Alex Kruger
We're in the adoption phase, and we finally enabled Bitcoin to be adopted. It's just getting started. This is a year many years in the making, with so much pent-up demand, which also means so much of that wealth spills over into altcoins and memecoins. So, like it or not, this is the way of the market. This is euphoria levels.
This episode is brought to you by Perennial Finance, the on-chain DeFi primitive redesigning derivatives for the DeFi-native. You'll hear more about Perennial later in the show.
Jonah Van Bourg
All right guys, welcome to another episode of THX. Today we have a special guest that a lot of you probably already know, but we're super excited to chat with because he's always got spicy, interesting takes. For those of you who aren't watching us on YouTube and are just listening, Alex Kruger is literally joining us from inside the Matrix.
Jonah Van Bourg
You've got one hell of a setup back there. That's a lot of screens.
Alex Kruger
To be honest, I have 10 screens. The whole thing is plastered, and I'm feeling that I need more screens because, to trade something, or if I have something on my book that isn't dust, I need to see the chart. I'm just that kind of person. I need to see the chart all the time, and there isn't much room anymore.
Jonah Van Bourg
How many things do you have in your book at any moment that you're trading and need that many charts for?
Alex Kruger
I have 100 right now.
Jonah Van Bourg
A lot. You had 70 line items during the bear market, and now you have 100?
Alex Kruger
No, in 2021—not the bear market. The bear market had almost entirely played out.
Jonah Van Bourg
How do you think about expanding risk in bull markets and consolidating it, cleaning things up, or getting out in bear markets? Just give us the broad framework, and then we can drill into this particular moment.
Alex Kruger
When things start getting frenzied and I start getting concerned, I start consolidating. It's simple: I start consolidating into things that are liquid and hedgeable, that I can manage more quickly without having to scramble around. I don't think the time is here yet.
Jonah Van Bourg
In the 2022 bear market, were you trading other macro assets as well? Were you hedging crypto long with oil long? Did you think cross-asset, or was it all crypto?
Alex Kruger
I haven't traded oil since 2020. It's been mostly crypto since then. It was mostly Bitcoin and ETH, basically trading, trading, trading. That was more short-term trading in 2021 and 2022.
To be honest, I called the bottom a little bit too early, basically at the end of May. I was off by 3 weeks. That was a very memorable trading experience because I did manage to turn around and trade the dump, but it was very hectic and difficult, and at the beginning it cost me a lot of money.
I remember going into the big dump that started on a Friday, on CPI Friday, long to the tits on ETH. I spent the rest of the year trying to get the bottom and, when failing, getting out. I was literally saying, “This is it. This is it. We're here.” Eventually it worked and paid off, but it was very, very difficult.
Jonah Van Bourg
What were your metrics for determining that? Why did you think that was the bottom? We're talking, I assume, about May 2022, post-Luna crash?
Alex Kruger
Exactly, post-Luna crash. People died. Usually, when people die at such a large magnitude, that's the bottom. It's almost always the way it happens.
What we didn't know, or what I didn't know, was that 3AC was about to blow up. Some people predicted it, and I think it was a big mistake on my side not to be well informed, because you could have known that it was likely to happen. It was the same thing when people were talking about Alameda and FTX. People were talking about it.
Jonah Van Bourg
I remember those rumors, but thinking back to then, it was so hard to verify them. You'd have some people saying, “There are rumors that they're bust,” but there was no way that could happen. There was no way.
It was like being in the fog of war at the time. It was very hard to see, understand, and get the information you wanted. What were you doing at that time to try to assess the market when you were in that type of situation?
Alex Kruger
What I was doing was talking to people. What I always do is talk to as many people as possible.
The Alameda and FTX insiders I talked to—insiders in the good sense, people who worked for them—didn't know. They didn't think it was going to happen. They thought everything was fine. Clearly, my sources were not right. I failed to get to the right sources, which would have been worth quite a few millions if I had gotten that right.
But we know how it went. What about you guys?
Jonah Van Bourg
For me, it was very similar. You try to talk to people, but nobody will ever give you information straight up unless they really, really like you and you have a very good relationship with them.
