Trading Crypto's Election Year | 1000x

We cannot understate the importance of the world’s preeminent superpower—a nation-state with basically unlimited resources—backing our space, as opposed to actively trying to fight our space like white blood cells fight a virus. I think if Kamala wins, we’re going to see a big dispersion trade. We’re going to see Bitcoin outperform everything else in the crypto asset space like crazy, Bitcoin dominance is going to go up, and you’re going to see a lot of people throwing in the towel. Meanwhile, if Trump wins, we might see tokenized equity on the Nasdaq. It could get there pretty quickly.

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.

The market is currently dying, which is honestly to be expected at this point. I’m sorry we didn’t record before Trump’s announcement, but basically, that was possibly the most telegraphed thing I’ve seen in a very long time. You had 30,000 coins added to open interest in the week leading up to his speech in Nashville, so obviously, no matter what he said short of “I’m buying billions of dollars of Bitcoin,” the market was going to sell off.

The good news is that, as far as I can tell, we’re pretty close to the end. I think there’s an unwind happening right now because people are getting out, and there was too much excitement going into this. We’re almost totally unwound. ETH is finally doing well. ETH/BTC is up because I think it’s slowly running out of sellers, and the ETH ETF outflows have actually outpaced the GBTC outflows pretty significantly.

Solana is still holding up quite nicely. We almost tagged $200, and we’re back down at $178, but once this unwind happens, we’re in a pretty good position. I’m going to be beating the bull drums pretty soon. I know I’ve got my bear behind me right now—you’re in the Bear’s Lair, I’m in the Bear’s Den—but I’m going to be beating the drums of a bull pretty soon.

For the last few days, I was sweating so hard because I think we were short around $68,500, and it got up to $69,700. I was like, “Dude, there’s no way this is sustainable,” but I was sweating for a bit. Now we’re good.

Yeah, we’re just banging around in Bitcoin in this tight little range, kind of from $60,000 to $70,000—or maybe $56,000 to $74,000 if you want to zoom out a little bit. It’s a wide range in percentage terms, and I think most traders in most asset classes would be delighted with that sort of amplitude. But in the crypto world, nothing really gets us excited if it isn’t a 100% instant-gratification rally, a face-ripper rally, and we’re not getting it.

What you just said is really important. You said that short of Trump saying he was going to buy billions of dollars of Bitcoin on some sort of regular basis, the market was going to sell off. That’s absolutely right. I would put a little asterisk there and say that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. actually came out and said he was going to do that.

If only. There are a lot of things he would do if he were in the Oval Office.

I mean, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is kind of irrelevant, and the dude said he had a brain worm. You can’t really elect a guy who said he had a brain worm.

Actually, I loved it. I just thought that, in the crazy world we live in, why not vote for somebody who’s being controlled by an alien space worm, like in Men in Black?

That was a tangent.

You’re right. Trump would have had to come out and announce what Kennedy announced in order for the market to keep going. When I was at Cumberland, there was always somebody on the team who would say, “So-and-so is going to speak at Breakpoint. We should buy Solana,” or, “They’re going to talk about Render at this conference. We should buy Render.” More recently, it was, “Illia is going to talk to Jensen at the NVIDIA conference. We should buy NEAR.”

Honestly, these trades just don’t work. They’re not good trades. The thematic trade here is that crypto is about to go parabolic. I believe that for a number of different reasons. But the trade of the last 6 months that would have made you money was simply to buy when it dips and sell when it pops. Just keep trading—range trading.

The problem with that trade is that no participant who’s still in crypto is a range trader. Every single crypto person who’s left standing right now is a momentum trader. If you trade ranges in crypto, you miss these big blowoff tops, you get nuked in 2022, and you’re dead. You’re out of the market.

We have a market of momentum traders getting chopped up in this range, buying high and selling low. I guess it pays to range trade, but the question is: for how much longer? With the giant bear behind you, Avi, it looks like you’re still range trading, but soon you’re going to—

Yeah, I think it’s important to be able to switch your bias in this asset class. I go from being a momentum trader to a range trader. I think I’ve said this 150 times at this point, but there are 2 ways that I look at Bitcoin and crypto in general. When I’m thinking about how to buy it, I ask: Is there momentum, or is there value?

What you have to understand is that most people just stick to the momentum side, but the value side is actually where you make the most money. The question is, at what price is Bitcoin? As Kamala Harris says, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” You have to look at the context. Do you think Bitcoin just fell out of a coconut tree? No. You have to look at the previous price action.

