The King Of Retail: Trading Crypto Cycles | Ansem

We were like, “Should we get a retail trader on the show?” Avi was like, “Yes, no-brainer answer.”

I am the William Wallace of retail.

I would clarify this: he’s not really retail, but the leader of retail.

I try to help him out, bro. I try to help him out—the quarterback of retail.

Do you ever wear Jalen Hurts-style eye paint when you show up to trading?

You know what I should do? I should do streams and come out like I’m a football player, in a full costume. I need a mic costume, bro.

You should show up to a Solana hackathon with the Super Turbo Warlord gear.

No, I need that.

It’s 1:53 p.m. on Tuesday, November 21, and we’re about an hour out from the announcement where Janet Yellen is going to talk about how she took down CZ. The headlines are slapping the tape right now, and the markets are whipping around. BNB is up and down 10%, and we don’t know what’s going to happen.

We could break it down into scenarios: if she says X, then Y happens. Ansem, how are you trading this?

Honestly, I’m expecting Bitcoin to hold strong here. That’s what I’ve been looking at. I think alts had their little run; they’ve done 2–3x. I think alt pairs are kind of topping, but Bitcoin has been strong.

If this regulatory news is basically just a fine and Binance can keep operating as it did before, I think we’re fine. I think we just keep going up. We might chop around a bit in the 33–37 area, but I’m expecting Bitcoin to break out before the end of the year.

I also have Coinbase. I have a ton of Coinbase, so all scenarios are Coinbase scenarios.

I think you tweeted this out, but basically everything at this point sends Coinbase to infinity.

No matter what the outcome is, unless they come out and say, “Every single exchange that has ever operated, we’re going to come after you next.” I guess that’s the one scenario. But in that case, we might as well pack up. We’ll all go back to trading pink slips or something.

We war-gamed this a little bit at my old place. We were chatting about it before the podcast, and there are sort of 3 scenarios.

Scenario 1 is CZ in handcuffs, an international manhunt, and a bunch of crazy OFAC and AML violations. Scenario 2 is just limbo. We’ve been in scenario 2 for—I don’t know how long. It feels like years, but it’s probably just months, and I’m getting a little tired of it.

Then scenario 3 is a manageable slap on the wrist, and the thing sends after a while because CZ and Binance pay their fine, and Binance is still dominating the marketplace after that. I don’t know. I agree with you, Ansem. I think this thing just keeps chopping with an upward trend.

But I wanted to ask you, against the backdrop of what you just said: tell us a little bit about yourself. How long have you been in crypto? Have you seen any scenarios similar to this during your history trading, with previous exchanges under fire? How are you referencing this versus the earlier parts of your career in crypto?

I’ve been in crypto since 2017. I was a software engineer before, but I was just trading crypto on the side. I was basically doing both at the same time, and I went full-time crypto in mid-2021.

I’ve seen 1.5 cycles, I guess. I came in midway through 2017, so that was half a cycle, when I didn’t know what I was doing.

I think it’s similar to the BitMEX lawsuit, which was in 2020—Q4 2020, I believe. I referenced it earlier this year when the lawsuit against Binance came out. I was like, “The last time they did this, it was basically the cycle bottom, and we ripped from when that news dropped.”

It’s kind of similar. Most of these things, if they don’t shut down the exchange entirely, have their peak fear when the lawsuit and everything comes out. Then it gets priced in from there.

Crypto is supposed to operate in a way where it doesn’t get shut down by one exchange going under or one exchange not being in control of everything. Bitcoin is its own thing entirely. We see that in the reaction to these markets, when people are basically saying, “Fuck you, we’re not selling our crypto because the government is coming after us.”

Earlier this year, when we bottomed around $25,000, that was the initial lawsuit announcement. Now we’re at $37,000, and we’re coming to the end of it. It seems like we’re getting all the bad news out of the way, with BlackRock on the side of pushing for all these ETFs next year.

It seems like we’re in the final stages of the worst part of the regulatory stuff. This came at a time when I was already thinking about reducing exposure a ton, so this actually makes it way harder for me.

You’re the biggest Solana bull I know, but it definitely looks the weakest. It has looked weaker than it has in a very long time. All the spot buyers and VCs that were chasing it, that didn’t want to buy at $19 and didn’t want to buy at $25, all bought at $45–$50. They got their little pop, and now there just doesn’t seem to be a spot bid in the market for this thing anymore.

That dragged everything up, in a sense, and obviously you had the BTC run as well. But now I’m thinking it’s back to BTC dominance. People had their fun with alts, and what I’m looking for is maybe we chop down to $34,000 or $33,000, then rotate right back into alts. You can reallocate to all your small caps again.

Right now, it looks kind of tough to be long if you’re just basing it on the charts. The flip side of the argument is that Binance removes everything you’re worried about, then you just have the BTC ETF, the ETH ETF, and probably a Solana ETF after that. It’s one of the weirdest spots we’ve been in over the last 2 months. The last 2 months were just so straightforward.

For sure. I agree, though. I think alts are near the top, against Bitcoin for sure. I can see a scenario where we get a Bitcoin breakout, alts pull back, and everybody says, “I don’t have enough Bitcoin.”

Then we get to the mid-$40,000s, maybe, and when we pull back from there, that’s when alts start having their fun again, when Bitcoin is chopping around at a higher level. I feel like people are ignoring Bitcoin. It’s really not that far off the highs.

BTC dominance is at the highs, right?

In that sense, it’s not being ignored. It pulled back a bit. It was at 54%, went to 52%, and now it’s popping again.

BTC dominance flipped 52% into support. I know. Fucking chart, dude.

That’s a cursed chart. If I were to draw a line there, that would be a sexy line.

