What's Driving Bitcoin Higher?

Sailor is behaving like a commodities trader. He's trying to squeeze something. This is a classic squeezy-type play. But what this is also telling you is that there's just broad acceptance of Bitcoin now, and I think this probably accelerates.

1. What's Driving Bitcoin Higher?

Jonah, we're happy to be talking today because Bitcoin is at $95,000 per Bitcoin. Pretty nice change of pace from the last time we recorded, when Bitcoin was at $85,000 per Bitcoin. I think, if you recall, last time we were talking about this, it was looking really good, and it was probably time to buy some out-of-the-money calls because Bitcoin can move very fast in this particular environment.

2. Will BTC Break $100k?

The environment, just to jog everyone's memory, is the fact that Bitcoin was radically outperforming the equity markets, to the point where we were kind of shocked. Normally, when equity markets are down, Bitcoin is down more, and Bitcoin was actually going up. You shouldn't fade that signal, and it turned out that was a strong signal. Now we're up more than 10% in a week, and I don't know—things are looking pretty good. What are you thinking, Jonah?

Yeah, definitely feeling good about this. Bitcoin is outperforming stocks in a way that looks consistent now. It doesn't look like it's just going to mean-revert back down. Our favorite ratio is basically at the highs.

I'm feeling good. I think this market keeps pushing higher, but I don't know if it just gases higher. I don't think it's going to rip people's faces off. I think it might just be more of a general outperformance-type scenario, where it trades with a bit of beta to stocks, but the ratio keeps grinding higher over time.

I think Bitcoin will gain ground on selloffs as people look for portfolio diversification. On rallies, if it's a big, macro, tariff-news-driven rally, I think it may just perform in line and then maybe gap higher as people look for beta. But I don't think people will look for beta at the beginning of a tariff-driven relief rally.

The thing is, though, we've had some crazy inflows. You just referenced those. Last week alone, it was $3 billion worth of ETF inflows, not to mention spot. If you follow the on-chain stuff, or even just Twitter accounts that follow on-chain stuff, you know Bitcoin's getting withdrawn from exchanges, whales are buying—all of these are sort of bullish fundamentals.

Yesterday alone, $600 million worth of ETFs was bought. IBIT was basically $1 billion of inflows, and then there were some random outflows from likely ARK and GBTC. Who knows? But net-net, it was $600 million worth of inflows. This is massive.

Some of it is something that we should probably talk about: when you see ETF inflows, some of it could be to arbitrage CME basis or other forms of futures basis, because during rallies, CME futures and derivatives of all kinds trade above spot. So people buy the ETF and short the futures in a sort of riskless basis trade to earn some yield.

I have to quickly double-check how much CME basis open interest went up, but I think a lot of this inflow in the ETF space looks like it is just outright buying, which could be sticky. What do you think?

I think a reasonable amount of it is outright buying, and we can sort of just estimate this, like you said, by looking at the CME futures, but also as a gut check. It's very rare that you get a tremendous amount of inflows for trading basis when basis is low, and basis is low when Bitcoin sells off.

All of those flows were coming basically as Bitcoin was going back up, and they started before, right? Basis was at around 5% throughout the period when these inflows were coming, and that's not really indicative of people coming in because they're trying to take advantage of the basis trade.

Yeah, that's fair. So it does seem that way. With that said, from April 21 to April 28, CME open interest went up about $1 billion. Even if we take the top end of that estimate—if every dollar of the increase in CME open interest was for basis—that would still leave $2 billion of flows.

Yeah, exactly. I'm looking on Velo Data. Our friends at Velo Data have a nice dashboard for this if you want to look. I'm just double-checking crypto-native open interest: Binance, Bybit, OKX, likely dYdX, and likely Hyperliquid over the last week.

Binance BTC open interest is basically unchanged. It went from $18.5 billion a week ago to $17.9 billion as of the last data point, so it's actually down a little bit. I think these ETF inflows are real, like you said. I don't think it's just arbitrageurs.

No, I 100% agree. These are real, and I think it's a combination of the flows that we were talking about on the previous podcast.

One, people are allocating to Bitcoin because this is a good general market environment for Bitcoin to prove itself as the macro-asset safe-haven hedge. As the world is fracturing, as tariffs are coming in, and the US is pulling itself into its own little economic bubble and trying to isolate China, having a cross-border asset becomes even more valuable.

Basically, no matter what asset you hold right now, the rules of the game are much more likely to change than they were a year ago. The rules of the economic game in China, the US, or the EU are going to change. Trump is making decisions on the fly, and other countries are going to have to respond to them. You have no idea what's coming.

