Trading Crypto's Weekend Meltdown

When the market refuses to go up on good news, it’s close to over. If you remember, there was news that XRP and SOL were getting CME futures listed, and they didn’t go up. That’s a very bad sign for the market. It means that everyone’s max deployed.

The other point was that after the Fed came out, Bitcoin didn’t really go much higher. When things like that happen, you have to say, “Okay, let me take a step back and reassess my portfolio,” and raise a little bit of cash, because cash is more important right now than it was before.

We are currently in the Situation Room reviewing the carnage we’ve noticed. Basically, everything seems to have died except for Bitcoin. I think this is the worst carnage I’ve seen in the markets since FTX when it comes to alts, because Bitcoin is completely fine. If you held anything besides Bitcoin, you’ve retraced every candle since the election, if not more.

ETH actually made a new low today—a new 2-year low, which is insane. It traded at $2,100, and the last time it traded at $2,100 was August 2024. It’s pretty brutal out there. Jonah, what do you say? Do you have any good hopium for the guys?

Yeah, just looking at my board here as you’re talking, Bitcoin is down 3.5%. Obviously, if you’ve been living under a rock, that’s because Trump has just started a trade war with Canada and Mexico, and people are wondering just how bad it can get.

1. Carnage In Crypto

S&P futures are down 2%. They basically just opened, so that tells you how worried the actual market of companies that build stuff is. I would call that “not so worried.” Bitcoin is kind of in line: 2% for the S&P and 3.5% for Bitcoin. The market is telling you, “All right, it’s going to be a little choppy for a while, but Trump is not going to preside over the death of the American equity market just to prove a point here.” He’s going to use this as a negotiating tactic and walk it back. This isn’t the beginning of something new and super menacing.

But altcoins—oh my God. They’re not just dying left and right; they’re dying super-ugly, disgusting deaths. ai16z is down 22.5%, ETH is down 12%, and Solana is down 2%. That’s pretty impressive. I think that tells you everything you need to know: hold Bitcoin and Solana.

For example, ai16z ripped from $0.25 per token to $2.25 in a couple of days—maybe a week. It was pretty quick. I bought near the highs. If there are a lot of people out there like me who are just holding alts like that, you’re down 90%. That’s why the timeline on Twitter looks so bearish. To the extent that you’re not supposed to do that, this is kind of a “told you so” moment for people who have been over their skis in alts at the highs.

2. Shorting This Market

I don’t know. I’m feeling pretty happy about a WIF short that’s going on right now, because I’ve neutralized part of my portfolio with it. Avi, have you shorted anything to protect yourself?

Yeah. I didn’t explicitly tweet that I was short WIF, but I sent out a bunch of angry tweets about WIF because it was so insane to me. The moment that the Fed paused—and I talked about this on Twitter, and I think we talked about it a little bit on the last podcast—that was just bad for alts.

The hawkishness from the Fed was not bad for Bitcoin, but it was really, really, really bad for alts. I think we both articulated that. What I was hoping for was some better strength from specific subsectors, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Everything just got washed out.

I think we can talk about ETH for a second here. ETH has been the dog of the cycle. We’ve beaten this horse to death, but we can do this one more time. Capital previously coming into crypto was good for all of crypto. That is no longer the case, and it basically will never be the case again that capital going into Bitcoin is good for crypto at large.

Capital has to be going to specific projects that are doing good things. That’s it, at the end of the day. ETH has not done anything interesting for 4 years. Since it was a leader in DeFi summer, it literally has not done anything good. That’s why everyone is using it as a short leg now.

In times like these, what everyone needs to hear is, “Don’t worry. There’s still opportunity.” We talked about shorting SUI once it broke the 50-day moving average. I gave that entire spiel about how, once it breaks the 50-day average—once an altcoin breaks the trend it’s been holding in this market—it’s completely done.

SUI broke the 50-day moving average at $4.50 and went down in a straight line by 50%. Sometimes this stuff is as simple as sticking to the basics.

One thing that got me nervous, especially after the Trump tariff thing, was that you could look at all of the charts of alts, and they had all broken their trends. When all charts look like they’ve broken their trends, like the S&P chart, you get washouts because people just capitulate on everything.