I’m looking at it too. I’m with you.

Can you walk us through this? Do you think of Solana as an alt? Is Solana an altcoin?

Definitely an alt. I think this cycle will cement it as number 3. That’s how I’m looking at it.

This cycle, the focus for ETH is that they’re pivoting to the modular thesis. In that thesis, I’m not sure how the value gets distributed across the entire stack. There are 10 different L2s, all of them are going to have tokens, and some of them will be doing off-chain DA instead of using ETH for DA. Some may use Celestia for DA, and some may use NEAR for DA.

With ETH DA, it’s looking like ETH is going to be more of a settlement layer. That transition from everything happening on Ethereum to Ethereum being more of a settlement layer, with execution happening on other blockchains, makes it unclear to me how value accrues across the stack.

But I think it’s pretty clear that Solana is on the complete opposite side of that thesis. It’s the integrated L1 thesis: do everything on the L1, and you don’t need to scale via L2s yet. It’s the monolithic opposite of Ethereum.

You have the settlement layer, then you have Bitcoin, and then you have one integrated L1. I think Solana is by far in the lead against the other L1s right now, just because of everything it has gone through and how strong the community is. The developer community and the teams there now are much stronger than they were a couple of years ago, so I think it will be a solid number 3.

You’re an engineer. Can you tell us why so many engineers love Solana? Is it an amazing engineering experience versus EVM? Is there something computer-science-related that us finance guys can’t understand? Help me get it.

I think they’re just more practical on the scaling arguments around Ethereum versus Solana. Solana people aren’t as focused on full decentralization, where everybody runs a node and everybody needs to validate the chain.

The Solana guys are like, “If you’re going to make a globally decentralized system that can operate at the same speed as the Nasdaq, you’re going to need some high-powered machines operating the network as nodes.” They focus on that as the practical way this is going to work long term.

There’s no real way around it. It doesn’t really make sense to do it any other way. I don’t know about Rust versus Solidity, or how many engineers prefer one over the other. Everybody in crypto is very comfortable with the EVM, and I think that’s why a lot of crypto people are so big on Ethereum, including the L2s that focus on the EVM.

But Solana attracts a lot of developer talent that doesn’t already have experience in crypto. There are a ton of Rust engineers outside of crypto who don’t know anything about crypto, but they know Rust and know how to program in Rust. Solana gets a lot of that attention as well.

I was a developer, but I haven’t been a developer in crypto, so I’m not going to claim to have built things on Ethereum or built things on Solana. I don’t have that frame of reference.

I think ETH benefited in the last run from the majority of people who were getting into crypto being general retail. You didn’t get as many builders coming in, in my opinion. You got builders coming in on the tail end of the cycle.

On the tail end of the cycle, people say, “Okay, I made money. I quit my job. I can start coming in. I can start developing.” Especially in 2021, you saw a lot of people building copycats and useless applications—a bunch of casinos.

Now I think we’re finally getting away from that in some capacity, which has made me pretty bullish on individual assets. There are a bunch of things I look at now that I couldn’t really look at in 2019 and 2020—things I wanted to buy, feel comfortable holding for a year, and not think about.

Other than BTC and ETH, everything used to be a straight rotation trade. Now I feel like there are things I’m willing to hold for a long time. For example, I played Parallel. It’s a dope game. It’s actually pretty good. It’s usable.

It’s a value-y project, but I think I can hold that for the next 6 months and feel pretty confident. There’s actually a ton of good stuff out there, and I know you keep tweeting about cycle bags—just buying these things, holding on to them, and forgetting about them.

What are your cycle bags? Shill us so we can buy them for you.

One of my cycle bags—you just called one out—but my main ones this cycle are Coinbase, which I like a lot. I think they’re in a really good position with the spot ETFs coming. They’re going to be the custodian for all of those.

They’re also expanding internationally, with their perpetuals and Coinbase Cloud for staking. They’re working with a ton of chains outside of just Ethereum, too. I think they’ve pivoted really well to be more crypto-centric and crypto-native in how they operate.

Coinbase got a lot of flak over the past few years for not being in touch with what crypto people were looking for. I think in the past few months they’ve done a really good job of that.

I also think the Base L2 is super strong from a retail-onboarding perspective. Coinbase has so many KYC’d people. If they’re able to get those people onto the actual chain, that’s huge.

There are around 100 million people on the Coinbase centralized exchange, but on-chain it’s basically me, you, and everybody on Twitter. We still haven’t really accomplished getting retail on-chain in crypto, and I think Base is one of the best chances of doing that.

I love Solana, as you guys know, for many reasons. I don’t really need to go into detail there. Parallel is also one of my cycle bags. I didn’t expect it to be a long-term play, but I started looking more into it, and the game is actually very complex and fleshed out as a trading-card game.

There are layers to it. You have to play it for a while to get good at it and really understand how to play well, which I think is really dope. You’ve seen them start to pierce into the Web2 segment of gaming.

People who play Magic: The Gathering also like Parallel. Once you tap into a market of gamers who don’t care about crypto, but the game is good enough for them to play, you have an option to onboard them without requiring them to buy an NFT or know what crypto is.

Then you have the crypto-native people who are going to be the first ones using all these applications. Parallel has a really cool intersection where it can tap multiple different markets.

I said the other day that this is the cycle where we’re going to see a lot more actual strong businesses come out, other than just exchanges that print money off fees. If you have a game that people really enjoy and are willing to spend money in to upgrade and be better than other people, that’s going to be a successful business if it can onboard enough consumers who are willing to spend regardless of whether the market is up or down.

I think we’re going to see some businesses emerge this cycle, and that could be one of them. I like Parallel a lot.