It's kind of nice to own an asset that exists outside the confines of a state. You know what the rules of Bitcoin are, and they're not going to change on you. Nobody's inflating away Bitcoin anytime soon. Nobody's playing currency-manipulation games to devalue it because they need exports. None of this stuff is happening, right?

It's a simple, clean asset like gold, and that's why gold did very well. So I think a nontrivial portion of the $3 billion that came in over the last week is people reallocating for that thesis.

3. The Microstrategy Playbook

The second point is all these new MSTR competitors that are coming online. For listeners who still don't quite understand the MSTR game, basically the game is that Sailor can make an infinite amount of money for himself because there's demand to buy nonrecourse leverage on Bitcoin.

Right. Leverage.

Why don't you explain that a little bit more? You can't get liquidated.

Basically, what Saylor gets to do is go out there in the market and say, "Our stock's trading at a premium because people are willing to pay a premium for this. When Bitcoin goes up $1, our stock goes up $1.20, and people kind of like that idea of this beta. So they're willing to pay a little bit more to get access to our stock."

"I'm going to sell this stock for cash that I'm going to use to accumulate more Bitcoin." It's this flywheel. He gets to sell the stock, although he may not take every single dollar and use it to buy Bitcoin. He has to use some of that cash for operating expenses, paying people, and all sorts of stuff. So he ends up making money on this as well.

I think what the rest of the world realized is, "Wait a second, why should we leave this financial-engineering game solely to Sailor? Why can't we do this too?" There's nothing special about what he's doing other than the fact that MicroStrategy now has a higher beta than Bitcoin does.

Why don't we just spin up a public company that does the exact same thing MicroStrategy does? We'll take a piece of this pie. We'll siphon off some of the demand for MicroStrategy, or maybe we'll even create more demand.

Now, there are 2 types of things that have popped up. There are the ones abroad, like the Metaplanets of the world, that are trying to create new demand. There's some stuff happening in Brazil as well, and I think we're going to see more things happening in other jurisdictions.

Then there's this most recent announcement by likely Cantor that they're raising $3 billion for what is effectively an MSTR competitor. Basically, people realize that Bitcoin is a really great asset to play this game with, and that's very bullish for Bitcoin.

Now, my understanding of the MSTR trade is that MicroStrategy has a real business. They sell—I haven't looked into it too deeply—but they sell products to end users, right? There's some kind of revenue going on there.

Originally—accounting and finance is a weakness of mine—but my understanding is that that legitimate old-school business generates some net income that covers the interest service for Saylor's leveraged Bitcoin.

That was true 2 years ago.

Yeah, I'm getting there. So now what he's done is he's extended himself past that point, right? Now he has to sell shares to buy more Bitcoin—basically, sell shares to cover the interest payments for the debt that he's raised to buy Bitcoin.

And so there is a scenario where at least MicroStrategy is a real business that contributes some net income to that interest-payment service. But some of what I'm skeptical about with these other MSTR competitors is: why would anybody invest in an SPV or some vehicle whose sole purpose is to raise debt to buy Bitcoin? To me, that feels a little bit worrisome and Ponzi-ish, because the unwind—it's not non-recourse leverage. Those vehicles could absolutely get liquidated in a spectacular cascade, and they probably will if Bitcoin trades down 30% or 40%. They'll probably accelerate.

I mean, the bet is effectively that—well, the reason there are 2 investors that we're talking about here is that the 1st is the people who are investing in it at the deal level, and then there are the people who buy it when it hits the open market. It's very obvious why people are investing in it at the deal level, and that's because they're offering it at a 10% premium, right? So they're saying, “You give us—we're going to raise $100 million, and we're going to buy $100 million worth of Bitcoin, and we're going to charge you a $110 million valuation to give us this money, because the moment that it hits the public market, it's going to trade at the same premium as MicroStrategy, and it's going to 2x.”

Yes.

And so you basically get your free money.

You just described crypto VC right there, right?

And we get to kickstart this business, right? Because that's really what they want, right? They want to list it at a 10% premium, and then people go, “What a great arb. It's the same thing as MicroStrategy. Let's go buy this thing.”

You don't even have to short the other one. You could, if you were more sophisticated, short MicroStrategy, buy this thing, try to play that premium convergence, or just buy this thing outright because you think 10% is way too low.

On the deal level, it totally makes sense why people are—I mean, this is now, as somebody on the inside, the most common thing that we're getting pitched. This type of structure, whether it's for Solana or Bitcoin, in whatever jurisdiction, is the most common thing that's coming across our desk.