If there wasn’t substantial momentum heading into that move, it’s kind of hard to buy it. When I look at Bitcoin since March 5 of this year—or I guess it topped out on March 13—there’s no trend there. It’s just sideways. In this type of market environment, you can’t buy the breakouts. You kind of have to buy the value levels.

The value levels are the bottom of the range. They’re sub-$60,000, or they’re mid-range. Maybe you can buy mid-range for a bounce around $63,000, but it’s really tough to buy the top of the range, betting that momentum will occur, because there hasn’t been momentum.

You either have to wait to accumulate your positions lower, or you have to buy a true breakout of the range above $72,000. That’s why, when it traded at $70,000 the other day, it didn’t really make sense to buy it. It’s just not the market environment to bet on momentum. You have to be careful.

My view—the reason I have a bear behind me—is that we just had a huge event: The former president of the United States, who is currently, according to the betting odds, the most likely person to become president again, voiced extreme support for BTC, and BTC is down.

What this event did was set a floor. People are going to be more comfortable buying Bitcoin when it’s scary to buy Bitcoin. Because of what Trump said, they’re going to have some level of comfort buying BTC that they didn’t have before. If the former president endorses it and basically says he thinks it’s going to be worth more than gold one day, then you want to buy value. You want to buy blood.

The former president, if he becomes the next president, can announce a strategic Bitcoin reserve. There’s yet another parallel with the oil market and how that works.

You’re right, and you know what else is crazy in terms of setting the floor, Avi? The other stuff that’s going on right now. The technicals are very bearish. As soon as Trump spoke at the Bitcoin conference, a day or 2 went by—not much time—before the Democrats in charge of these offices moved roughly $2 billion worth of Silk Road Bitcoin to a centralized exchange to sell.

You also have these massive outflows from the ETH ETFs, which is basically the opposite technical effect of the Bitcoin ETF launch. You have bearish technicals, sideways trading, and a market that should be fragile, yet it’s kind of not. We’re seeing higher lows.

Let’s wait. I don’t know. There are some segments of the market that have been okay. A lot of Solana beta has performed well, and Solana itself has performed well up until the last 2 days.

Bitcoin itself has been remarkably fragile.

Yeah. Solana/BTC is at the highs of the year right now, around 0.0027. It was there in March during memecoin mania, then it sank back down, but now it’s right back to the highs. Solana is Teflon right now. I think that strength is going to continue.

What do you think about ETH and the ratio here? The ETH ETF has been really depressing.

Basically, what I think about ETH goes back to what we were talking about. I think ETH is a Trump trade, and here’s why. What matters isn’t who wins the election. Let’s talk about what actually impacts the price of ETH.

What impacts the price of ETH is whether there will be regulatory clarity under the next presidential administration, or whether the current paradigm of throwing a wrench in their plans and kicking the can down the road—the Gensler way—will continue.

When I put on macro trades, I always like to work out a probability tree. Trump is at 60% on Polymarket; let’s call Kamala Harris at 40%. Under Trump, I assume an SEC overhaul is 95% likely. Under Kamala, I assume it’s a 25% likelihood. For each of those scenarios—SEC overhaul or no SEC overhaul—I assign probabilities for regulatory clarity.

Regulatory clarity is very likely under a Trump SEC overhaul. It’s still likely under a Kamala SEC overhaul, although less so. It’s very unlikely if Kamala doesn’t overhaul the SEC. Then I put price scenarios for Bitcoin, ETH, and Solana on each of those SEC-overhaul probabilities and come up with some forecasts.

It’s not an exact science, but it’s something to lean on when a trade is going in your face. You can look at the spreadsheets you made and see whether the assumptions still make sense.

What I came up with is that if the SEC finally gives builders and projects some measure of clarity on what is and isn’t a security, and you can just snap your fingers and have that happen overnight, ETH and Solana become the protocol layers for the internet of value. There’s massive upside.

FinServ financial institutions will probably stick with ETH because it’s stable, and they don’t need high-performance blockchains. They’re working with SWIFT, and anything is better than T+2, 5 days a week. ETH is way better than that, even though it isn’t Solana.

Solana is a micropayments infrastructure thing that could turn into something huge: stablecoins, faster value movement, and all of this other stuff. Suddenly, a whole internet of value becomes viable once financial institutions and Web2 companies can reassure their employees, management, and shareholders that they’re not going to get sued by the SEC for doing their thing in crypto.