I’m looking at Parallel Alpha here on OpenSea. Some of these trading cards are worthless, and some of them are trading for 1 or 2 ETH. It looks kind of like Magic. Is that the experience?

I always thought of Magic as this amazing game, but the exchange for cards is terrible. You deal with these bitter old men, and they take you out.

Wait, back up, Jonah. How do you know anything about Magic? How do you know anything about Magic? I didn’t peg you for a Magic: The Gathering guy.

It came out during my high school years. I didn’t play that much. It was mostly with kids I knew from school.

Did you ever play in any tournaments?

No, I didn’t make it that far.

That’s my closest comparison. I played Yu-Gi-Oh! when I was younger.

There are 4 different factions, I believe, and each faction has its own special abilities. Your deck has 20 cards, and you play against somebody else. Each card has its own attack, defense, and special ability.

You basically try to take the other person’s health points down to 0 before they kill you.

They also have other games outside of just the trading-card game. That’s the first one, and they plan on making other games as well. The newest one they’re working on is an AI-first-person game based on the Parallel avatars.

Basically, your AI goes out on quests, and you update your character as it goes. That’s their next game. It’s going to be an entire franchise of different things.

This is bananas. I just ran the numbers on OpenSea after you brought it up. We’re looking at $161 million of volume printed on these trading cards since the project kicked off.

There’s real stuff happening here under our noses. Part of why we wanted to have you on so badly is because you’re paying attention to it. I’m too fucking old, and Avi is too busy slinging institutional volume and trading the tokens that can handle it. We need people who are in the weeds looking at interesting stuff.

Thank you for telling me about this. I’m going to try to buy some cards.

You can start playing it. I can get you access to the beta. The open beta comes at the end of the year, but I can get you in.

Yes, please.

I mean, the trenches have been so profitable. Not that I can play them in any size—it’s just not really my game—but as an outside observer who pays attention to the people who pay attention to the trenches, it’s kind of nuts. All the on-chain stuff has been popping off left and right. Money can be made.

We’ve had some polished billionaires on the show who come from interest-rate trading. We’ve talked to Anatoly from Solana, who’s a developer and a super-genius. We haven’t talked to any retail-type people in the trenches.

How did you get attracted to crypto? Tell us how you managed to survive these cycles and develop your process without a formal trading background. How did you do it?

I went to Georgia Tech and studied computer science. My minor was in business, and one of my classes for my minor was an emerging-technologies class. My professor was a huge Bitcoin guy, and Bitcoin was one of the focuses of that class.

That’s when I first learned about Bitcoin. I’ve always been at the intersection of finance and technology. My major was computer science and my minor was business, so I’ve always been in that area.

When I graduated in 2017, I had a mentor at the job I was working at who was a huge crypto guy. He was like, “Dude, I’m making a ton of money trading on Bittrex, BitMEX, and all these sites.” He started telling me about altcoins, and I was like, “Okay, let me look into this and figure out how to do it.”

That’s when I started trading in 2017. I’ve always been on Twitter. I’ve always been online—I was a Tumblr guy, played World of Warcraft, played League of Legends—so I had been online forever.

When I started looking into crypto, I thought, “Let me figure out who the crypto people are on Twitter.” That’s when I found Cobie, TraderSZ, Loomdart, and all those guys.

When I was learning how to trade in 2017, I started posting charts like everybody else. I didn’t have any followers, but I posted a ton of charts while I was learning technical analysis from those guys. They were talking about how cycles work, how altcoins versus Bitcoin work, how money flows down through the ecosystems, and all of that.

I saw it in 2017. I didn’t trade the cycle well at all. I was all-in on alts when Bitcoin was ripping, so I was down a ton against Bitcoin. I also didn’t do a great job selling the top.

But I saw the cycle and knew what it looked like and how to play it when it came back again.

In 2020, when DeFi Summer happened, it started popping off. I was actually playing poker with a lot of crypto people and wasn’t really that active in the markets. Then people started talking about shitcoins on Uniswap, and I was like, “Okay, let me figure out what this is and get back into it.”

My friend Jeremy and I made a group chat on Telegram. That’s when everybody was trading against each other and trading microcaps on Uniswap. We went straight from poker into trading on Uniswap.

You didn’t leave the market, though, right? You were still in it and had your finger on the pulse the whole time. You didn’t take a breather in 2019 and look at other stuff?

I took a breather. I was more focused on my actual day job in 2019. I traded in 2018 and 2019, but my daughter was born in late 2019, which was also right around when COVID happened.

That whole time period, I wasn’t looking at markets. Then the COVID crash happened.

I remember BitLord was on Twitter talking about COVID in China. He was walking around Shanghai or Beijing—I think it was Shanghai—and there was nobody on the streets. I thought, “That is completely wrong for China,” because I had been there and knew what those streets looked like. Something was up.

I started looking at the U.S. markets, and in my head I thought, “As soon as COVID gets to New York, we’re fucked.” Everybody on the subway is face-to-face. If it spreads that fast and doubles every day, as soon as the first case gets into New York, it’s over.

People weren’t really worried about it, so I was short Boeing. I bought puts on Boeing, thinking, “Whenever people figure out that this is an actual thing, airlines are going to get crushed.”

I was short Boeing right before that crazy crash in March. That printed pretty well, but I closed it too early. I didn’t expect it to go down 70% in a couple of weeks.

After that, I started paying more attention to the market. Everything crashed, and I thought, “Okay, we’re playing poker with crypto people.” Then people started talking about DeFi Summer, and everything ripped.

I looked at the chart and thought, “How the fuck did I miss this 100x?” Bitcoin was trading at $10,000, so I thought Bitcoin was at least going back to its all-time high. I knew that for a fact.