When I talk to as many people as possible, I try to cross-reference as many stories as possible. Are the people I think are going to say the same thing saying similar things, or are they saying different things? Normally, in crypto, where there's smoke, there's fire. If there are too many occurrences where the stories don't match up, or people are saying slightly different things, or there seems to be some nervousness in the air, then you start to step away.
I remember that I did not, in any way, shape, or form, predict or get the FTX blowup. My thought process at the time was, “Even if Alameda blows up, there's no way that Sam would have put FTX at risk. It just wouldn't have happened.” I was completely caught blind-sided by that.
The 3AC issue was different. The moment they started going around trying to raise money for the GBTC trade again, that was a huge red flag. Why are you doing this? Who are you raising it from? What the hell is going on? Do you just need capital? Why are you being so pushy? That was a weird one for sure.
Avi Felman
Alex, after the Luna crash, I thought I navigated it quite well. I sold Luna near the highs. It looked Ponzi-like, so I got out and reduced risk. I didn't really get hurt on that dump, or only got hurt a little bit.
I thought, “Okay, there's so much blood on the street now. It's over. It's time to buy.” Like you, I had to get out of the way of yet another freight train in order to stay alive. That sell-off was crazy.
Normally, in these things, when the dominoes start to fall, they fall pretty quickly, one after another. In this case, Luna blew up, then 3AC, and everything puked. Funding went insane. Then everything calmed down—we flatlined—and bizarrely, out of nowhere, 3AC blew up. After that, there was another month or two of nothingness and calm, when you could have said, “All right, this is it. This is the bottom.” Then FTX immolated itself. That was tough.
Jonah Van Bourg
So, if I could paraphrase what you're saying, your process is to consolidate risk from many line items into a few or zero when things get shaky and volatile. That's when you start picking up the phone. That's probably good for our listeners to know.
Avi Felman
When things get bad, I just get the fuck out. I started scribbling about this on the podcast a little bit: it's just a toxic risk framework. When you look at your book and think, “I'm not going to try to wait for 10% higher levels. I'm just going to get out of this bad risk,” it's toxic right now.
Jonah Van Bourg
A good example is FTX. We didn't need to predict it. Predicting it would have been worth a lot of money, but once it started, we had so much time to react. It started getting panicky with ETH at $1,500. That's when it started—actually, I think it started with ETH in the upper $1,500s—but it got bad with panic at $1,500 and just kept going down.
There was so much time to react, short, or hedge. That's the thing with black swans: we don't need to actually predict them. As traders, our system has to be wired in a way that we're instinctive and can react very, very fast in a good way, just like a tennis player reacts to a tough ball in a certain place.
Alex Kruger
That objective comes with a lot of time and practice. It's hard to predict what will happen a month, 2 months, or 3 months in advance. But once you see the direction something is heading, understanding that switch in the market is important.
Jonah Van Bourg
Speaking of switches in the markets, we've got Bitcoin at $73,000, ETH at $4,000, and memecoins ripping all over the place. You have 100 positions in your book, and I probably have more positions than I've had in a year.
How are you thinking about this in terms of froth? Because, honestly, it seems like we're getting to the point where I probably want to start thinking about taking off risk.
Alex Kruger
We are at the same levels, I think. There's a caveat that makes it a little bit less insane. If we're looking at funding rates, the 3-month annualized futures basis is at 25%. That's flashing red levels, but risk-free rates are at 5%, so it's actually 20%, or 21%. It's not as frothy as we might think, but it's still really crazy.
Memes are going insane. The thing is, the ETF flows are so large, and in my opinion they're just beginning. That sustains and enables this level of absolute, insane degeneracy.
If you're concerned, this is actually a good place to hedge your spot holdings using futures or perps. Unhedge once it flashes, but hedge only a small percentage—not the entire book. That being said, I think it makes a lot of sense to keep running into the halving, at least.
Things are crazy, but things can get crazier. We make the most money in the part where it gets really, really crazy. If we're just getting out to protect profits, that works, but you leave most of the money on the table.
Jonah Van Bourg
What do you guys think?
I normally run a very clean crypto book. I don't like to have a lot of line items. Like you, I like to keep it super concentrated and tidy. I have started diversifying, though.