That’s why I think if we get stuck with another 4 years of Gensler—or Gensler 2.0—ETH is going to be absolute trash. It’s going to underperform and look the way XRP looked after its big time in the sun.

Meanwhile, if we get a new regulatory paradigm, all the pipes have been built. Institutions can just light up ETH, and they’re ready to. They will. That’s what I think about ETH.

I think that’s fair. At the end of the day, it’s going to take a long time for people to come in, but at least the infrastructure is now built in order to do so. Once people decide to allocate to ETH, and once people decide to allocate to BTC, it’s going to be easy to do.

There’s still a lot of uncertainty. As you said, you had to build a spreadsheet for this: Will there be an SEC overhaul? Will the United States be friendly toward crypto? Will the United States be friendly toward applications built on crypto? The answer so far is no.

You need to see whether Trump gets elected, and you need to see what happens if Kamala actually switches her stance. Otherwise, you’re looking at a lot of uncertainty, and I don’t think there are enough people left who are willing to buy an uncertain market.

Basically, everyone who owns crypto in the United States is already reasonably fully allocated. If you look at the numbers, around 50 million people own crypto. A substantial portion of the people who invest in the stock market also own crypto.

The way I view it is that it’s about the level of allocation. Retail and your average person are probably already reasonably fully allocated. I don’t know how much more, as a percentage of their portfolio, the average person is going to increase their Bitcoin holdings.

It’s really about the family offices of the world, the institutions of the world, and the big money of the world. They’re not going to deal with uncertainty very well.

I think that’s a good view. Ultimately, what needs to be underlined here is that you have a lot of institutions, family offices, and bigger pools of capital. The retail degen crowd is either in or out by now, but you have a lot of institutional capital ready to go.

Let’s take the pool of family offices, or even basic hedge-fund strategies that touch crypto. Those guys are all ready to go. They just don’t want to get sued. If Gensler gets fired, if Trump starts buying Bitcoin, or if there’s a new crypto-friendly regulatory framework, I think they’re ready to pull the trigger. I really do.

I don’t think it’s going to be like 2021, when we were all sitting here saying, “The institutions are coming,” but we didn’t know when. They’re all ready. They’ll show up the second they know they’re not going to face legal risk.

The same is true for family offices. If you’re a family office and you want to get involved in crypto, your concern isn’t getting sued. Your concern is whether your qualified custodian supports Bitcoin. Can the Bank of New York Mellon or JPMorgan custody your coins?

If I had to guess, my gut feeling is that family offices are behind the spectacular inflows into the Bitcoin ETFs, like IBIT, because custody isn’t an issue there. But I think you’ll start to see more adventurous, younger, wealthy, techie types directing their family offices to go out the risk curve and buy other, riskier tokens once they know they can get solid custody and won’t get Wormholed.

It’s all either contingent upon institutional clarity, or it’s institutional-adjacent stuff like custody, lending, and all the other things you want to do with a coin to make it more capital-efficient.

Capital efficiency is key. One thing I hope will happen with the ETH ETF, which would allow people to buy more ETH, is that if you can borrow against these things, you’re good to go.

The way I’m currently thinking about the ETH ETF and when you want to buy a ton of ETH/BTC is when you start to see the ETH flows level out. When you look at it, ETH is being drained a lot faster than GBTC was being drained.

I think the selloff underneath has probably already happened. What we’re waiting for now is the last little bit to drain out. The ETH news was sold a lot faster: We went down 17.3% in 4 days. I think the BTC ETF news trade bottomed on day 12, so the market is getting more efficient at pricing the ETH trade.

That’s probably what will happen with Solana once it happens. Bitcoin proceeded to rip 92% in 50 days after the ETF approval, so I’m of the mindset that we can probably see a pretty strong performance from ETH over the next few weeks. I’d call it mid-August as the point when I’d start to turn pretty bullish on ETH.

I agree with you tactically, but it’s important to note that ETH was never a big, important trust in the space. It was always the redheaded stepchild of GBTC.

GBTC had tens of billions of dollars of assets under management. It was this massive trade where you could create it and then sell it at a premium versus the Bitcoin you had in there. It was an arbitrage, and it dominated the news flow back in the previous cycle.

It was this massive thing that entangled a bunch of people. Three Arrows Capital exploded on it, and it was pledged as collateral as part of the FTX estate. It was a big story, a big macro asset, and a big way for retail people to buy Bitcoin in their 401(k)s 7 years ago.