I tried to tell everybody, “Bitcoin is going to rip soon. All these alts have done all these multiples, and Bitcoin hasn’t moved yet. That money is going to start flowing down into Bitcoin.”

They didn’t even know what Bitcoin was. They were like, “What is Bitcoin? We know Ethereum and Uniswap. We don’t care about Bitcoin.” Their introduction to crypto was trading on Uniswap.

That’s how I became active again that cycle. Bitcoin was my first big trade. Then I thought, “What else should I look at?” Gas fees were spiking on Ethereum, so I started looking at Solana. That was probably my best trade that cycle.

I had that framework for how to rotate capital between Bitcoin and altcoins, and I knew a little bit of technical analysis. It has always been easy for me to pick up new things, so trading Solana wasn’t hard for me to understand.

That was one of the weirdest periods, when people were getting into crypto through Uniswap and ETH but weren’t touching Bitcoin. Back in 2016 and 2017, everybody’s first stop was Bitcoin, so I was used to the opposite happening: the wealth effect from BTC into alts.

Then people started onboarding because of the crazy yields in DeFi. They were thinking, “I can make 100%. I can make 1,000%. I can 5x my money in a month if I go into DeFi.” People were going straight to small caps on Uniswap.

It just shows you how much the crypto market changes within a year, but also how much the same things happen again. You just have to pattern-match differently.

It’s like when your teacher gave you a problem set and then the test was a different version of that problem set. You just have to figure out how to superimpose it onto the new problem.

Why is it that this cycle should be the opposite, with money trickling from Bitcoin into alts?

I don’t think it was directly just altcoins into Bitcoin. There were also a lot of TradFi flows pushing the market up around that time period.

But generally, the people who are really good at trading crypto cycles have always had Bitcoin as their core asset. Now, for some of them, it’s Bitcoin and ETH.

If you have people buying altcoins when they’re down 90%, they usually know what they’re doing. They’re going to protect their gains by going back into Bitcoin or taking profit into ETH.

Whenever those people print on alts, they think, “Let me take profit into Bitcoin and take profit into ETH.” The crypto natives are often on the same side as these funds, and they know what they’re doing, so they control a lot of how the market flows.

I don’t think it’s directly Bitcoin to alts and alts to Bitcoin. I think this cycle there’s going to be a lot of institutional focus on Bitcoin because of the spot ETF.

BlackRock’s connections with people in finance are massive. In my head, I’m thinking, “Bitcoin is going to be the first thing all these people with gold allocations, stock allocations, and real estate allocations look at.” They’ll think, “Let me get 1% or 2% of Bitcoin and add it to my portfolio now that BlackRock is stamping it as safe for people.”

That’s what I think is going to happen. It also legitimizes the crypto space further across the board. If Bitcoin is stamped, then ETH is next.

Then the question becomes, “What are people building in crypto that makes sense outside of traditional technology and finance?” Once that happens, that’s when everybody says, “Okay, crypto is cool. Crypto is here to stay.”

I think this is the cycle where that happens. People argued that it was last cycle, and you could make that argument, but because DeFi was so new, I think it’s easier to make that argument this cycle, once everything has been through the ringer and survived.

In your poker circles and in the retail community that you clearly lead—sorry, not run—what’s the mood like? Can you give us a sense of what people who are passionate about crypto, this market, and this technology are saying after getting beaten up throughout 2022?

There are 2 main groups. You have the developers and builders. I’m closest with the Solana community of builders, not as much with the Ethereum guys, though I know some of them as well.

Even when I was at Breakpoint in 2022, they were super excited about the future of crypto and everything they were building: DeFi, consumer applications, decentralized physical infrastructure, and everything across the board. They were excited about the future and what they were building.

That energy made it a lot easier to be bullish this year, even while everybody else was saying, “Dude, you’re a fucking idiot. What are you talking about?”

I’ve talked to these people. I understand this technology and the advantages it has versus Ethereum and other chains. This thing is going to turn around eventually. Having those relationships and talking to them made it easier for me to make that bet.

On the other side, you have the retail degenerates. Everybody is trying to 100x whatever spare funds they have.

Right now, I’ve talked about it a little bit on Twitter, but you have a ton of people working day jobs who aren’t making enough to afford a really nice house in a short amount of time. They know that if they calculate how much they’re saving year over year, they’ll be working for a long time.

They see crypto and think, “I can shave a few years off the back end by making some extra money in the markets.” So everybody is asking, “What should I buy? What are we looking at this cycle? How do I 10x?”

I get a ton of questions like that. It’s the energy of people in the markets: they’re looking for a way to get some extra cash. A lot of people on the retail side of crypto are focused on that.

Then you have the builders, who are more focused on, “No, we’re building real things here for the future of finance and the future of technology.” It’s a nice dichotomy.

It’s nice to hear that from you. We’ve had this thesis sitting in our financialized ivory tower about why there’s an interesting casino element to crypto, but you bring up a really good point.

Life in America and in many other places has gotten away from normal people, and that’s not fair. You have to invest well to achieve financial outcomes that used to be part of the standard package.

My mom worked for the Postal Service and bought a house in the hills in California on a government salary. That’s not happening anymore. I see the appeal in crypto. It’s cool that people can get out there and trade technology that has a future, but obviously there’s a lot of risk involved.

It’s tough to navigate, isn’t it?

I see a lot of comparisons to the early 2000s. I wasn’t around then, but from looking at it, that era seems similar to me. A ton of companies popped up, and they were the giants of the past 2 decades, but there were also a ton of companies that went to 0.