My take was that it was the weekend and liquidity was low. I sent this in our group chat: “I think you can nibble a little bit here, but wait for Sunday, because Sunday is when the crazy stuff happens.” I think that’s true, which is why, hopefully, we’ll get this recording out as soon as possible. I think this is the bottom. I’m fairly confident that this is at least a short-term bottom.

For the record, we’re recording this around 11 p.m. Eastern on Sunday night.

You had a really nice call on SUI and how to short that one. You know what’s interesting? The market is handing traders some layups.

It’s not like crypto to be this easy.

What specifically is easy?

I’m getting to it. Basically, I think what people used to look at, just from having been trained through a couple of the previous cycles, was that the easy trade was the altseason trade. Bitcoin rallies, and then you buy altcoins. It’s like a leveraged Bitcoin trade, but delayed by a few weeks or months.

That’s kind of what crypto does to shower wealth upon people who aren’t necessarily in the mid-frequency game of picking bottoms on Bitcoin. Bitcoin moves, and then you get your alt move. That was the previous easy trade.

That trade, for the reasons you just mentioned and several others, is gone. But now you have the inverse of that. There are too many fucking coins out there, not enough capital, and the wealth being created in IBIT—the ETF—is certainly not flowing into dogwifhat, because one is off-chain and one is on-chain.

The easy trades are from the short side. I’ll give you an example. I’m not really a big crypto shorter. I’m mostly in Bitcoin and have been for most of this cycle, for reasons we’ve discussed. But dogwifhat was my least favorite coin.

It was announced that WIF was going on The Sphere, and the token rallied from $1.50 to $2 in short order. Then it was announced that not only was the coin not going on The Sphere, but that everybody who had been pretending to put this hat on The Sphere and collecting retail users’ money for however many months this WIF-is-going-on-The-Sphere narrative had been running had never had any intention of putting it on The Sphere.

It was all a big charade—basically a scam, kind of a crappier mini-FTX with way less ripple effect and consequences. The price was $1.50, which is right where it was before the whole “it’s going to be on The Sphere” merry-go-round started.

To me, when the price is the same after extremely bearish news—“Hey, this thing is basically a scam; it’s crime-fi”—and there are tariff rumblings, interest-rate rumblings, and all sorts of bearish, shaky stuff going on in the broader crypto market, that’s a nice, clean way to neutralize some of your crypto exposure.

This is probably the biggest short I’ve ever put on in crypto, this WIF short. I wouldn’t have put it on as a standalone trade, but since I’m sitting on so much notional worth of crypto, it feels like risk reduction to put on a big WIF short against other crypto. I’m still long, I’m still losing money on this move, but I’m losing less.

I picked WIF because new scammy information should put the price lower than it was before the scammy information came out, and that hadn’t happened. But you could have done this with SUI, Dogecoin, aixbt, or any of these other coins that are down 20%. You could have done it with TRUMP.

I think the new inverse altseason is the new altseason. Anytime you’re feeling worried about your Bitcoin, just look at some oversupplied coin that shouldn’t be trading at a multibillion-dollar FDV and hasn’t gone down enough, and short it. It’s literally that simple.

There are plenty of ways to do that on-chain, too, if that’s where your money is. You can go on Hyperliquid and do it.

What do you think of the branding of “inverse altseason”? It’s so fucking funny.

It’s so good, Jonah. I like it. You should tweet that. If not, I might tweet it.

I’m tweeting it right now.

That’s so good. I mean, it’s true. Literally, inverse altseason is the way to make money now.

I’m tweeting: “Inverse altseason is the new altseason. Just short stuff.” I’m attaching a boot-and-fine-doot Canadian trade-war meme.

It’s so good. I mean, I like it. There are too many altcoins. Altseason is a myth, but don’t despair. Just short them and supplement your net worth.

That was my previous tweet. I just put out a new one. I’m not trying to sit here and pretend I’m a genius. I could have shorted more. I’m obviously taking a bath on this crypto move. ai16z is my biggest raspberry of the year. That one sucked.

But it’s not enough to matter because I’m mostly in Bitcoin, and I’ve got some WIF shorts to feel good about. I think there probably aren’t enough people who listen to this podcast to care about “inverse altseason is the new altseason,” but just short stuff. Look at what hasn’t puked enough.