Just talking about Bitcoin for a second, I am so bullish I can't see straight. I think these ETF flows have just begun. If you look at metrics on Glassnode, like Coin Days Destroyed, or the Farside Investors ETF dashboard, what you're seeing right now is long-term holders taking some profit at all-time highs and effectively passing their tokens to the BlackRock ETF.
Those are new long-term holders—people in their retirement accounts who aren't going to turn around and sell if we rally another $10,000 or $20,000 in Bitcoin. Ultimately, I think that once you work your way through that holder selling on the offer—which, from the Coin Days Destroyed metric I described, is already happening—the only seller left is miners, and their block rewards are about to get cut in half next month.
We've had $11 billion worth of ETF buying so far. We rallied $30,000 per token on that inflow. The next $11 billion worth of ETF buying could send us up much more than $30,000 per token.
Specifically to your point about how, when markets get crazy and parabolic, you make most of your money toward the end of that quadratic-looking move, I've decided that while the music is playing—before it stops—and while these ETF inflows continue, I'm going to be a degenerate.
I lit up my Phantom wallet, which I hadn't touched in a while, and funded it with some random things. I had some ETH flying around from Friend.tech and some Stellar. I cleaned all that shit up and put it into Jeo Boden a couple of days ago because I thought that was the political counterpoint meme to the Trump token, which had gone up to a market cap of whatever, $400 million. Jeo Boden was trading at a $15 million market cap, and I thought, “All right, I'm just going to go as big as I can on this little shitcoin.”
I'm just playing around with those things. This is the first time I've actively traded crypto in over a year. I'm getting degenerate, which is a sign of how ripe the opportunity set is. I'm a terrible crypto trader compared to you guys, and even I see opportunity at this point.
Avi Felman
I tend to agree with you, but the 2 simple numbers are that there's $6 billion of open interest on Binance and $4 billion of open interest on Bybit. That's short-term capital, and it will leave at some point.
Once we stop seeing momentum, you'll get some level of closing, and you'll get this to reverse. While I do agree with you that I'm very bullish, I think we're overdue for a 10% to 15% pullback at this point—maybe more. You get these pretty frequently in bull markets.
I think it's important not to get too overlevered. At this point, I'm just playing in spot bags. I wouldn't have any leverage on my book other than what I think of as synthetic leverage through coins, because I am nervous. We have a tremendous amount of buildup.
That being said, I'm conflicted because normally, when you break through all-time highs, it's a rip fest. After the halving, though, it normally takes 1 to 2 months.
Jonah Van Bourg
How do you trade peak bull markets, where everything is hitting the fan and we're getting crazy volatility, with 30% pullbacks followed by 100% rallies?
Alex Kruger
I have no leverage at the moment. Leverage is gone. It's too expensive to keep leverage on the book, and I'm very worried that a little push could drive a very large crash.
I'm surprised we didn't push further yesterday. We had Bitcoin down 13.3% intraday and ETH down 18%, exactly as it was 8 days ago. It was insane.
I fully agree that we're going to see a major pullback at some point. The thing is, it's impossible to predict when it's going to happen. At some point, inflows are going to slow down. They may reverse a little bit, and with this buildup we could get a very large flush—at least 20%. I think 35% makes sense because things are really insane.
Jonah Van Bourg
My way of playing that is like you guys: I'm not levered right now, so I'm just going to sit there and take it and hopefully buy a little bit more on a crash. I'm not going to sell and try to rebuy and dance between the raindrops.
How are you going to play it?
Alex Kruger
I've done it on 2 occasions in the last month. I hedge a percentage of my book—basically 20% to 30%, not more—because if I'm wrong, it's too costly to get completely out. Then I rebuy on the dip.
It happened twice in the last month. One was right before the 18% flash crash 8 days ago. I was waiting specifically to reload at $58,000, or the equivalent on other coins, and it didn't hit my bids. I manually redeployed everything. I actually levered up and then got the leverage out over the next couple of days.
Jonah Van Bourg
What's your signal to rebuy? Is it just when funding collapses back to something flat?
Alex Kruger
I'm looking at quite a few funding metrics. Funding is too slow. I'm not looking at funding because it resets every hour or every 8 hours. I'm looking at basis, which reacts faster.
I'm looking at the CME basis. That's the main one because there's more liquidity there. I'm also looking at spot, but the main one is basis.