Look at the altcoins we’ve had since 2013. If you look at the top 100 in 2013, 90% of those coins aren’t even around anymore. Go to 2015 and do it again; most of them aren’t around. Go to 2017 and do it again; some of them are still here.

That’s the risk of trading crypto. Some of this stuff is going to fail. I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, but it’s also why, when you’re right about certain things, you can hit 100x.

The market is still small enough that the big players can’t simply push size into everything. You’re front-running all those guys. That’s how I look at it. It’s similar to that dot-com era and the crypto explosion.

That’s why you see so much community in crypto. Anyone who seriously knows crypto understands that you have to pay attention to make money.

It’s actually tough, especially if you’re playing the gambling game or the small-cap game. You have to look at that position every week at least.

If you’re playing on-chain, you have to be looking at it. You can’t just ignore it, because at any moment the founders can mint, and you’re out.

Ethereum has an incredibly strong community. That’s a cult community of ETH people. They’ve been holding ETH for years and just never sell it. They literally hold a huge amount of their net worth in Ethereum.

That’s why you see these shitcoins pop up. Who are the people throwing $200,000 or $300,000 at $5 million or $10 million market-cap coins? It’s because people are literally storing all their wealth on-chain.

I have to ask a question about that, because this is a game I used to play. In 2020, I was flipping things like BASED and YAM and all this random stuff.

I actually have no idea what’s going on on-chain right now. I don’t even know how people are finding these small caps. I only see them when they’re at $15–$20 million, but sometimes I see people posting in chats about buying $500,000 worth.

Do you play this game, and how do you find these things?

I play it a little bit. I’m honestly always second. I’m in so many chats, and people are literally sending me things that launched at $100,000 or $200,000. I’m like, “How are you even finding these?”

They track a lot of the new launches and have lists of deployers they know are good. Some deployers are bad. They run rug checks on everything and ask, “Is this safe? Is liquidity locked? Who launched this? Who’s behind it?”

They play a lot of the $100,000–$200,000 games. I know a lot of people who do that. I’m there watching it, but I usually start paying attention once something has a little bit of exit velocity.

I’m thinking, “Let me figure out, at $5 million or $10 million, whether this has gone to 0 yet.” That’s how I found Unibot early this year.

I missed it at first. People bought it at $30,000, $40,000, or $50,000 market cap. I don’t know how they found it in all these chats, but they saw that it was a Telegram bot for trading shitcoins.

I thought, “Telegram bot for trading shitcoins? That makes a fucking ton of sense.” I was watching you guys do this every day, and I knew people were using Maestro, which didn’t have an associated coin.

I thought, “This is Maestro with a coin. This is one of the easiest theses I’ve seen.” I looked at the metrics, saw how much money they were making from fees, and saw that user activity was starting to become consistent.

I bought it around $5 million the first time. Then I started talking about it more around $20 million, and told people about it closer to $30 million or $40 million.

I was thinking, “This makes sense, and if they do well, this isn’t going to 0.” A few things like that pop up with these new, fair launches.

It’s cool because then VCs pick them up. Unibot ended up getting VC investment once it showed product-market fit. It turned into a whole section on CoinGecko, and other people started launching Telegram trading-bot coins. All these developers jumped in and said, “This is the new meta.”

It’s cool how those metas come to fruition in the trenches, then hit the timeline, and then the VC guys get involved. Now it’s a thing.

A lot of that happened with DeFi Summer, too. Everybody was yield farming, and then it turned into a real thing. That’s how these things happen in the trenches.

People store their wealth in ETH, and when they feel rich in ETH, they start buying CryptoPunks and ERC-20 tokens. What’s the trade idea here for Solana?

If Solana is the token of this next cycle, and people are storing their wealth in it—which, based on what I’ve seen on Twitter, sounds like they are—what happens if Solana starts to rip even more, or even continues the move it has made so far?

What trickle-down effects do we get? What are some interesting projects on Solana, or NFT projects, that you think will get picked up by the new Solana-rich people?

I think you’re going to see that wealth effect happen in the same way. I’ve been saying for a while that people wrote off Solana alts because, last cycle, they were basically all scams. OXY and MAPS were examples of projects that were really bad.

OXY and MAPS are wild to me. One thing people aren’t paying attention to is that OXY and MAPS make up something like $800 million of the claims on FTX.

There’s a massive OXY and MAPS position. Those tokens are basically worth 0. They’re 0. The hole is actually smaller than people expect because of that. There’s this massive fake amount of money that people are ascribing to the hole.

I remember when OXY raised $400 million in 2021—maybe it was the end of 2020. The consensus at the time was, “Yeah, ape it because it’s on Solana, but it’s probably never going to amount to much.”

What’s out there now that’s better?

If Solana gets repriced above $100 and has the kind of second cycle that Ethereum had, where it rips again, then when teams on Solana launch tokens, people are going to ape into them. They’ll ape into NFTs on Solana in the same way.

There are a few really strong teams. I like the Jito Labs guys a lot. Jito is a MEV team, and they also run validators and have a liquid-staking version of Solana called JitoSOL.

They’re a combination of Flashbots and Lido on Ethereum, but on Solana. They don’t have a token yet, and they’re running a points program right now. If they launch a token, I think it will probably be one of the strongest ones on Solana.

Then there’s MarginFi. They’re similar to Aave; they’re a lending-and-borrowing protocol. They’re doing some pretty cool stuff.

One of the issues last cycle happened with the risk limits on—maybe it was Solend. I don’t want to throw them under the bus, but there was a huge position on one of the big lending-and-borrowing protocols on Solana, and the risk parameters weren’t great.