Where’s Polkadot, my second-least-favorite coin? Has that one capitulated yet? If not, let’s short it live on the podcast.

Here’s a little bit of hope for those people out there. There are always opportunities. One of the biggest opportunities that I still personally see is that a lot of the coins getting ETFs still got nuked really hard.

XRP got nuked ridiculously hard. Litecoin is below $100. SOL is way off its highs. I genuinely believe that buying those alts against ETH is still a great trade. This is actually giving you entries, because for some reason they all went down more than ETH.

I assume there was a lot of pre-positioning in those coins. All of that positioning has just been liquidated and wiped out. This is a great time to go back in and put on those pair trades that do have real catalysts.

The ETF catalysts are the last remaining real catalysts in this market outside of Bitcoin catalysts. Would you put them on as pair trades? With Bitcoin basically unchanged, trading the pair is almost the same as trading the coin versus the dollar. Would you buy SOL/BTC, or would you just buy SOL/USD?

I would buy SOL/USD. It’s a matter of your risk profile. I wouldn’t short them, and I wouldn’t buy them against BTC. I would buy them against ETH, because I think that’s a better risk-adjusted play.

Smart. It’s a better expression of alpha.

In my personal opinion, do I feel comfortable holding Litecoin outright? Not really, because I don’t think it’s the best asset in the world. But do I feel good holding it against an ETH short? I feel better about that. I do think there are also very good catalysts for agents and just general AI coins, and I’m pretty comfortable accumulating some of those at these levels. I think Virtuals here is actually a pretty good buy—just hold on and don’t touch it.

Yeah, that’s smart. Basically, there’s no reason to hold that outright, personally. If you’re looking to buy something a little bit out on the risk curve and speculative, you’re looking to buy it versus ETH. If it’s something battleship-like, such as Solana, you would buy it outright.

Speaking of battleship-like assets, this is a great time to test your conviction. If something is down 80% and you were thinking of buying it but haven’t yet, and you’re hesitating now, it makes you wonder how convicted you were.

I think the only thing to buy, as you said earlier on the podcast, is projects with an actual roadmap that are going to ship something great. Tellingly, the only things that are up versus the dollar right now on my board are Hyperliquid and Fcoin—two opposite ends of the spectrum. You have your favorite meme and your favorite DEX.

I think I might finally, whenever I cover my WIF short, try to buy some Hyperliquid. I think that’s probably a good idea.

I think you should probably be covering your WIF short now. This is a great level. This is where you shove. This is where you buy.

Yeah, I mean, just across the board, we’ve had $2.17 billion worth of liquidations over the last 24 hours. That is massive. This is nuts. I can’t remember the last time there were this many liquidations.

Who’s still levered long in this market at the highs? Who’s using leverage? I obviously used a little bit with a short, but that’s against longs. Who’s outright long with leverage? I don’t know. We advise against that on the 1000x pod.

3. WIF

A lot of people, man. This is the whole market. It’s a casino. What do you mean, “Who’s long with leverage?” Not me, that’s for sure.

Maybe I’m the idiot, though. But the thing about WIF is—

WIF is over. WIF is done. WIF is zero now.

Why should I cover it, then? Why should I cover it?

Because it’s important to remember that even if something is worth zero, if it goes down 70% in 3 days—or let’s see, it’s down about 40% today, but it’s down 70% in the last 2 weeks—you’re due for some level of mean reversion.

News came out. Things are different than they were 2 weeks ago. It isn’t just a price move with nothing having changed. There’s also beta to the market.

To be completely fair, I don’t know with 100% certainty if the WIF thing was a scam. It’s entirely possible, and actually probable, that the guys running WIF are just dumb and genuinely believed that they would get on The Sphere. They genuinely thought they would be able to figure out how to do it, and then it turned out that they couldn’t.

But they couldn’t turn around and tell everyone that they couldn’t, so they got stuck. I’ve seen this sort of malicious incompetence happen a lot, and I’m sure you have as well.

It never starts off as scammy. It doesn’t start off as malicious. It’s more like: “We’re going to raise $700,000, and we’re 100% set. We’re going to use this money to put this thing on The Sphere.”

Then they call up The Sphere and say, “Hey, can we put our dog with a hat on your Las Vegas Sphere?” The guys are like, “Who the fuck are you? How did you get this number? Please hang up.” Then they hang up.