And I do think it's going to work kind of the same way that GBTC worked, which is that it worked really, really, really well until it massively imploded, and then a bunch of people lost money. It reminds me of GBTC so much. I'm starting to get a little worried about this.

I tend to have my blinders on. Look, I think long term. I think that Bitcoin is going to the moon. I don't really view many risks as being salient right now. This is a big one.

When this was all covered by MSTR's real business, it sort of made sense to me. But now that it's turning into this kind of unfettered, debt-fueled bonanza, you're basically asking: what's the Bitcoin price at which all of these entities, these SPVs—whatever you want to call them—get liquidated? I should probably buy puts struck at that level during peak euphoria, because that's when the market could move fast. That's when you want to own optionality.

There's also a really funny dynamic here: it's easier to raise money when Bitcoin's going up, and people are more likely to respond to convertible debt offerings and notes when Bitcoin is going up. So you can raise a lot more money at the exact wrong time.

4. Ads (Kraken OTC, WalletConnect)

The optimal thing to do is for Sailor to raise a ton of money when Bitcoin's up, then wait until Bitcoin comes off and buy. But he doesn't do that. Either he can't or he won't. What ends up happening is he consistently buys the tops over and over, to the point where his average price is now, I think, $70,000, which is insane.

This is the only major red flag that I can think of for Bitcoin. It's not a problem yet, because I do think we'll get some more euphoria. Maybe the fact that a bunch of people are trying to copy Saylor is a sign that we're getting close to peak froth, or it's a sign of froth. This is the 1st thing that I think actually worries me and needs to be monitored, so I've got my eye on it.

But I think once people are throwing money at these things, maybe we should start analyzing the premiums of these various vehicles. Any listeners who are good at that sort of thing, maybe we should set up a stock screener and try to understand the premium to book for each of these vehicles. Maybe when that premium starts to get toward the levels that GBTC was at back in 2021, we should say, “Okay, we're at peak bubble mode now. Time to buy some Bitcoin puts.” For now, though, I think it's just something to watch carefully.

A version of this strategy that I think would be viable, and that would make me giga-bullish, is—rather than random companies trying to spin this up for Bitcoin and Solana, and Sailor copycats—what if, like, I'm just brainstorming with you here, Avi, what if some non-U.S. megacorporation that wants to sell to—okay, so let's say that the Mar-a-Lago Accord gets signed and there's a grand new bargain. Maybe some defense contractor like BAE Systems says, “Look, we want to sell weapons and kit to people outside of the new Mar-a-Lago Accord. We don't like Trump. We aren't based in the United States. We generate approximately $3.5 billion of free cash flow every year.

“We're going to start—we maybe aren't going to take our cash and invest it in Bitcoin, but maybe we're just going to borrow. We're going to do, like, a Bitcoin bond. We're going to borrow some money, put it into Bitcoin, service the interest with our massive free cash flow, and then we'll have Bitcoin on our balance sheet to transact outside of this hemisphere that's just been set up by an arbitrary dude called Trump, who we don't agree with. We can sell our weapons to whoever we want, even if they disagree with the Donald.”

If that sort of thing were happening, then I would be like, “Oh, my God, Bitcoin is going to $500,000 a token.” For now, I'm more just a little uncertain.

Yeah, that would be sick.

5. Saylor’s Bitcoin Flywheel

But I mean, I think the issue is that the market attracts losers, right? Don't out me, Avi. The Bitcoin market—I mean, it's true. It attracts losers. It's basically GME, right? It's the companies that couldn't—don't have anything going on. And they're like, “Oh, fuck it. I guess I'll just throw a Hail Mary and hopefully this will save my business.”

Yeah, that's kind of what Saylor did. But the thing is that it is a genuine opportunity because—I don't know if I should tell this story live on air, so I'll tell sort of a—imagine Saylor back in 2019 as he's exploring buying this. Imagine what he might have said to somebody who was listening to his pitch.

He might have said something along the lines of, “This is the greatest short squeeze of all time. If we can get people to FOMO in, right?” I mean, that's kind of how you have to think about it. If you know that there's a buyer of this thing that's going to keep buying this thing, why not front-run it? Why not force everybody into it? Because how could you not buy something that you know somebody is going to buy an infinite amount of?

Yeah, for sure. You're front-running, and then at some point every millionaire, every billionaire in the world is going to go, “Ah, I should allocate a little bit to this, because there's a buyer with infinite capital that keeps buying this thing relative to its size.”