Another example was Monday night, when I took off 25%. I hedged 25% and reloaded at the top because it didn't get to where I wanted. I was expecting continuation, but it didn't happen. I reloaded at the top. Sometimes I buy the top. I bought the top of Solana as well.
This episode is brought to you by Perennial Finance. Perennial is quickly becoming one of the go-to derivatives platforms and liquidity layers for all of DeFi. There are kind of three things you need when you're thinking about a place and a platform to trade on: great trade execution, low fees, and an on-chain permissionless platform. Perennial nails all three of those buckets.
With the launch of Perennial V2, they've made all of that possible by introducing faster oracles, which reduce trade execution to seconds; lower fees, competing with major centralized exchanges and minimizing fees for both takers and makers; fully modular markets, which allow the protocol to support any price feed out there; and cash-settled trades in USD, not in crypto.
Perennial allows you, the trader, to gain access to deeper liquidity with only a fraction of the TVL. Perennial enables a two-sided market made up of both traders and liquidity providers. Traders deposit the assets to get levered exposure, while liquidity providers provide pools of capital to earn fees for taking the other side of the trader position. Perennial allows you to trade crypto perps, FX, and coming soon NFTs and more. Backed by some of the best investors in the industry, Perennial is a must-check-out platform if you're a crypto trader. Go check them out by clicking the link in the description. Give 1000x credit. Go check out Perennial. You're going to love them.
Jonah Van Bourg
What's your view on the cycle now? We've had Bitcoin lead everything for a while, but on a day like today, when Bitcoin is up 2%, we're seeing Solana up 6%, and MATIC is finally doing something. Do you have a view on whether this stops being a Bitcoin-led rally at some point in the future?
Alex Kruger
No, I don't think that's going to happen. I think it's going to continue being Bitcoin-led and spill over into the other shit.
I also think that if we're looking for red flags, we would have already been out of the market by the end of January or early February, because the red flags started long ago. If you want an analogy, look at 2021. The red flags also started in January, so we had a full year of red flags.
All people remember is Matt Damon saying, “Fortune favors the brave,” and that crap at the end of the cycle. They remember the insane Dogecoin run in May 2021, but that wasn't the first one. There was a Dogecoin run before that.
It's tough going in and out based on metrics and flags. I think it's better to spread it out.
One thing I wanted to talk about, because it's very related, is the ETF side and why we're early. The reason we're early is that the institutional sales machine is not yet fully deployed. According to some estimates, it's deployed only up to 20%, and they're looking to ramp it up big time into year-end.
What does that mean? Let's think about how the plumbing works on the ETF side. You have ETF buyers, basically retail and discount platforms; you have institutional guys; and you have wealth advisors.
The wealth advisors are divided into 2 or 3 tranches, depending on how you look at it. You have what are called the wirehouses—Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and those guys—and then you have the RIAs, which are split into independent and non-independent firms. The non-independent ones include Edward Jones and Wells Fargo Advisors.
These firms are very slow to start promoting an ETF to their clients. They need to see a track record. They need time. The product needs to get approved.
We've seen headlines in the last 2 weeks that Merrill Lynch and UBS will start offering the ETF to their clients. This is just starting. We're very far from having the entire institutional sales machine in place and pushing ETFs to the people who actually want them.
They're not shoving it down people's throats. People actually want it. People are calling Merrill and saying, “Do you have the Bitcoin ETF? I want Bitcoin. What do you think about Bitcoin? Is it a good investment?” That's the kind of thing that's happening.
Jonah Van Bourg
You said there are $30 trillion of client assets under management across all the different wealth-manager verticals you mentioned—the wirehouses, the semi-independent shops, and the smaller boutique places. Do you think we're 20% of the way through that?
Alex Kruger
No, that's not on an assets-under-management basis. It's on the machinery. What percentage of the sales force that pushes ETFs is already enabled? Who has the technology and materials, and approval from risk, to actually push it?
It's not my estimate. It's an estimate I recently heard, and I had it from a couple of sources. We're 20% there, and the ETF guys think we'll be at 80% by year-end.
If that's true—and I believe it to be true—that means when we get the leverage flush that's going to happen at some point, perhaps a 20% to 35% decline, you go balls in. Hopefully, if you're a trader, you manage to hedge some of it so you can deploy additional risk.