ETH never had that cache. I think ETH was just a way for degens like us to replicate the GBTC discount trade on a shortened time frame. The rapid outflows right now aren’t that surprising. It isn’t something that’s as sticky as GBTC was.

I don’t know if I’m as bullish as you are based on price action mirroring what Bitcoin did after the GBTC-to-Bitcoin ETF approvals. You might be right, but I’m bullish for other reasons.

There’s one other big reason that I didn’t bring up. I’m bullish on ETH and Bitcoin, and also Solana to some extent, because I do think Trump is going to get elected. I think his odds are being undervalued by Polymarket.

One thing that both he and Kamala will do, whoever wins, is probably devalue the dollar. Trump wants to do it as a mechanism for trade—to make our exports appear cheaper and offer better value to foreign consumers—because he’s obsessed with trade balances and imbalances. A weaker dollar means stronger Bitcoin.

With Kamala, I think we can expect a repeat of the Joe Biden stimulus orgasm of 2021. It will be, “We’re going to print trillions to pay off student debt. We’re going to print trillions to do social-welfare things like preschool and after-school care.” Just wait for the printing machine to start humming. Bitcoin is a great debasement hedge as well.

When you think about the election, people got really excited when Kamala was installed and some polls came out saying she was leading Trump. The reality is that politics, markets, and life work in a similar, predictable pattern: Whatever happened most recently is the most important thing in people’s minds.

You saw this with the Trump assassination attempt. People were talking about it: “Oh my God, Trump got shot. This is going to change everything. This is going to change politics. The world is going to change.” A few weeks later, nobody is talking about it.

Joe Biden steps down and Kamala steps up. This is new, fresh, and exciting. In 2 weeks, people are going to forget that this crazy event happened, that Joe Biden stepped down.

Somebody on Twitter encapsulated this with a funny post about President Garfield’s assassination. They said, “This will be taught in history books for years to come. This was an insane event. America will never forget this tragedy.” I bet 75% of people don’t even know who this guy was.

Andrew Garfield?

Who’s President Garfield?

Andrew Garfield. Never heard of him.

Exactly. James Garfield—the 20th president of the United States—was assassinated on September 19, 1881. The shooting occurred less than 4 months into his term as president.

Actually, that’s kind of crazy.

Yeah, he got shot. That’s a real bummer. Four months didn’t last very long.

Long story short, every event that you think is going to be life-changing, every event that you think is going to impact your life for an extended period, and every event where you think, “Oh my God, I can’t believe this happened,” I almost guarantee you it will fade into irrelevancy.

It’s nuts to think about, but it happens so often. Think of all the announcements that seemed huge in the moment but, in hindsight, aren’t that big anymore. Elon Musk selling Bitcoin off his balance sheet in May catalyzed a selloff, but 2 months later we were right back to where we were before, and Elon loved Bitcoin again.

All these things happen. They impact price in the short run, but they don’t really impact price in the long run. That’s not to discount what just happened. It’s just to say: Don’t overestimate the impact of these events. The world tends to go in a direction.

My personal opinion is that Trump is the better candidate than Kamala, so despite the fact that she got a recent boost, I think he still probably wins.

I think he wins, too. When I talk about Trump trades, I’m talking about episodic macro themes. Catalyst trading is, “I’m going to buy because Elon is going to appear on Saturday Night Live,” or, “I’m going to buy NEAR because Illia is going to talk with Jensen at their conference.”

I’m a terrible catalyst trader. I think I’m a decent episodic macro trader. I’m a macro momentum trader, so the way I avoid killing myself during these periods of chop—when a bullish catalyst comes up and we rally to $70,000, and then a bearish catalyst sends us back to $65,000—is that I stop trading.

In big moves, I do okay. If I get it dead wrong, I’ll just get out of the market and sit on the sidelines for a while, then get back in when the price is more in my favor and the risk-reward is better.

You seem to have the ability, as a more active trader, to switch back and forth between range trading and momentum trading. Are you looking for a theme?

No, it’s just being a crypto trader. If you’re a crypto trader and you want to actively trade BTC and ETH, you have to build that skill set. You have to know when it’s time to set and forget, and you have to know when it’s time to pay attention.

You get it after a while. You learn when Bitcoin is trending, when ETH is trending, and when these assets are trending. It can be subjective, and you just have to understand what to look for in these certain types of situations.