That may or may not have been something that he would think about or say to somebody who was listening to his pitch back then, but I think that holds true today, just on a larger scale, right? So back then, you could make a few—you could make a few billion. Maybe you could make a billion dollars doing this, and that's kind of interesting to people.

But the reality is, a billion dollars at a company level is not like making a billion dollars doing something insane like this. This is not—it's okay, right? It's fine.

A billion dollars isn't cool, Avi. You know what's cool? A trillion dollars. No, I'm joking. It wasn't very good, though. Look, I mean, this was Austin Powers-inspired.

I enjoyed it. It was inspired by The Social Network and Austin Powers.

I think what’s going on here—this is the part of the podcast where I remind everybody that I used to be a professional commodities trader—is that Sailor is behaving like a commodities trader. He’s trying to squeeze something like this. This sort of thing happens in nickel. It happens in silver. You go and read books about how so-and-so tried to corner the market for this or that commodity. This is a classic squeezy-type play. I don’t think it’s that different.

Even in the world of corporate bonds, Avi, some of these smaller issues—when somebody gets caught short one of them, which is rare, but it happens—big institutions will short-squeeze them out of it to pump their bags. It’s just Wall Street behavior, and I think Sailor has identified perhaps the squeeziest commodity of our time to try and squeeze.

Yes, 100%. I mean, it’s remarkable, though, that it took this long. But what this is also telling you is that there’s just broad acceptance of Bitcoin now, and I think this probably accelerates.

My guess would be that at some point in the next 2 years, there’s going to be a company—not to the level that you just described, where they, you know, BAE Systems—but I think a reasonable company will do this because they can improve their bottom line by 10% to 20%.

Yeah. And the thing is, once it becomes really easy—and it is becoming easy today—but once it becomes really easy to borrow against Bitcoin, that’s going to unlock everything. That’s how this is really going to explode, because you never want dead capital on your balance sheet. It’s not good.

If you have your treasury in 10% Bitcoin right now, that’s locked capital in a lot of ways. That’s 10% of your balance sheet. You really can’t do anything with it unless you sell, and then that kind of defeats the whole purpose. You need to be able to borrow against it at an institutional level. You need to be able to go into Chase and say, “Hey, I want to borrow against this.”

You can do that today with the Bitcoin ETF, but I can tell you, as somebody who’s tried to do it, they’re pretty anal. They do not give you good rates, or they do not give you a good LTV either.

No, I mean, in order to buy a house using your Bitcoin as collateral, you have to basically cash out of your Bitcoin, buy the house with dollars, take out a dollar mortgage on your property that you already own, then you get a good rate, and then you take the capital that you just pulled back out and put it back into Bitcoin.

When people ask me, “If I have a lot of Bitcoin, how do I buy a house?” that’s my recommendation.

But, yeah, wouldn’t it be easier to eliminate those 6 steps and just do it? Honestly, before BAE Systems does it, I can think of other arms dealers that would do this.

Sovereigns—sovereigns are debt-fueled entities, right? They’re constantly borrowing. In developing markets, they’re borrowing from the IMF. In developed markets, they’re borrowing from whoever holds bonds or eurobonds, or whatever—basically, U.S. Treasuries.

I could see a sovereign just becoming a debt-fueled, arms-selling Bitcoin borrower, kind of like MSTR. I expect it, actually. And then maybe that gives permission for non-sovereign entities like international oil companies to go and do the same thing if they need to transact.

6. State Level Adoption

I was chatting with one of our buddies, Zahir, a friend of the pod from Split Capital, about what it would take for an international commodity-trading company to start doing Tether-denominated payments.

Basically, it’s going to be end users demanding Tether settlements in exchange for hydrocarbons—commodity-producing economies like Angola and Nigeria saying, “Hey, rather than going through 17 correspondent banks and getting dinged by 5% along the way, just send us Tether to this wallet address.”

That’s when I think stablecoins may provide the lubricant.

I mean, that’s got to be happening at some level already—very limited. There was one cargo.

I mean, even if they’re not state-level actors, the intermediaries—it’s easier for them to move. And once it reaches the state level, man, I wish I could have a piece of Tether equity, but don’t we all?

I think there was an article that just came out: Tether is the most profitable per-employee business in the world.

It’s pretty bonkers. I mean, think about it. What the fuck is their business other than just sitting there and clicking a button to issue Tether?

Yeah. Their business is basically, “We’re the only company that figured out how to not get shut down by the Department of Justice,” which is good. That’s a pretty incredible thing.

It’s huge. Regulatory arbitrage is the greatest.