Somebody built this position, and it ended up messing up a lot of Solana DeFi when they had to unwind it. The MarginFi guys have really been hammering the nail on being safe with how they operate, how they scale up, and how they build from the ground up. I like them a lot.

Jupiter has also gotten a lot of good reviews. They’re an aggregator, kind of similar to 1inch, but literally everybody on Solana is trading through Jupiter.

The experience is so much faster, easier, and more fluid compared with DEXs on Ethereum. That’s because of the underlying Solana technology.

I used Mango back in the day, before Solana blew up. I thought I was slick-looking and cool.

At the end of the day, though, you need real use cases on these chains for a DEX aggregator to be relevant. What are the exciting games on Solana? What applications are going to bring people over from Web2? Are we going to see those hit Solana, or are we not there yet in the cycle?

I think we’re there. Aurory is probably the biggest game right now on Solana, but there are a lot of new ones that we’ll see coming out.

What I’m really trying to figure out for Solana, and what I think will be the best play, is which DePIN plays on Solana are going to work. If I can identify those, that’s one application category that is very well suited to Solana versus other chains because of how much more efficient it is.

If you’re going to scale something globally, you need to do it on Solana. Applications like Helium, Hivemapper, and Render are possible because of the chain. Render is already big—it’s over $1 billion—but applications like those that are only possible on Solana are going to be the best plays.

I have to figure out which ones I want to hit. I honestly don’t have a good list for that yet.

So much of crypto is trying to predict what people will do next. Where are people going?

A few months ago, you could say, “At some point in the future, I’m 100% confident that AI will be talked about by everybody. Therefore, I want to buy AI coins.” You don’t know when, how, or what the catalyst is. You just know that at some point people will talk about it, so you buy it.

That’s sometimes when prices are low. Anytime Bitcoin is below, say, 70% of its all-time high, that’s kind of the mentality when you approach the market. You buy certain things because you know people will talk about them at some point, whether it’s a real bull market, a fake bull market, or an echo bubble. You don’t care. You know you’re front-running the attention.

That’s literally attention. The euphoria peaks happen when there’s no attention left to spend on something. When everybody is talking about it and everybody is all-in, there’s nobody left to buy. That’s when the euphoria peak happens.

If you front-run that, that’s how you make a lot of money in crypto.

From the culture side, NFTs are interesting. You have CryptoPunks on Ethereum. What are they at right now, a 60 ETH floor?

They’re still over $100,000. They went as low as 40 ETH, and they’re up 50% off the lows. I’m seeing a 55.3 ETH floor.

A good bet to make if you’re betting on the future of crypto is to figure out what the CryptoPunks equivalent will be on Solana, if you think Solana is going to be the third chain.

I’ve been trying to think through that. Mad Lads are possibly a good candidate because the team is doing a lot of different things for the Solana ecosystem.

They have Backpack Wallet, they’re building the exchange, and they have the xNFT infrastructure, which is executable NFTs that have all these other features. Mad Lads are basically their NFT.

I don’t know if they’ll be the one or if it will be another project.

That’s one thing I like about the way you explained your thought process over the course of the podcast.

You don’t get too married to things, and when things are about to fall out of bed, like during COVID, you didn’t look to crypto to save you. You went and bought Boeing puts.

How do you risk-manage things? When do you know you’re in euphoria and it’s time to unload?

I don’t have rules around how large portions of my portfolio should be. I trade more off the individual chart and individual coin.

I did pretty well with PEPE earlier this year. It was probably my best trade this year. It was one of those situations where everybody was piling into shorts on a meme that had no inherent value. It was literally just retail versus all the other traders in the market.

All these traders were going short, and PEPE was listed on Bybit. I thought, “This is definitely going to squeeze.” I was lucky enough to buy it earlier on-chain, and it was a popular meme in crypto. The frog was everywhere, so I thought it made sense as a way to capture attention in crypto.

Then it got listed, and everybody was shorting it. I thought, “They’re going to get steamrolled trying to go against this thing.”

For finding tops using technical analysis, I think volume is really good. When the volume spikes are 2–3x the previous daily volumes and are larger than the total market cap of the coin, you’re usually pretty close to a top.

On SHIB, when it topped, it was doing multiple billions of dollars in volume. When PEPE topped this year after it was listed on Binance, I think the volume that day was around $2.4 billion. The meme coin was at around $1 billion or $1.6 billion market cap.

You’re looking at PEPE versus USDT, right? You’re not looking at pair charts for the volume. You’re looking at the straight-up USD volume?

I was on-chain, and I had a long on a shady exchange—the only way I could get long on it. I was closing both at the same time, but I was really looking at the low-timeframe, 5-minute chart and trading off technical analysis.

Those volume spikes are usually pretty good indicators. Otherwise, it’s really based on technical analysis. Once something starts going parabolic, you know it’s going to top out soon. When the thing is doubling every other day, it’s done.

That’s the hardest part but also the most lucrative part: staying sober about this stuff. When you look at your Coinbase account or your on-chain wallet and it has exploded, it’s easy to say, “I’m good. Now it’s going to 3x from here.”

It’s very hard to stay calm and think, “What objective framework can I use now that will help me lock this in and not get too greedy?”

One rule that’s been really helpful is tracking your emotional response to things. If I’ve refreshed my portfolio 5 times that day, I have to think about selling.

I’ll be about to send my friends a screenshot of my portfolio, like, “Let me take some off.” Without fail, I’m sitting on my exchange thinking, “What are we at now? How much money did I make today?”

People are a lot more similar than we give them credit for. If a lot of other people are doing that as well, at some point they start thinking, “Wait a second, this is nuts. This is a lot. I need to start getting out.”

I’ve been saying this year that a good portfolio allocation is to separate your core portfolio from your degen portfolio.