I’ll give you an example. When you’re looking at Bitcoin on a 1-week time horizon, I’m staring at the 1-week chart, then the 4-hour chart, then the 1-hour chart, and then the 5-minute chart. Basically, every microdip gets bought up. Every $100 move down gets swallowed immediately, and that happens for a week straight. That’s momentum.

That’s kind of what happened in October of last year. If you look at the period from Tuesday, October 24, to November 24, there was a full month when every dip would just get slurped. You never had a trend down for any extended period.

That signals to me that you should just stay long and wait for a crazy blowoff, which we ended up doing. Are they slurping it right now? You watch this thing tick for tick. What’s going on here?

No, they’re selling it. There are a lot of sellers in this market, which is why I have the bear here. I’m still pretty bearish. From here, I’m not going to get crazy long unless we trade at $63,000.

Right now, at $65,850, Bitcoin has pretty bad technicals. I think it’s really slow, and the block sizes are too small. If it trades at $63,000, I’ll reverse my opinion.

I’m avoiding this range trading because I don’t watch the market tick for tick like you do. To all the traders out there who don’t exhibit the peak-performance attributes of market focus and process that you just described, you’re probably better off setting it and watching your position from the sidelines rather than constantly getting in and out.

What I would say is that, while catalysts come and go and momentum comes and goes, it’s really hard to understate the importance of a regulatory, macroeconomic, or other broad-based backdrop theme and its impact on macro assets like Bitcoin and ETH.

I keep going back to Gensler and the SEC. The slow grind, that sort of war of attrition on crypto where the SEC basically sandbagged it in the United States for 4 years, impacted a lot of people, including the 2 of us. It also impacted the price. It delayed institutional adoption, slowed down the ETF approvals, and forced a lot of people and capital out of the market.

These paradigms matter, and they’re not catalysts. They’re paradigms. When we’re talking about Trump trades and Kamala trades, we’re not talking about a catalyst. An election could seem like a catalyst, but it’s really about what paradigm we’re going to be looking at for the next half-decade.

I agree. If Gensler gets fired, basically make a list of everything that’s under SEC investigation.

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Yeah, let’s talk baskets. You were talking about an AI basket. That’s a great basket that we should start talking about: Which coins are being investigated by the SEC and are going to absolutely rip once Trump gets elected?

If anyone has ideas, comment below. I like Uniswap a lot. Lido is really good. What else? Let me think. Probably that’s it.

I think Coinbase stock just explodes. Coinbase definitely does well. You’re supposed to see Coinbase’s market cap converge with the CME. I don’t have my Bloomberg in front of me, but it’s a number of billions. It could get weird.

Weird is a good word for it. Definitely the Banana Zone once that happens. What do you think happens to the miners in a Trump-winning scenario?

That’s a good question. The thing about the miners is that a lot of them have recently been driven by things outside of BTC. They’ve turned into a data-center trade for HPC, so it’s a bit difficult to say.

I think Riot is the pure-play miner. Everything else that I look at has turned into an HPC play. It’s hard to say.

I think it’s cyclical. The miners are all focused on AI right now because everybody is training expensive models. You don’t need that kind of compute forever. Once all the main models have been trained and have absorbed the entire internet—and I didn’t come up with that thesis; I listened to some tech podcasts that did—let’s say that’s true.

Let’s say Bitcoin is trading at $150,000 because the United States is either buying it or printing dollars with reckless abandon. I think you see the miners pivot back to crypto.

AI and crypto are the 2 ends of the spectrum that these miners can service. They’ll do an economic calculation, just like a refinery asks whether it’s more profitable to produce diesel or jet fuel. The miners will switch between the 2 depending on what the world needs at any given time.

I think that makes sense. The only question I always have with that specific trade is the demand side. Every research report I look at talks a lot about the supply and the investment in infrastructure, and then less about the demand side. It’s almost like demand is a given: Of course there will be demand.

That, I think, is the only danger with the trade. Just to take it back to what else might do well in a scenario where there’s more clarity, anything that would do better if it were integrated with traditional finance—DeFi in general—should do extremely well.

In a scenario where crypto can integrate with TradFi, I was thinking that the most bullish token in the world is Ondo. We obviously talked about it and did our project review a while ago, but then I looked at Ondo’s fully diluted valuation. It’s $10 billion. Circle is about to go public at $5 billion, so maybe Circle is the trade.