A large part of it is just because they started so early. I actually remember—I’m telling a lot of old stories today—but back in 2018, there was one of the 4 or 5 SEC commissioners, this guy named Robert Jackson, who was holding a thing. I think I can technically say this was off the record, but who cares now? This is so long ago.

Somebody asked him, “So you know that Binance is operating an illegal offshore futures exchange. Why haven’t you gone after them and shut them down?”

He said, “With every action that a regulatory agency has to take, you also have to understand that our job is to protect the consumer. And you have to understand that when something is really big, you might end up hurting more people than helping,” which I actually thought was a pretty savvy take that you don’t hear a lot.

But I do think it contributed to why it took so long for any action to be taken against these companies. The SEC did realize, “Hey, if we just shut them down out of nowhere, the DOJ just destroys them out of nowhere, then a lot of people are about to lose a lot of money, and that’s a lot worse than whatever’s happening right now.”

I think that’s kind of what happened with Tether: they just got so big, people were like, “We can’t really shut them down.”

Yeah. If we shut them down, then way more people are going to get hurt than if we let them operate. We just have to figure out how to get them to come back into the fold, or stop doing the really extreme stuff, like subverting sanctions.

It’s funny. I am very bullish, by the way, on Plasma because of this. Full transparency: I invested a tiny little bit. I wish I was able to get a bigger piece, but I do think Plasma is going to be good.

Yeah, I think Plasma is a winner. ETH is too slow. Tron is too drug-dealery. There needs to be a legit, fast set of rails for Tether, and Plasma is in the best position.

But it’s funny you mentioned that anecdote, Avi. It seems like that SEC, that DOJ, the sort of 2016-to-2020 regulatory bureaucracy had the consumer in mind. The Gary Gensler era was just playing whack-a-mole with crypto companies and hurting the consumer along the way.

I don’t know who they protected necessarily by suing Uniswap and Cumberland, but at any rate, that sort of action gets consumers hurt. When you hurt consumers, you just create an issue that the opposite political party can use to throw you out of office. And that’s exactly what happened.

I view crypto philosophically—I don’t want to get too off topic here—but philosophically, I view crypto as a DDoS attack on legacy financial infrastructure. For those who aren’t aware, a DDoS attack is when somebody sets up bots to spam a website until it can’t handle the inbound anymore and shuts down.

If, let’s say, you wanted to build a Visa or Mastercard competitor with lower fees that doesn’t charge merchants 2% back in, like, 2010, the regulatory state would block you because of lobbying, vested interest, and all of that stuff. Then crypto comes along, and it’s just millions of tokens showing up trying to basically replace financial infrastructure.

Most of it gets blocked, but some things like Bitcoin and Tether make it through. Even during difficult periods for crypto, like the Gensler era, crypto survived that and now has major influencers in all branches of government—executive, legislative, and, well, maybe not judicial, but possibly. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

So I do think that just the nature of crypto is enough to explain it—the way it works, by organically attracting bag holders. Then the bag holders become influencers, and then the influencers—some of them survive, some of them get pushed to the wayside.

But if something lasts long enough and pumps hard enough, those influencers become, at this point, some of the most important and powerful people in the world. I guess that’s one framework through which you can look at an asset like Tether.

Is Tether going to survive with Lutnick in Trump’s ear? Probably, right? Bitcoin—Donald Trump’s a Bitcoiner now, so probably, right?

7. Ads (Kraken OTC, WalletConnect)

What about Monero? That one’s been pumping. That was one of those sketch coins that I think a lot of people avoided for a long time. Is Monero going to become an alternative asset for moving money in a multipolar world? Should we be paying attention to it?

8. Privacy Coins In A Multipolar World

I think I mentioned Monero a while ago. I've had it on my watch list for at least 3 years now, and I own a tiny, nonsense amount of this coin. I've always, in the back of my head, said I should have a much larger allocation to Monero. I should really own 5% of my portfolio in this thing because, if you think about it, the argument for Bitcoin, in many ways, used to be that it's a Swiss bank in your pocket, right?

You can siphon off money from anywhere, chuck it into Bitcoin, and then suddenly it's yours and nobody knows about it. It's totally impenetrable, and you can do whatever you want with it. That's not true anymore at all in any meaningful way, because there are so many tools to track Bitcoin. It's so easy and so transparent, and realistically, a huge amount of people now own Bitcoin.

You just own it on an exchange or in your brokerage because you bought IBIT. It's a geopolitical asset now, right? It's like gold-lite. It's not a Swiss bank in your pocket, shady crypto-money type of thing. The whole concept of shady crypto money is a morally gray area, but it had value, and that's why I think it attracted a lot of people.