The team says, “Well, we can’t tell our audience because we built up this whole narrative, so let’s just keep trying to get on The Sphere.” I actually bet that’s what happened, as opposed to, “We’re going to take this money and run with it.”

It’s not low enough. It’s down only 25% today. I’ve never been in the business of holding on to a short if it goes down 25% in a day. A general rule of mine is that if something goes down 20% in a day, I take it off. If it goes up 20% or goes down 20%, I take it off.

In one day, it’s just not how I personally trade. I think it’s time to move on.

I just think looking at this ETH chart is disgusting. The thing retraced everything after Trump. It just reminds you—we can’t say this enough—that altseason doesn’t exist anymore.

The people buying Bitcoin don’t rotate it into alts because they’re not gamblers and don’t seek higher rewards. The people who drove Bitcoin up to $109,000 are, in large part, ETF buyers—people buying on Fidelity, people buying in brokerages, and institutional guys.

These are not people who are rotating capital into your dog-with-a-hat coins to send them higher. Quality matters. That’s why HYPE is $22 and is up today. That’s why HYPE didn’t collapse in on itself, because there’s genuine real value there.

That’s also why Solana is only down 3% today.

4. Privacy Coins

Right. The trade is to close your shorts and get long Hyperliquid here, if you’re not already. That’s a trade. Maybe buy some SOL, XRP, Litecoin—buy some things that will have positive flows going their way.

One coin that has been outperforming that nobody talks about, by the way, is Monero, which is fascinating to me.

It’s a privacy coin, right?

Yeah. It’s the biggest privacy coin, and it’s doing extremely well. Clearly, there’s demand for privacy. The narrative is Bitcoin but untraceable, and that’s a pretty good narrative.

For a heavily Bitcoin-denominated market, it has held up extremely well. The issue is that you can’t pair-trade it, because it kind of just grinds up. It outperforms to the downside and to the upside, so you have to weather a ton of volatility on whatever short leg you have.

ETH will often pump past it to the upside, and then you’re going to get all freaked out. But the more I think about Monero, the more I realize it’s probably worthwhile to have in your portfolio. Privacy combined with a truly private currency is a compelling use case.

As Bitcoin gets adopted and more people hold it in ETFs and whatnot, and as it becomes more trackable, there’s this old idea that Bitcoin was a Swiss bank in your pocket. That’s no longer true. Monero is literally a Swiss bank in your pocket.

That’s a really interesting take. Allow me to humbly challenge your thesis here. The FDV of Monero is $3.7 billion. The FDV of Zcash is $500 million, or about one-seventh the size.

Zcash is down 26% today, while Monero is down 11%. I agree that Monero is definitely outperforming, and it has been performing well all year. What is it about Monero that’s better than Zcash?

Monero is actually used. This is kind of an old argument, but there’s also a conspiracy theory that more Zcash was minted than we know about. That could be why it has performed so poorly.

The initial ceremony to create the seed and then burn it to fully encrypt it was compromised. I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories, but it kind of makes sense when you consider how poorly Zcash performs consistently.

Where does all of this selling come from? Why is it literally impossible for this thing to go up? It just doesn’t go up.

That was my question. Why would you pick Monero over Zcash?

5. What's Next For Markets?

Because Monero goes up, and Monero is used. That’s the bottom line.

If we’re entering a world where—

This transitions nicely into a conversation we should be having about 2 things. First, when is the market going to turn in the short term? It definitely will turn. Trump is not going to stubbornly ride this all the way to zero—this being risk assets.

The second question is longer term. The fact that this happened changes the world a little bit. What does that mean for crypto?

One implication could be that, in a world of trade wars and increasing barriers to global trade, privacy coins like Monero are more relevant. That’s long-term bullish for a smaller-cap asset like Monero.

Let’s focus on the long term for a second. A trade war is bearish for risk assets and bearish for crypto in the short run because it means prices are higher for people, there’s more economic turmoil, companies’ profit margins get thinner because they can’t pass all of the increased tariff costs on to consumers, and so on. Those are all the reasons that are getting priced in right now.

But longer term, if you erect barriers to trade and you’re Donald Trump in charge of the United States, whose currency is the U.S. dollar—the preeminent global reserve currency of the day—and you start waging trade wars against other countries, that weakens the long-term viability of the dollar.