The risk for those of us who are already in the market is that it happens too fast and we can't hedge. If you're really bullish beyond the immediate term, you could wake up to a Bitcoin candle that's down 15%. You're not going to say, “Let me sell now and rebuy 10% lower.”
Jonah Van Bourg
As markets melt up, like the Nasdaq in 1999 or Bitcoin in 2024, things get very volatile. It becomes both easier and harder to spot trading opportunities.
How are you positioning in the memecoins right now? I think that's the summer we're going to have. It's going to be a meme summer. There's going to be a hat on the Sphere in Las Vegas. Maybe that's a red flag for you, or maybe it's a bullish signal. I'm curious to hear what you think about that.
Alex Kruger
I have a large Dogecoin position, which I wish were WIF, to be honest, but it's Dogecoin. I also have a few shitcoins. I'm on Puff [?], MEW, and Jensen Huang. I just tweeted about replying to one of your tweets. I'm thinking of Jensen as a Boden play, right?
Jonah Van Bourg
You mean Jensen Huang?
Alex Kruger
Yes, Jensen Huang.
Avi Felman
This happened to me. I bought a slug of Jeo Boden a day after it came out, and as a result of me buying it, the creator of the Jensen Huang coin airdropped some Jensen Huang to me. He gave me 15,000 units. It was worth maybe $0.10 or $0.15 per coin.
I thought, “Wow, this is funny. It's Jensen Huang's face on that giant well-hung COVID meme.” I forgot about it, and I checked my Phantom wallet a couple of days ago. It was worth $15, so it literally went up 100x in a week.
This is just happening left and right. This is the craziest market I've ever seen. It's wild.
The Zin position that I bought 2 months ago on the recommendation of a friend—I put in $1,000, checked my wallet, and it had just ripped. Now people are sending me things like Monkey Getting a Haircut on Solana.
Honestly, it's kind of funny. This is called the 1000x podcast, and Bitcoin isn't going to do 1000x. Some of these things are going to do 1000x, so we're in that kind of market.
Jonah Van Bourg
I just put Monkey Getting a Haircut in the chat. Do you guys want to take a look at it? It has potential.
We're all dumbing ourselves down, but that's where the money is. It's also reacting to the coin. It just reacted since we started recording, and it's not live. Otherwise, I would think the listeners were pumping it.
Not financial advice. All this shit is probably going to zero. But I honestly can't remember a time when memecoins have done this across the board.
Normally, you have specific concentrations. The memecoins pop off for each ecosystem, then the DEXs pop off for each ecosystem. For example, when Avalanche said it was going to raise an ecosystem fund, its coins would pop off, and then it would be the Solana coins or the Avalanche coins.
Now it's more of a free-for-all. You just launch a coin with a funny name, and it goes up. The concept of Jeo Boden wasn't really there in 2020 or 2021 as much as it is today.
In the grand scheme of the golden era of memecoins, we're going to look back on this time as the Cambrian explosion. Historically, things tend to get crazier after the all-time-high break, not into the all-time-high break. In theory, we have a lot more to go.
Will this cycle be a meme summer, or will we be over memecoins soon and move on to something like a narrative summer—AI coins, for example?
Alex Kruger
I think we already had an AI summer, winter, whatever you want to call it. I think we're going to have another one. Memecoins will cool down, and then we'll have another AI cycle.
I'm more in on the supercycle idea—that this just keeps going. We're in the adoption phase, and we finally enabled Bitcoin to be adopted. It's just getting started. This is a year many years in the making, with so much pent-up demand.
That also means so much of that wealth spills over into altcoins and memecoins. Like it or not, this is the way of the market. Launching altcoins is so easy.
Jonah Van Bourg
Do you consider alternative Layer 1s like NEAR, Solana, or ETH to be the next things that perform best from a risk-reward perspective?
Alex Kruger
For me, it's not NEAR. I missed NEAR. NEAR has already run. It kind of relabeled itself as the AI chain, so it has already run. I want to buy a pullback, not here.
I'm not buying new shit. I'm redeploying from some shit to other shit. The market is too hot to be putting new money in. I got here all the way from the bottom to the top, fully long. If you didn't, if that's not you, you don't put money here. I think here you wait for that pullback and eat it up. Be patient, otherwise you're going to get fucked.