Monero is the only thing left of that era. Monero is what people thought Bitcoin was in 2016. You kind of see that. The reason for that massive spike is that if you steal a bunch of money and want to hide it, you just shove it into Monero.

I'm not saying that's a good thing. I actually think it's obviously a bad thing if you're doing illegal things and getting away with it by using this token. But at the same time, people invest in tobacco companies, and tobacco kills people. It clearly has a position in this world that is not going away anytime soon, and you can see that in its volatility.

It's very low-vol for a crypto asset relative to other coins. Basically, there are zero speculators in this thing because it doesn't trade on a bunch of different exchanges. There's consistent demand over time for it. And it's actually a pretty low market cap, all things considered, given that it provides a good real service to people.

What is it? It's a $5 billion market cap coin, and it's the only truly private currency that exists in this world. There are some competitors, but Zcash is trash. I mean, it's complete and utter trash, and nobody uses it. We don't even know if it has a backdoor, and there are all these worries that it was artificially inflated during the ceremony.

That's why it's dying off, because there's an infinite supply of this thing and there's too much shit going on behind the scenes for Zcash. Monero has clearly won the battle. It's worth $5 billion. I mean, it feels cheap. I don't know. I think it should at least be worth $15 billion to $20 billion, given its place in this world.

I agree, given its place in this world. The only thing that concerns me is that Zack XBT tweeted something about how the reason this pump happened was because there was a $330 million Bitcoin heist, and somebody had swapped that into Monero so they could move it around. I guess timing is everything in trading.

I agree that at some point this thing will probably be worth $20 billion to $30 billion, especially if global geopolitical turmoil increases or if there's a larger war than the active ones right now. But if you're holding it and there's no heist, and that's what drives the price action, do you bleed out 50% or 70% in short order before it then rallies? Because that would suck. Maybe we should be looking for a better entry point.

I think that's a very fair point. Maybe you don't want to buy it right now because it went up a ton, but it's something I'm looking for, basically. You add on a dip if we get a dip. It's on my short list of things to buy and hold for 5 years.

If we were to distill crypto into a very neat flowchart, it would be gateways at the top of the funnel, where you can swap fiat and crypto for each other. Then there are centralized and decentralized exchanges. That's sort of at the middle of the funnel. At the bottom of the funnel, there are pathways between both exchanges and random wallets that are not exchange wallets.

There's this spiderweb of interconnectivity in crypto, with some exchange nodes. At the top are gateways. I think Monero is basically Bitcoin plus Tornado Cash, right? It's a Bitcoin store of value with a mixer built in.

What ultimately matters to a criminal—or to somebody who's just looking to hide their money—is whether or not they can launder that. Maybe it's not all criminals, but somebody who's looking to hide their money inside of Monero: Can they get it back out into fiat easily? And if there aren't many gateways that accept Monero, which seems to be the case, it's still a little bit harder to use for somebody who's looking to privately hold Monero.

Imagine you're a criminal: You hold a bunch of stolen cash in Monero in a wallet. Who's going to give you fiat for that at anything near fair value? They'd probably demand a massive discount to take your Monero. There aren't many exchanges that do it.

Bitcoin, meanwhile, does have a mixer feature built in. Let's say that I hold Bitcoin and the government knows about it because it's all transparent and it's all on-chain. I can still flee to a jurisdiction that my government doesn't patrol, move my Bitcoin there, and then extract it from a gateway in that jurisdiction without potentially getting in trouble.

It is still mobile money, even if people can see what you're doing. And centralized exchanges, because their order books aren't on-chain, are in effect a form of mixer. So I do view the use case for Monero as being valid. I think it's a nice call option on global instability—or a put option. There's optionality on that.

My concern is that, in the absence of total geopolitical chaos, how much value does it actually add on top of existing Bitcoin infrastructure? It's an interesting debate. I'm not sure where I stand on it, but we're spitballing here.

It hasn't died. It's like one of those few assets that's been around since—when did it come out? 2016? Actually, it looks like 2014. From 2014 all the way to today, it hasn't died. And it's had those 2 massive peaks. It had that 2018 run, and then it had the 2021 run. Now it's still sticking around.

It's on my watch list as well, Avi. It's a real project, and I think that we can't dismiss it, right? I mean, look, for now, maybe it's just criminals and bad people, but as the old expression goes, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.