It makes it slightly less exciting for Canada and Mexico to trade bilaterally with the United States, and instead makes it slightly more exciting for them to trade bilaterally with each other, not in dollars, because the dollar is being weaponized a little bit here.

If Canada and Mexico want to trade with each other bilaterally, they could do it with U.S. dollars. Then the Fed and Mr. Trump would have access to pretty much any kind of punishment they wanted to impose on those countries for doing what they’re doing. Or they could just pick another currency.

They’re not going to pick the peso, because Canadians don’t have a lot of use for pesos. Mexicans don’t have a lot of use for loonies. Both of those currencies are nuking, by the way. The Canadian dollar is having a day like one of these AI coins; it’s puking right now.

Ultimately, you need an alternative reserve currency that’s independent. The euro doesn’t really qualify, and neither does the yen. Bitcoin just feels like that alternative reserve currency sitting there as a dark horse on deck, waiting for prime time.

These sorts of actions intensify the long-term drumbeat for Bitcoin adoption for the reasons I just described. I think they also intensify the drumbeat of long-term adoption for privacy coins.

I’ve always avoided those because, frankly, I think they tend to facilitate a lot of crime and terrorism. It’s hard to get long something, even if the use case is exciting, when that’s what it’s meant for. I don’t really have a view on Monero, but I could see this scenario being very long-term bullish for Bitcoin and very long-term bullish for Monero.

In the short term, though, I don’t think this is that big of a deal. I think Trump is going to U-turn this pretty quickly. This opening salvo is just meant to extract a little bit of pain in order to ultimately end up with a better deal. What do you think?

That’s the classic take that seems to be floating around, and it’s also my take. Trump is obviously using this as a negotiation tactic.

The issue is the response. The initial response from Canada and Mexico has been for them to join arms and sing “Kumbaya,” saying, “We won’t stand for this U.S. attack, and we’re going to administer retaliatory tariffs.” That’s not a good sign, because it could mean that this gets dragged out.

Trump has an ego at the end of the day, and he needs to win. This needs to turn into a win situation for the United States. The question is when that happens.

Tariffs are much worse for the country that has a higher percentage of its trade allocated to the country administering the tariffs. Canada exports basically everything to the United States. It is far worse for Canada to have the U.S. put tariffs on Canadian goods than for Canada to put tariffs on U.S. goods. That’s obviously true.

But there seems to be some appetite from politicians in Canada to subject their population to this. What you don’t want is for these tariffs to go up and remain in place for 3 months before the Canadian citizenry revolts. What forces these politicians to back down? Does Trudeau get booted out of office? I thought he was supposed to be gone by now.

That’s a pretty easy one. He fights Trump tooth and nail, then he leaves a couple of weeks later, and Pierre Poilievre takes over.

The issue is that Pierre is also in favor of retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. This is a bipartisan issue in Canada. They’re all angry at the U.S.

I’m scratching my head, too.

How about this? Let me bring in an analogy from the oil market. During the Trump 1.0 administration, he was fighting against a similarly stubborn regime: the Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran.

He wanted to starve them of cash, so he exited the JCPOA unilaterally at a time when oil prices were threatening to rip into triple digits because supply was maxed out everywhere. By taking Iran offline, the price was starting to get pretty dangerous for Trump after he exited that deal.

The worst thing that can happen to a U.S. president is an energy crisis, like what happened under Biden. Trump was effectively between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he wanted to sanction Iran and shut down its regime. On the other hand, he didn’t want riots on his watch in the United States or to get voted out of office because he had caused an energy crisis.

He did a backdoor deal and waived the sanctions for a while to let Iran continue to export. He acted like the waivers were a sign that he was backing down. He didn’t waive the full amount that had been sanctioned; he waived some of it. Then he did another thing: He let the rest of the oil move into Chinese bonded storage without telling anybody.

You wouldn’t have known that unless you were in the oil market, which I was at the time, specifically the physical oil market. Iran was selling oil to China—or, basically, storing Iranian oil in tanks on Chinese soil. The oil would then disappear from those tanks into God knows where.