It's a matter of having a framework. This is euphoria levels.
Avi Felman
I would agree with that pretty wholeheartedly. The interesting thing, though, is that for a lot of coins, we're not at euphoria levels yet. It's sort of just Bitcoin.
I think there's a reasonable scenario where Bitcoin can sail up to $65,000 and Dogecoin can double in that time as people rotate. The risk-reward for Bitcoin is tough, but the risk-reward for everything else is okay. Dogecoin is up less than ETH since October, which is pretty nuts. I wouldn't have expected that.
Jonah Van Bourg
It makes sense when retail comes back. I just read that volume on crypto exchanges is 25% of 2021 levels.
Avi Felman
There's a lot of leverage coming in. A lot of people in crypto are levered to the tits, but there are still so many people who haven't come back. When they come back, they're not going to buy Bitcoin. They're going to buy WIF, BONK, and Dogecoin on Coinbase.
Alex, is there a price level where you look at it and say, “After this, I'm out. I'm selling half”?
Alex Kruger
I was thinking of selling 40% at $75,000. We got pretty close, but the price action made me change my mind because every time we flash, we just buy back up. That tells me that we continue.
Right now, I'm thinking possibly $85,000.
Jonah Van Bourg
I don't operate with levels like that. Generally, I do, for the simple reason that it helps enforce discipline, but I always have the right to change my mind.
What I try to do is check my bias from when I set the level. If I've revised it upward 2 or 3 times, that's generally a danger zone. Right now, basically anywhere from $90,000 to $100,000, I'm scaling out substantial amounts. Other than that, I'm just going to ride it for the fucking ride.
In crude oil, when I'm super bullish or super bearish, I usually don't set price levels to get in or out. I set levels associated with fundamental data that drives crude oil. I'll say, “I'm going to exit my crude oil long when refinery margins drop below a certain level,” or, “I'm going to buy as much oil as I can when I see X, Y, or Z happening at OPEC.”
I'm attempting to monitor that in crypto. This is my first crazy bull swing in crypto, and I'm trying to apply the commodities framework. I'm not going to look at Bitcoin's price as a signal for when to get out. I'm going to look at metrics, on-chain metrics like the MVRV Z-Score, or perhaps something more qualitative, like the Matt Damon “Fortune Favors the Brave” commercial. When that shit starts coming back, maybe it's time to get out.
I'm not going to try to set price levels because that feels arbitrary.
Alex Kruger
Two things. First, crude oil doesn't have that right tail because it doesn't move enough for returns to become truly exponential. It makes more sense to use fundamentals.
Second, under normal circumstances, crude oil just ranges. It's a wide range, but it's been ranging for 15 or 20 years. If we leave aside the 2014 dump and 2020, it's a ranging asset. Getting out when fundamental metrics tell you to get out is okay because you're not going to miss a 400% move.
Another way to tackle the uncertainty around where to get out is to use funding rates and feel the market. Regularly, you take a little bit off the table, either by selling or hedging. When that correction comes, you're psychologically in a very good place to manage risk and decide whether to sell more, buy back, or buy back and put leverage on.
That takes away the need to pick the top. We don't know if it's going to be a local top or a global top. We have no fucking idea.
There can be exceptions when extraordinary things happen, such as the Fed dramatically changing its view on the market or a major war, like Russia and Ukraine. Those things are extreme, and you say, “Fuck it, I'm out of this.” With FTX, when you start hearing about it, you don't care whether it's a local top or a global top. You're out.
Given that uncertainty, the way I think about it is like playing an accordion. The accordion always has air inside. You're just inflating and deflating, inflating and deflating. In a bull market, you always keep a certain amount of air in there. You take it out, put it back in, and keep playing.
Jonah Van Bourg
So you're trading around your positions?
Alex Kruger
Yes, very constantly.
Jonah Van Bourg
That requires a lot of energy and focus, which we know you have.
From a market-structure perspective, why are basis and funding so extreme right now? You would think that, now that the ETF exists, any pool of capital in the world would view 20% annualized as an amazing return. If you're a fund manager, why wouldn't you buy the BlackRock ETF, sell the CME future in infinite size, and collect that basis?