Yeah. Maybe this won't happen in the United States, where we live, but maybe at some point some government somewhere will start to impose capital controls on its citizens in a way that's unfair to those people. And if there's a gateway in that country where you can get your fiat into Bitcoin and Bitcoin into Monero somewhere on the decentralized web, maybe that's a way for people to preserve value and escape.

I don't know. Even in my own family history—and probably in yours, too—I can think of at least 5 examples of somebody getting told to leave a country in the next 24 hours; otherwise, they're going to be killed. In that scenario, it does seem like it would be worthwhile to have a channel to get your capital out of there.

You know, those situations in my family and my wife's family history were unfair, right? So imagine that comes up again somewhere, somehow. I'm sure it comes up every few months, honestly. Wouldn't it be nice to get your capital out of wherever you're being expelled from in a way that's liquid, rather than, "Oh, I can't sell my real estate because that'll take forever, and there are no buyers for real estate owned by people like me"?

These types of scenarios—the history is not that ancient. So that's why I pay attention to this stuff. I think it's important.

9. Ads (Ledger, Arkham)

I think that's fair. So I guess we'll be allocating a little bit now. Maybe just nibble a little bit.

What else are you seeing in the markets, Jonah?

It's been pretty calm, I will say. Not a huge amount has happened over the last few days, basically since Bitcoin hit $95,000. It's taken a bit of a break. I do think that we're looking at $100,000 in short order, at which point I'll be offloading the rest of those calls.

Good call on that.

The market moved 12% in 4 days, which meant that was a pretty damn good return on those $100,000–$120,000 calls that I was talking about last week. With calls, it's always about timing. Now we're pretty close to it, and I do think that we can stall around these levels.

We can stall over the next 10%. I do think that we can hit $100,000–$105,000. I don't necessarily think we're going to $120,000 in a straight line. So I do think now is a good time to start chipping away at those calls. I'm still obviously holding my core position because I'm very bullish, but the extra leverage comes off.

Now, this is the kind of market where you want to be long spot and short calls. Let's say you're long 100 units of spot. Maybe you want to be short 30 units' worth of $105,000 calls. Collect some theta, especially if you don't expect it to just blast to $120,000.

I don't think you want to be long calls anymore. I don't expect the market to rip quickly here. I think there's too much uncertainty. I'm personally just waiting for the next headline. It's been such a headline-driven market. I think that's a little bit of what the market's doing right now, too: it's digesting.

I think it's going to digest for a little bit until Trump comes out and says the next absolutely insane thing. It's going to be crazy. We kind of have to just wait around until then. He could say something crazy bullish. I think it's more likely that he says something chaotic and vomit-inducing, but I do think there's a put under this market.

If it goes too low, look out for the stimmy. It's coming.

These guys aren't going to tank the markets. They can't. They won't. That's not their mandate, especially with Bernie and AOC touring the country doing their Fighting Oligarchy tour. If those are the politicians who start to take over, then you can sell everything. But the incumbents are kind of like—they don't want to just hand it to those people.

10. Earnings Season

I mean, look, from the absolute bottom to here, we're up 17%. It's a big move. If we go back to the lows, it's another 14% drop, which is not insignificant. I think you kind of need that in order for Trump to walk back again. You're going to need that. He's not going to flinch on a 5% pullback.

Yeah, that's what I'm trying to articulate: it's going to take a little bit. He does now have wiggle room to be more aggressive. I mean, we still have no freaking clue. Earnings season's coming up. There's going to be a lot of earnings coming out, and it's not really going to tell us a lot. Maybe—I mean, it's really not going to tell us anything.

But it does make you wonder: how much are companies going to be impacted by these tariffs? They're probably not impacted yet.

No, no. Well, yeah, they're going to be crying. Basically, CEOs are going to come out on these calls, and every single one of them is going to start crying. They're all going to be lowering forward guidance. They're going to be crying about how bad these things are. They're going to talk about how many of their small and medium-sized business customers are going to go bankrupt if these tariffs take hold.

They're going to talk about how consumer uncertainty is impacting purchasing. They're going to talk about logistical challenges. So basically, earnings season—lobby season is the new earnings season. These guys are just going to be lobbying via these earnings calls, begging for Trump to make their lives easier and send us back to Valhalla in the stock market.

I don't know. I've never been an equities trader. I just buy the index and stick it in the bottom drawer.

I think that this is going to be like whine season—whine season. I think that's probably priced in, with the stock market trading at, you know, whatever it is, 5,570 instead of 6,100, or wherever it should be absent these tariff things.