People in the oil industry knew that China was taking oil out of Iranian tanks located in China and using it in its refineries at a discounted price. It was a super-backdoor way for Iran to sell oil, and Trump did that until the price of oil crashed back down.

So what you’re saying is that he might potentially look for backdoor ways out of this fiasco that he caused for himself?

Yes. To finish the thought very quickly—sorry for rambling—I bet he does something similar. He does a partial walkback that still makes him look tough, and then, if there’s real trouble, he does something super under the table that most people don’t know about to get the rest of the way back to square 1.

Here’s a question: Can you articulate exactly why Trump imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico? Can you articulate what he’s trying to accomplish?

No, but I haven’t been paying close enough attention. It’s something like fentanyl coming in from Mexico and Canada because they’re not securing the border well enough.

J.D. Vance put it nicely. He said there’s a lot of fentanyl coming in from Mexico and Canada, and the U.S. asked them to stop it. They didn’t, and now we’re moving on to the next phase instead of just asking. We’re playing tough.

This is about border security and fentanyl.

What’s interesting to me is how easy it should be, in theory, for Mexico and Canada to get these tariffs removed by making public statements that they’ll attempt to clamp down on the things Trump is talking about. Yet the response was so aggressive.

If I’m going to dig deep here, I think what’s happening is that countries around the world are nervous and scared of the U.S. right now. They’re scared that we’re going to economically bludgeon them in order to get our way.

Trump is actually starting with the so-called easy stuff, like forcing Colombia to take immigrants back. Of course you should let a plane of your own citizens land. That’s pretty standard stuff. You should probably let a plane of your own citizens land in your own country instead of sending them back to the U.S.

6. Ads (Kraken OTC and Ledger)

Then there’s this fentanyl issue, which kind of just requires public statements and minimal action. What’s happening right now is a reflection of countries being nervous that if they bend here, things get much worse.

7. Bitcoin In A Multipolar World

Do you think it has anything to do with socialism versus capitalism? Mexico and Canada are left-leaning.

I don’t think so. I think it solely has to do with the idea that the U.S. is moving away from the old world order.

There’s a great tweet that articulates what’s happening right now. This looks dumb unless you view it through the lens of the new world order.

For the longest time after 1945, America was the indispensable country. America was the country that would go out there and build up other countries, give aid to other countries, act as the world’s policeman, dictate policy around the world, and try to shape the world in its image.

It was saying, “I want the world to look like this, and we’re going to work toward that.” We did this by using our wealth to flush other countries with money. We were so good to so many people that they would love us.

If you think about it, a lot of money flows out of the U.S. to other countries specifically so that we can move forward on our foreign policy—not trade, but soft power. That era is coming to an end.

Trump and his collection of people have decided that America will stop pushing its image on the world. It will stop trying to dictate what the world should look like in 15, 20, or 50 years. It will stop using soft power.

What it will do instead is cut the best deals with individual countries for the economic growth of its own economy and its own citizens. That’s it. No more worrying about the rest of the world.

You’re an ally? Sure, you might be. But that doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is whether we’re getting a good deal out of our relationship.

The whole idea of consensus-building doesn’t exist within the Trump administration. That’s why it keeps threatening to pull out of every agreed-upon accord.

The idea that it’s good for the world to have a group of nations acting in a certain way, with the U.S. subsidizing those nations to get them to act in that way and support the U.S.—that’s over.

That’s what people are fighting back against.

It’s kind of like global cooperationists versus the hedge-fund pod-shop model of global geopolitics.

Let’s bring it back around: That is so good for Bitcoin, you have no idea. That was what I was about to ask you. Let’s say we enter a multipolar world with no global hegemon. How does that make you feel about the price of Bitcoin in 10 years?

It makes me feel like this thing should be worth $50 million.

In a world where there isn’t one Team America World Police making sure everybody is running democracies and liberal democracies, the dollar cannot live in a multipolar world the way it is right now. It’s going to be a very diminished asset.

I think currencies and commodities such as crude oil, liquefied natural gas, gold, and Bitcoin are the only stores of value and means of exchange that will be relevant in a world with superpowers threatening each other with nuclear weapons.

Here’s where I might disagree with you. The dollar can still go up a lot in this scenario.

What’s happening is that there’s actually a subsidy right now for a lot of countries to interact with America. When you remove that, you need to pay higher prices for American goods.