Put 70%—Bitcoin, ETH, Solana, or whatever your highest-conviction alts are—in the core bucket. Don’t try to trade that all that much.

With the other 30%, do whatever you want: trade on-chain, trade perpetuals, yield-farm, and buy random new launches. Do that with a smaller portion of your portfolio, then redistribute back into your higher-conviction bags.

I think the way you make the most money in crypto is by staying in the trenches and being active with all the new rotations. But you also need a core portfolio so that you’re consistently long.

Even if you get messed up trying to trade low-timeframe stuff, or you’re wrong on a rotation and buy an altcoin that drops 50% overnight because something random happened on-chain, you still have your core portfolio. You’re not completely messed up.

Trade with a cool head. Discipline is the number-one characteristic of traders who make money consistently over time. The second is being able to manage your emotions properly, but discipline is definitely number 1.

The million-dollar question is whether you’re in your core portfolio for another parabolic cycle-top event. Are you here because you’re preempting another giant bubble, or do you believe we’re in a 20-year megatrend where crypto slowly starts to eat value transfer, the way software is eating the world in other areas?

Because crypto is so small right now, even if you assume that, on a longer time frame, we’re in a slow uptrend, the repricing is going to happen quickly. It’s going to be a parabolic bubble because the market is so small and it’s so easy for people to get access to it.

I’m still trading it that way. I still think there will be a cycle top, and then things will go down around 70% after that top happens.

But if we get to $6 trillion as the top for this cycle and then stay in the multitrillion-dollar total market-cap range, I think volatility will dampen because we’ll be a bigger market.

I think this is one of the last cycles where we’re still tiny.

Bernstein has been saying $10 trillion. If we get to $10 trillion, that’s not out of the realm of possibility.

The next bubble is going to be huge. People have now missed 2 cycles. If they haven’t gotten into crypto by then and this thing starts ripping again, there are going to be a tremendous number of people with a lot of money experiencing FOMO.

It remains to be seen when that top is. Maybe a good way to end this is to have everybody give the exact date of the next top.

I’m down.

I’ll go first. I think the exact top is going to be January 21, 2025.

I’m going to say March 2025.

I’m going to go a year later than you guys. I think it’s coming in 2026. Let’s say March 15, 2026. You heard it here first.

The reason is that by then the United States government will have thrown in the towel on pretending it has an inflation anchor and a way to pay back the debt. They’re just going to start printing their way out of this.

If there’s one thing crypto does right for your portfolio, it’s that scenario.

You’re literally giving us 2 full years of a bull market. I don’t know if my body can handle that.

Or maybe the bull market starts later. We get another year of hell, and then the top comes later.

You guys have been in crypto way longer than me, so you probably have this perception of crypto as something that either ramps, dies, or chops around violently and murders people.

I don’t know. I’ve traded some pretty big asset classes, and things don’t always work like that. You can have periods where something grinds higher.

Crude oil went from negative $37 to $120 a barrel between 2020 and 2022. It basically ground higher in a straight line. That can happen. We might be in the middle of one of these long grinds, and who knows?

That would be so frightening. If Bitcoin steadily goes up to $250,000, can you imagine how many altseasons we would have?

I would print. That would be crazy. There would be a new rotation every 3 months, and Bitcoin would just keep going up.

People would lose their minds. That would be max pain, because every 3 weeks people would be calling the top, selling everything, and losing all their money. That’s ridiculous. I actually think people would lose their minds.

Well, if that’s max pain, then that’s what’s going to happen. Even people are doing it now. The Bitcoin chart is just up, but it’s not ripping up; it’s just higher low, higher low, higher low, higher low, higher low, higher low, higher low, and everybody is shaking and panicking, asking, “Why is it not responding to stuff by going up?” Bitcoin has product-market fit. Bitcoin is real.

Every day, more money goes into it, and the ETF is about to debottleneck some of those pipelines of money. You see sovereigns aping in—El Salvador, and the Central African Republic keeps happening.

Ethereum has real use cases. Solana will probably start showing up with cool games, DePIN, and all that stuff. Who knows? Maybe we end up with a vortex of inflows.

A 2026 top would be crazy. Linear growth for the next 2 years.

I didn’t call that. I said the top is in 2026. Maybe we have a nasty path to that point, but I think we get a steady grind. I believe it.

The reason crypto goes parabolic is that this market is full of degenerates. The people who trade these markets are willing to put their entire net worth into these coins.

That’s why you have these parabolic moves. In other markets, I don’t know if you have people putting such a large percentage of their net worth into random things. Maybe you do. Maybe retail is starting to do that now with Tesla and GameStop.

But as an asset class, I don’t think anybody is all-in on their net worth in oil at any given moment.

The market for Nasdaq or gasoline isn’t something the average retail person can trade or would care to trade.

Meanwhile, most of my TradFi friends are no-coiners. They say, “Crypto is going to die after it drains all the money out of everybody’s pockets.”

But you mean the entire world’s desire to gamble on a technological future? I’m sorry, but no, it’s not going to happen. If it does, then buying Bitcoin is probably bullish. That dystopian future is probably bullish for Bitcoin.

I want to ask you something for the screenshot of this podcast. Can you move your head so you’re in the image underneath the crown behind you—the Basquiat crown—so we can get a snapshot of you as the king?

There we go.

That’s it. We’re good.

Let me clarify: don’t go all-in on one thing. Please do not do that. That’s why I said to have a core portfolio and a degen portfolio.

I know people who have gone all-in and spun up 100x or 200x, but when you don’t have risk parameters and continue to trade like that—“I’m all-in on this, I’m all-in on this, I’m all-in on this”—somewhere along that path, it’s going to wreck you.