There are all these little weird adjacent trades where you could probably get a 2- or 3-bagger if you pick them up ahead of a regulatory shift.

I think Trump is going to win. I don’t think Polymarket is right, and the reason I think Trump is going to win is that I think his campaign strategy is to slow-play all of his criticism and all of the dirt they have on Kamala until just before the election.

There’s no point doing it before she even gets the nomination. It’s about recency bias again.

There are no secrets about Trump. The guy got shot on live television in the face. We know his dirty laundry. Meanwhile, Kamala is not really known by the country yet.

If I were a Republican strategist, I would tell Trump to cool his jets until she secures the nomination and the coconut-brat-frenzy stuff dies down, like all episodes do. Then start blasting the airwaves with anti-Kamala propaganda and getting her dirty laundry out there.

I expect we’re going to get an FBI-Hillary-emails-2.0 type thing for her. I really think she’s going to lose. I’m willing to bet a lot of money on this, and I’m indirectly betting on crypto. I’m pretty much all in at this point.

When that happens, if Polymarket is underpricing it, Circle stock, Coinbase stock, and a bunch of random tokens that aren’t currently overvalued should do well. There are a lot of tokens that are overvalued, so you have to be choosy.

Certain baskets of cursed tokens—maybe Uniswap, maybe Lido, and maybe even XRP—could do well. Tokens that are being basically teabagged by Gary Gensler will probably rally a lot.

I think that’s all reasonable. I do wonder, when this all comes to a head, what the repricing looks like. That’s something we have to think about.

One thing that’s always been clear to me is that whenever people’s price targets are too low, you probably just want to sell everything. The fact that people at $65,000 were calling for $75,000 with a lot of excitement makes me nervous.

You need those $100,000 and $150,000 price targets, because they tell you a lot about people’s psychology and mentality. If you’re asking for $75,000 when you’re at $65,000, you’re probably selling at $70,000, because the risk-reward isn’t really in your favor anymore.

At what point do people gain the confidence to say, “Okay, this is going to $100,000,” or, “This is going to $150,000”? If you’re looking at DeFi and thinking these things are going to reprice if Gensler gets fired, how much can they get? How big can these things become?

Not that big. I think they’re layups. They’re probably 2- to 5-baggers. The 1,000-baggers are probably hiding in the $1,000-to-$10,000 coins by market cap right now.

I don’t personally know exactly where to look yet. Maybe it’s niche AI coins, or something with a little bit of native traction. Maybe Chief was right and I just have to start hooking myself into the Discord fire hose of garbage and looking for those 1,000x opportunities.

I do think the megacap DeFi tokens are easy 100% to 500% returns if Trump wins. That’s the kind of layup you never get in TradFi. If you’re an interest-rate trader, you’re never going to show up, buy something, and have it double on a relatively obvious type of move.

I don’t think so either. You get to front-run those flows, because once the market opens up, the flows will come. To me, that’s a no-brainer.

Other than that, there’s not too much in the market that’s crazy interesting to me. I was trying to get a handle on DePIN because Helium was trading extremely well over the last week. Off the bottom, it was one of the best performers.

I noticed that it was getting a lot of traction in Latin America. While technically being crypto, it doesn’t really have anything to do with crypto other than the token incentive. It’s interesting, so I’m doing a little deep dive on that right now, which I think could be quite fruitful.

I think Helium is so interesting. Back in 2022, I was shilling Helium to my oil buddies, and they were all rolling their eyes at me. But how is it possible, in this world of inflated services and goods, that there isn’t a space for Helium to come in and offer cheap Wi-Fi or bandwidth to everybody, secured by—I don’t know what you call it—proof of “I plugged this black box into my Wi-Fi box”?

My point is that I think Helium is a really good idea. What’s holding Helium back is the fact that a token, no matter how amazing it may be—even Bitcoin—is kind of just a Ponzi scheme if it doesn’t give you some sort of equity or dividend in the underlying project.

I think that soon Helium will be able to register its tokens as securities and offer token holders essentially a pass-through of revenues that come from users paying to use the network. Once that happens, bootstrapping Helium is less reliant on people lighting up Helium nodes and buying Helium. It becomes more like an actual company—a decentralized Verizon or decentralized AT&T.

That is probably a better business model than centralized AT&T. We’re really on the cusp of this massive unlock of the internet of value. I just hope it happens. I want it to happen so badly, not just for my bags but because AT&T sucks. It would be great to sign up for Helium at one-fifth the price of Verizon.