You have a few competing forces. One is that the American economy will continue to grow and produce the most innovative and best products. Therefore, our products will be desired around the world, and there will be strong demand for dollars because the U.S. is the only place where you can invest.

This is the economy that will give you the best return on any bonds you purchase. Basically, America is the only place to go for investments, and in my personal opinion, that is bolstered under the Trump regime and the way he’s running the government.

So you’re saying that finance and the regulatory climate are exports that the United States has—an export that will strengthen the dollar?

Yeah. On the other hand, you have the idea that you can’t rely on the United States to act in your best interests. Your reserves of dollars and Treasuries are going to be much lower at the state level.

There are these 2 offsetting flows that I haven’t spent enough time trying to figure out which way they lean. I’m not making the argument that this is either really bad or really good for the dollar, because I see flows going in both directions because of this.

I don’t have a view on the dollar right now.

For Bitcoin specifically, this is extremely good, because you need a nongovernmental currency that is effectively apolitical in a multipolar world.

You can’t rely on a basket of the currencies of your closest allies. You have to rely on gold or Bitcoin if you want reserves. You simply can’t have U.S. Treasuries as reserves in this world anymore.

One day you might wake up and find out that they’re not an ally anymore.

Right. You thought those were your dollars? They’re actually my dollars. Fuck you.

I agree. This is all very, very good for Bitcoin.

Thinking about this, people always try to get around tariffs. If economic warfare increases, maybe that’s a big boon for both Bitcoin and Monero, because you’re going to need payments that exist outside the system to evade tariffs.

You’re going to need payments that exist outside the system. That has to be a pretty big draw.

I also wonder if you’re going to have a premium on virgin Bitcoin that’s been mined directly by the miner, as opposed to Bitcoin that has been in circulation.

Let’s say I’m a sanctioned entity, or an entity that the United States doesn’t like, and I want to buy something that the United States would prefer I not buy. I want to buy it with Bitcoin. If I go on Coinbase, complete KYC, buy a bunch of Bitcoin, and send it to Venezuela to buy a cargo of crude oil, that’s pretty traceable.

Meanwhile, if I wire fiat to a Chinese Bitcoin miner and receive virgin Bitcoin in exchange, then send that Bitcoin to Venezuela and buy my cargo of crude oil, that could be harder to trace.

If you buy Bitcoin directly from a miner and spend it using a fresh wallet, it’s harder to trace. Your gateway is some random offshore miner instead of a heavily regulated entity where every transaction is monitored.

I wonder if you’re going to see a premium on people buying Bitcoin directly from miners for purposes like that. It’s just tin-foil-hat stuff, but it seems like a way to make Bitcoin a privacy coin.

I don’t know if there’s enough liquidity for Monero. Maybe an ecosystem could develop, but it seems like an interesting possibility.

Yeah, I’m calling it now. My favorite trades are Bitcoin, Monero, XRP, Litecoin, and SOL.

Short ETH to zero.

Why XRP?

Because of the ETF.

Fair enough.

It did just dive 30%.

8. The AI Trade

I might have to pick up some Dogecoin as well.

One thing I will say is that through all of this absolutely horrific stuff going on in the market, do you know what’s been doing really well?

Tell me.

aixbt. I love it.

I love it, too. It’s putting out some pretty amazing content. We’re going to launch a terminal for this thing at some point in the next 3 months, and I think people are going to be blown away by the level of insight it’s able to generate.

It’s starting to reply to people right now. For example, Ansem asked, “If I want to get up to speed on the newest Solana clients and Firedancer, where do I go?”

It replied, “Anom said, ‘Helius blogs might not give you the full picture. Check Jump Crypto’s technical docs. They’re leading Firedancer development. Solana’s recent performance shows why client diversity matters.”

That’s not a perfect response, but it’s able to point you in the right direction: Go check Jump Crypto’s technical docs.

In the future, this thing is basically going to be ChatGPT trained on crypto like no other. No other agent or AI is going to be trained on the data this AI is trained on. It’s going to be the sidebar for everyone in crypto, in my personal opinion.

That’s an awesome vision for the project. At the speed we’re shipping, I think we can get there. I wouldn’t be pumping this if I didn’t use it myself, because I think that would come off as dishonest.