The thing about crypto is that the market can be up-only for months at a time. When you’re long during those up-only periods, your confidence keeps going up. You start thinking, “I’m a genius. I’m so smart. I made this much money in 2 months. I’ve never made this much money in my life.”

That confidence tricks you into making trades with no consideration of risk. It traps a lot of people toward the end of bull markets. They say, “I made this much, so I’m all-in on this,” and then they do it again and again until they trip themselves up.

At the beginning, they said, “I’m going to take profit back into this. I’m going to sell at these levels. I’m going to take profit at this time.” Then they forget.

That’s why I say to journal a lot when you’re trading. It’s easy to lose track of what you were thinking a few weeks or months earlier.

If you journal, you can open your book and turn back a couple of pages: “On March 21, I said this. I said I was going to sell when this 5x’d. Why am I not trying to sell now? What happened between then and now? Why is my mindset different?”

Usually it’s because you’re wrapped up in the market. You’ve committed yourself to something and gotten lost in it.

This is why you’re good. Discipline is the number-one characteristic of traders who make money consistently over time, and I’d say the second characteristic is managing your emotions properly.

Journaling helps with both. It helps with discipline and emotional management.

I’ve always found that half of emotional management is reminding yourself that you’re feeling something at any given moment.

When you’re in the moment and things seem very easy, it helps to have a reminder to stop and think. That’s half the battle.

For sure.

Maybe we should get a reunion of the Untitled Crypto Podcast together.

We need to get Cobie back.

Where is he?

He’s probably traveling the world in a van somewhere. I have no idea. He said crypto Twitter was too negative and that he was going to do fun things. I’m sure that’s what he’s doing. He’s probably still on crypto Twitter, checking it every day.

I honestly don’t know how you do it. I gave up on crypto Twitter about a year ago.

It’s pretty bad. This year has been particularly bad. The amount of negativity online has been nuts.

I get both sides of it. People DM me all the time saying, “Don’t pay attention to those guys. You helped me do this and this. You helped me think through this. You made me this much money.”

But the timeline is extremely aggressive when you have a lot of followers on Twitter. It’s a different experience.

It’s funny because I tweet the same way I did when I had 1,000 followers. I’ll tweet, “Ansem’s drunk again.” I was doing that when I had no followers. My friends would say, “Are you good? What’s up?”

Now I tweet about crypto, and people say, “Ansem is tweeting about crypto again.” When you have 100,000 followers, somebody is always going to have a problem with what you said.

It’s a numbers game.

It’s a numbers game. If you tell 5 people something, there’s a low chance that one of them gets angry at you. If you tell 100,000 people something, it’s highly likely that somebody will have a problem with what you said, especially if it’s not consensus.

Just don’t put your address on your Twitter profile and you’re good.

The thing is, people recognize me now. I walk outside and they’re like, “Yo, Ansem, are you serious? What the fuck?”

Does that happen in New York? Do they call you “the Godfather”? Is it, “What’s up, king?” Or is it more like, “What’s this shitcoin going to do this week?”

The first thing they usually do is pull up my profile picture and show it to me. They’re like, “Are you the dude from Twitter?” I say yes.

Then they start talking to me, and of course, at the end they’re like, “Okay, what’s the next coin I should buy? What should I buy next?”

Without fail.

It’s been happening pretty consistently lately.

I think people in finance gatekeep trading. They say, “To be a successful trader, you have to go to Morgan Stanley and sit on a desk for 2 years. That’s how you learn how to trade.”

I don’t think that’s true at all.

This is what I respect about both of you. I played that game. I wore the tie and sat at the desk, and all it did was pre-screen me to join what was ultimately the most ridiculous shitcoin casino of all time.

One thing that’s great about crypto is that it democratizes these markets. When there’s a crypto crash, unlike in crude oil, you don’t ruin entire economies. The impact is limited.

But there’s also a positive: it can create wealth, and it can create an alternative to some of these rigged TradFi systems controlled by suspicious people.

My cope is that it has taught a generation of people the power of second-order thinking. If you want to be successful, you have to ask, “How do I play this game? How do I think about this? How do I get better at this? What’s the monetary incentive to get better at this?”

People are actually having to put some brainpower into it, which is probably a good thing.

It’s also teaching people about finance. Obviously, the risks are much higher in crypto, but once you learn how to manage your own money, I think the process of managing your own money is going to shift much more back to the individual over the next few years and the next decade, rather than pushing that responsibility onto other people.

One reason is that people are going to be forced to do it. They’ll ask, “How do I become more efficient at scaling up my savings?”

The other reason is that I think we’re shifting away from trusting big corporate institutions and back toward the individual. You can see it across different markets in different ways.

Look at how marketing works now. There’s a ton of marketing directed at content creators. People with large online followings often do much better with marketing than big companies do with traditional advertising.

The individual is becoming a much bigger narrative.

I couldn’t agree with you more. Managing your own money teaches you risk-management techniques much more than offloading your money to a robo-manager ever will.

It’s impressive for me to have the opportunity to talk to you about what you’re doing. When I was your age, I had years of white-shoe banking experience, but I was a horrendous trader in hindsight.

You’re miles ahead. Your discipline and journaling are things I didn’t learn to do until my 30s.

Crypto forces you to grow up fast because you lose all your money. Then either you learn, or you get wrecked a few times and ask, “How do I stop this from happening?”

Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. This was fun.

We’ll have to get Cobie on next.

That would be an interesting one—calling in with Starlink. He’s probably actually in space.

Are you in the ISS? Why are you floating?

I have no idea.

Ansem, thank you so much. It was great talking to you, as always.