card markets pretty easily, like baseball cards.

I got a bunch of Marvel cards, some of which are pretty valuable. I love those. I used to collect them when I was in elementary school.

But it’s stuff like this, this Cards marketplace. Prediction markets are obviously popping off. Everyone’s talking about prediction markets. That’s why I’m long Aerodrome, because I think AMM prediction markets will end up on-chain on AMMs, and I think AERO is a good play.

I’m basically long new-market creation when I’m trying to structure my portfolio. I’m long the things that I think will benefit from not just new shitcoins getting put online for people to gamble, but new markets—whether that’s a prediction market, a memecoin, or a Pokémon card.

I didn’t even think about that. That’s really cool. Wait, how do we get to this Cards thing? I searched “Cards crypto,” and it’s not there. What am I looking at here?

I’ll send it to you. If you just type in Cards on CoinGecko, it’s called Collector Crypt.

Oh, Collector Crypt. Okay.

Your digital bridge for weird real-world collectibles.

Cool.

It’s pretty sick.

Love it. I think you’re right that you’re going to be able to trade these things on AMMs at some point in the future, and you’ll also be able to borrow against these positions at some point in the future, which is really where it all starts.

This is where it’s all starting to happen: you’re getting the tokenization of everything, and you’re getting the gamification of everything. There was a girl I vaguely knew in college. We talked a few times, but she was well known because her dad had a $3 million Hot Wheels collection, and somehow that spread like wildfire. Her dad had a multimillion-dollar Hot Wheels collection.

I always thought to myself, how rich do you have to be to spend what was presumably, if not millions of dollars on Hot Wheels, hundreds of thousands? I doubt that this guy 100x’d on his Hot Wheels collection.

I don’t know. Maybe he got a great entry price. I think he definitely spent at least hundreds of thousands of dollars on this.

That’s ridiculous. The question is, how rich do you have to be to lock up hundreds of thousands of dollars and now have millions of dollars of your net worth locked up in Hot Wheels?

I’ve got a Hot Wheels collection. I gave it to my son recently. I collected it when I was a kid, but mine’s probably worth $100. I got mine secondhand.

Is it worth more or less if your son chews on them?

Oh, no. These are indestructible. These aren’t like the Chinese plastic toy cars you buy today. If you look under the bottom of my Hot Wheels, it’ll say “Made in France, 1969,” and it’ll be some cool-looking Peugeot. I have an English school bus that’s awesome. These things are rock solid. They are die-cast metal toys.

My point about this specifically is that in this new world, you’ll be able to unlock value from any source of wealth. If you have fancy wines in your basement, Hot Wheels in your attic, Pokémon cards, or Polymarket positions that don’t expire for 3 years, you’ll be able to borrow against them.

Wait, I have a question. I have a lot of that stuff. I’ve got coins—sorry, I’ve got a three-legged Buffalo nickel. I’ve got Hot Wheels. I’ve got Marvel cards. Avi, question for you: if I use this crypto—sorry, this Collector Crypt thing—why do I care about selling NFTs of my Marvel cards? I want to have my actual Marvel cards.

The beautiful thing about a Fidenza is that if you buy one, you can mint the physical, if it’s never been minted before—an actual print that gets sent to you by Tyler Hobbs, and he signs it. I do believe there’s a beautiful connection between NFTs and physical objects. Why are people digitizing their Pokémon cards and selling the NFTs but keeping the physical? Who would buy the NFT of a physical Pokémon card? I don’t understand.

No, you own the card.

Oh, so when people buy the NFT of the card, you actually owe them the physical? It’s like an eBay-type system where you have to send them the physical, too.

Yeah, I think that’s super valuable. Super valuable. The reality—the reason that it’s so valuable—is because it standardizes pricing and increases liquidity. You can easily compare, buy, and sell. It’s just way better than eBay.

You know what that would be great for also? DVDs. It would be great to have a digital version of your DVD even if you have the physical as well, so you can watch it or stream it wherever you are. I really believe in the connection between the physical and the digital. I don’t think eBay does a good enough job of it. OpenSea is pure digital.

I like the idea of something that marries the two, and it is kind of another way to gamble. You’re right that people will borrow and lend against these assets, too. This is what crypto is for. Crypto, as we’ve said a million times, is the best way to move value on-chain, and so much value is locked in weird places off-chain.

This sort of thing is a great place to start. I guess the theme of this podcast is how the gambling economy moves online, the collector economy, and how you can find pockets of value appreciation in overlooked areas.

We pointed you in some good directions. If you guys have any ideas for us of where to go next in this exploration, let me know.

This is fun. Finally, Crypto's got some real real cool stuff to do.

No, this was great, Jonah.

As good talking to you, man, as always.

Hope you feel better soon, man. It was—

Wonderful to record. Um, all right. Until next week.

See you.

Nothing said on the ThousandX podcast is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.