Why does that opportunity exist now that there are no barriers to entry and the ETFs have unbottlenecked access to the long Bitcoin leg of the basis trade?
Alex Kruger
We have to be getting levered, except none of us are running leverage. It must not be us, but people like us—people in our circles, the crypto natives, people who've been around for a long time.
Most of them missed the bottom. They missed the beginning and the middle, and they're getting in now. There's a lot of people getting in with size, levered up, starting in the $50,000s, out of FOMO.
As to why, I don't have the definitive answer. I think it's a matter of the time it takes to put those trades on in infinite size. You need to raise funds, set up the legal structure, get the approvals, and eventually start putting it on.
If everybody thought the basis was going to compress to zero, what would you do? You wouldn't set up a legal structure or prepare to put the trade on because you don't expect the trade to be available. Now that the trade is available, there are people working behind the scenes to put it on in infinite size. It's going to happen eventually.
Jonah Van Bourg
That makes sense. I agree with your point. A lot of people missed this run-up, and a lot of people weren't allocated as fully as they should have been.
That stems from the fear during the bear market. In 2021, people would be 100% to 150% exposed and feel normal. After the bear market, I think a lot of crypto natives, given the wealth they had, wanted to preserve it. They were 30% to 50% allocated to the market, maybe 60%, and only recently has that shift in their mindset happened again: “I need to be 150% exposed. I need to go back in.”
That is why I get a little worried.
Alex Kruger
And why is all this meme activity happening? It's not only because it's easy now—Solana makes it so easy. At the same time, you missed most of the move but still have significant wealth sitting in crypto. Sadly, you feel rich and have FOMO at the same time. You're thinking, “Fuck, I missed both of them. What the fuck do I do?” So you long Avalanche.
Avi Felman
I think we're seeing that now. This is when the majors catch up. When people really have that FOMO, they think, “Why didn't I buy that?” Then they start rotating into the things they know they missed.
They missed the memes, they missed Bitcoin, and now it's time for the majors. That's why MATIC actually looks pretty nice from a trade and structure perspective. It's barely up off the bottom, and everybody is going to pile in. Then they'll start rotating to the next thing.
Alex Kruger
Solana is also interesting. As soon as the FTX locked-SOL deal gets closer to being done, SOL could fly all the way up to its all-time highs in a straight line.
Jonah Van Bourg
When do you think that selling is finished?
Alex Kruger
My understanding is that it started about 3 weeks ago and that they're 50% done. I may be wrong, but that's my understanding.
Jonah Van Bourg
So a few more weeks?
Avi Felman
If you take away the selling pressure on Solana right now, there's some explosive upside potential there. That's something I've been underpositioned in for this entire rally, and it's where I feel FOMO. I feel stupid, especially now that I'm using it and realizing how good the experience is.
What I still can't wrap my head around is how zero or near-zero gas fees translate economically into market cap and value. I think I'm mid-curve on that mental pathway because, if we're valuing Solana on a P/E basis, it's insanely overvalued. I stopped checking, but it must be trading at a P/E in the thousands right now.
Jonah Van Bourg
Meanwhile, Jeo Boden has solid fundamentals and a solid P/E.
I'm joking.
Do you think there's been one notable underperformer during this entire rally? It's Ethereum—the Ethereum ecosystem, the high gas fees, the absence of memecoin activity there, and the NFTs happening inside Ethereum.
Do you think an ETH ETF will be a big catapult event for that ecosystem and its token price, or do you think it's going to lag throughout this rally?
Alex Kruger
I don't expect that ETF until next year.
Jonah Van Bourg
When that happens, do you think the market will front-run it?
Alex Kruger
I don't know when that will happen. Once it does, though, ETH should outperform massively.
The market has changed its odds from roughly 60%—or a little higher—of an ETF by the end of the year at the beginning of the year, to more like 40% right now, maybe even 30%. It's tough to look at those metrics because the implied odds come from Polymarket, which is a tiny market.
Determining the odds of a massive, multibillion-dollar market based on the odds of a tiny market is questionable. It may be better to use options to determine the true implied odds of the ETF. I haven't done that, but if somebody is doing it, I would love to see the analysis.