I literally have notifications on for this bot. If I’m not paying attention to TradingView all day because I’m out and about, it keeps me up to date. I’m pretty aware of what’s happening throughout the day because of what this thing is posting.

The best part about it is that it sounds just like you and me. The way you do it is by building a character file. The character file has message examples, lore, and biographical information.

We created ours from our podcast transcripts. I haven’t updated it for the last couple of podcasts, but up until 2 podcasts ago, I was putting in fresh examples, lore, and biographical information from every single transcript. I guess we’re going to have to automate that, too.

There’s a mountain of work, but this is a fun project. A terminal is an interesting vision. I used a Bloomberg terminal for almost 20 years, and I don’t have one anymore.

Bloomberg is great because it has everything you could possibly want to search for. But what ChatGPT is so amazing for is that it opens your mind to things adjacent to what you’re looking for. It provides context and explanation.

ChatGPT is garbage for trading. It’s so good for learning about many things, but it’s garbage for trading. In building this agent, I’m starting to understand why.

Piecing trading together combines so much real-time and non-real-time context. We’re literally updating dictionaries’ worth of information on the backend to teach the bot why certain features of the market are bullish or bearish for Bitcoin, ETH, and so on, and how to interpret them.

Then it comes back and processes all of its information through that dictionary. It’s pretty interesting. Building it is making me a better trader, and the output makes me more alert and causes me to miss less. I like it.

You’re on mute.

It’s honestly great, and it’s already useful for me.

Glad to hear you’re using it, too.

Of course I’m using it. It’s a great product. In the future, people will be able to upload their own data and ask it for its interpretation of that data. It will be able to do so effectively by using the frameworks it has already generated.

It’s pretty cool stuff. I’m very happy with how things have been going.

Me too. Obviously, AI agents in general have been absolutely destroyed. Have you looked at the Zerebro chart recently?

Yeah. It’s almost at zero.

Does this mean that we’re building during the bear market? Does this mean that we’re chewing glass? All those analogies—it’s insane.

It went to a $750 million market cap, and now it’s a $46 million market cap. That’s insane.

There are a lot of projects that will go to zero. There are also a lot of projects that are probably phenomenal buys. All of the froth has just been washed out of the AI market.

My personal aixbt is right here. I love that one. Let’s see—it’s down a substantial amount.

That is down only.

Oh my God.

What I’ll say, just as a last point before we wrap for the day, is that this has been very painful. You needed to be very quick on your feet to avoid the worst of it, because a lot of this came on the heels of the tariffs.

But it’s a highly reliable signal: When the market refuses to go up on good news, it’s close to over. There was news that XRP and SOL were getting CME futures listed, and they didn’t go up. That was very bad. It means that everyone is max deployed.

People aren’t able to speculate anymore because they’re max deployed and just holding on to what they already have. There’s no cash on the sidelines to speculate.

The other point was that after the Reserve came out, Bitcoin didn’t really go much higher. When things like that happen, you have to say, “Okay, let me take a step back and reassess my portfolio,” and raise a little bit of cash, because cash is more important right now than it was before.

That’s what I’ll leave you with right now. I think it’s a really good time to buy.

Yeah, to buy the good stuff. I think it’s a phenomenal time.

One thing I would add to that very well-articulated statement is that if something is trading at price X, a bunch of terrible news comes out in a bear market, and it’s still trading at price X, the market is handing you a gift.

You can get short, especially if there are too many coins out there. Inverse altseason is the new altseason. Look out for death knells—for the toll of the bell—for a project here or there. If the price hasn’t nuked yet, it’s probably because people aren’t paying attention.

You’re going to get windows of opportunity to short things here before they really break down.

Nothing we say is financial advice. Obviously, don’t take anything we’ve said on this podcast as a recommendation. Please do your own research.

Jonah, it’s great talking to you.

It’s always a pleasure. Thank you, Avi. It’s nice to be dialed in on a Sunday night with the markets moving a lot.

It feels like we’re in the game again. At least we’re getting some volatility here. Even if we’ve lost money—or even if you’ve lost money—at least the market is moving. It’s exciting and fun. You can’t be too upset when you get this.

It gives you something to do.

Anyway, Avi, it’s a pleasure.

Likewise. See you next week.