One hundred percent. The real thing here is that technology has obviously become better over the last 10, 15, 20, and 25 years. We don’t necessarily need to have these really expensive setups to maintain.

I used to have somebody in my life who worked on maintaining telephone poles. It’s very complicated and very difficult. If you have this infrastructure and it works, it’s actually great. It’s probably easier to maintain.

It’s just a matter of whether you can get it into as many hands as possible so that you have coverage. That makes sense.

The only drawback was that Helium inflates a ton. There’s a huge amount of token issuance that subsidizes the running of these nodes. That’s the only thing I’m concerned about. Other than that, it’s obviously a great idea, and clearly other people think so because people are buying it.

I think the way the price action would play out if Trump won and the SEC got friendly is important. A lot of people would expect a god candle—a massive green, face-ripping move on everybody’s screen. I don’t know about that.

I don’t think it’s going to be a 1999 moment. I think you’ll get a big rally when the election results are announced and it’s Donald Trump. If it’s Kamala, maybe you get a big selloff and then a rebound in Bitcoin, with less of a rebound in the other tokens.

That’s kind of what happened to the S&P when Trump first won. Everybody thought, “Oh my God, it’s going to be World War II,” so the S&P sold off. Then it regained all of its lost ground and more. Maybe you get that in Bitcoin with Kamala.

Back to Trump: If he wins, I think you get a big rally on the day, a little bit of follow-through, and then a steady, multiyear uptrend as project after project gets adopted and institution after institution lights up inflows or crypto-adjacent products like lending and custody.

Settlement moves on-chain, gas gets spent, and ETH becomes deflationary. I think a confluence of factors will lead to something like a 2002-to-2007-style rally in crypto—a slow one.

This goes into the idea of whether there will be 4-year cycles. Are you going to get these compressed periods of an absolute rip, or is it going to be slower, more methodical growth as you suggested?

I think it’s 100% what you suggested. The issue with the whole 4-year cycle is that Bitcoin was an asset nobody paid attention to. You needed catalysts to get people to pay attention to it and buy it, and the halving happened to be one of those catalysts.

You would go through these 4-year cycles where you’d get a crazy move into and after the halving, then a crazy collapse. Everyone would forget about it, and it would toil around for a while before attention came back to it for another halving.

Now everyone pays attention to Bitcoin all the time. It’s constantly on Bloomberg, constantly on CNBC, and constantly everywhere. You don’t have the same cycle of attention that you had before.

FTX definitely impacted this and caused an 18-month lull because everyone was too scared of crypto, but I don’t know what could happen again in crypto that would create the same effect. Even if Binance went down, as long as it wasn’t a situation where everyone on Binance lost their money, it’s hard to imagine an FTX-level event.

I can’t imagine another extinction-level event that would nuke Bitcoin out of existence. I think it’s just going to be slow growth over time. You’ll have 20% or 30% pullbacks, but I don’t think you’re going to get an 80% pullback ever again.

85%? I don’t think so either. I don’t believe in the 4-year cycle anymore. You stated it eloquently, but what market in the history of markets adheres consistently to a time frame for its cycles over multiple decades? It would be unprecedented. It’s too ridiculous. It can’t be.

I think we’re done with the 4-year cycles.

I couldn’t agree with you more. In terms of extinction-level events for crypto, the United States could come out and ban it, but even that would probably be a down-80% move. It probably wouldn’t kill it.

I think what would be a pretty scary, FTX-like event for the altcoin space—and I’m not suggesting this could happen; I’m just hypothetically stating this in an imaginary world—is if Tether collapsed for some reason. That would really kneecap crypto for a while.

I think that’s probably a great note. If we’re talking about Tether, we should probably talk sports or something.

We should probably just stop. I’m in Rick and Morty’s garage. This is fantasy we’re talking about here. Tether is fine.

I remember the Tether short. I used to talk about it. Everybody shorts it because they’re jealous of the business. How great would it be to run that business?

You sit in Lugano, drink your macchiato, check your bank account, and it goes up by $1 billion every day or something. It’s ridiculous out there.

Well, anyway, Jonah, as always, great talking to you.

It’s a pleasure chatting with you. I hope everyone enjoyed this episode. We’ll catch you next week. We’re going to start doing these weekly, so we’ll bring you more content. Great talking to you, Avi. Thanks for making time as always.