Should we talk about Pendle? You've been bringing that one up a lot, and I did a little bit of research to try and get smart on it, like you are, maybe, you know—

11. Finding Value In Crypto

Yeah, why don't you go ahead? What have you learned?

I mean, the reason I was looking into it is specifically because I'm super bullish on RWAs and anything that tokenizes assets, because I think regulation is going to make it super easy. But I haven't done a deep dive in a while. What did you find?

I did a little bit of work on it because you've been bringing it up on pretty much every single one of these podcasts, and I knew almost nothing about it. So I decided to try and educate myself.

Basically, first of all, it trades. It's a real business. So my first box—ignore or pay attention—is checked. I'm paying attention. The P/E is around 22, right? I mean, if you go on DeFiLlama and look at their revenues, they earn basically $1 million a week, and they trade just shy of $1 billion in TVL.

So it's a big growth asset, too. That revenue is going up. This is a real business trading at a low P/E. It turns out they effectively dividend all of their fee income back to token holders via that vePENDLE mechanism. So if you stake PENDLE, then you get vePENDLE, and you just sit there and collect the fees they earn from people trading on their platform.

So that box is checked, too. It's kind of like Hyperliquid: it's a real business trading at a decent multiple, not a crazy one, and the tokenomics are all kind of square.

What's weird about it is that you deposit yield-bearing assets, like staked ETH or some yield-bearing stablecoin, and they basically break it up into the principal asset and the yield-bearing asset. To me, that's weird, because if you trade a corporate bond or a Treasury bond, those 2 things are linked.

If you want to get long yields, you don't go and buy a U.S. Treasury yield coin. You short the bond, or you buy an ETF that shorts bonds, and vice versa. If you want to bet that yields are going down, you buy bonds, or you buy an ETF that buys bonds. So separating yield from price is kind of strange and unintuitive to me.

But the growth of this project is unignorable. The tokenomics are unignorable. The valuation is so cheap that it's unignorable. If the growth continues, I think you're looking at a 2- to 10-bagger on this one.

I'm with you. I think, if I remember correctly, just from the outset, I do agree that it's a little unintuitive to split it up. But Pendle kind of came into being when yields in crypto were ridiculously volatile, and people just really wanted to speculate on them.

Yields would go from 30% to 100% to 50%, and they'd just be all over the place. Some people just wanted to lock in a constant yield, and if it's at 25% and somebody's willing to bet that it's going to go to 100%, why not lock in your 25% and just not worry about it? I think that's the idea.

But now, really, it's just a stablecoin accumulation platform as well. And you know what else I loved about it, to that point, Avi? It's connected to 11 chains, and you have your DeFi dashboard right in front of you. I messed around with—I did my fair share of yield farming for a while, and I was blown away by how much value I had. I had an Apple Notes file that I would keep to try to keep track of where all my money was, because it's very difficult. You can just forget about stuff and lose thousands of dollars on-chain in protocols that you forgot you staked or locked, or you can just lose money.

The idea of having a one-stop shop with a dashboard that shows you all of your different yields and connects to all of your different chains—and you're not going to have some stranded asset from 2022 sitting on a DEX on NEAR. You're just going to have it all in one place. I think that is a good product that the market kind of lacks. If this happens to be the one that people gravitate toward, that alone is a use case that I think will drive memetic momentum in the price action, absent everything else.

Yeah, one of my goals for this quarter is just to dive into everything that actually makes money and is growing, because I've been so disillusioned with the state of the industry, and Pendle was one of them. I'm doing my deep dive now on Maple. Maple's TVL has literally 4x'd since February, and I'm trying to get a good handle on what those fees are going to look like, especially relative to the market cap, and what directions it can continue to grow into.

But RWAs are coming, man. Don't sleep on this. The next big trade is that, and maybe some AI tokens, but this is going to be like a year-long 5-to-10x type trade, in my personal opinion. Maybe we need to go talk to some RWA experts for the next pod.

Yeah, I think RWAs are real AF. It's all kind of coming together, isn't it? It's like stablecoins are proliferating. The rails are there. The L1 infrastructure can handle billions of transactions seamlessly. Now, the gateways are popping up. It feels like it's only a matter of when, not if, all of these things click and we swap out existing TradFi plumbing for crypto plumbing at some point soon. It feels like we're nearing an inflection point there.

I think you're right. That's a very optimistic note to end on, Jonah.

Yes, it is. The years of TradFi are coming to an end. It's almost time for crypto prime time.

Crypto prime time.

All right, dude. Great talking to you.

This is a pleasure.

Yeah, as always, this is fun. We'll catch up soon. Thanks, Avi.