When Will Bitcoin Bottom?

Jonah Vanborg

Wow. I can't see anything. How are you doing, Avi?

I'm doing great. The lights are bright up here. It's a big, big stage. Well, welcome, everybody. Just to do some quick introductions and get that out of the way, I am Avi Felman, one of the 2 co-hosts of the 1000x podcast.

1. Ads (Kraken OTC and CryptoTax)

I met Jonah at FTX Bahamas way back in the day, right before the whole FTX thing collapsed. Post-FTX, we realized there was probably a need for a place where 2 traders could come together and talk to each other intelligently about the markets. We found that a lot of the information you get in crypto is very high level. It's a lot of talk about macro and long-term trends, which I think is great, but it's also good to get into the nitty-gritty and figure out how you should actually trade and make money in this extremely volatile asset class.

So that's how we got together. Thank you guys for coming out and listening to us talk to each other.

Jonah Vanborg

Yeah, thank you very much for being here. I'm Jonah Vanborg. I'm the other co-host of the 1000x podcast, and what our podcast is about is trying to bring the sort of conversations that you'd hear on a trading floor into a podcast format.

When you make your crypto trading decisions, you don't necessarily feel alone or live in your own little mental echo bubble of potentially bad decisions. You want to at least stress-test your ideas with other people, and a lot of crypto traders out there don't really have that. Avi and I are attempting to create it, but it really was born of just a phone call that we used to have once a week talking about markets.

I learn something on every single one of these podcasts. Ultimately, the big question that keeps coming up every single week for us is: Okay, there's all this blockchain technology being built. We're all here in crypto because we believe that this is going to revolutionize finance and change the way that value is transferred. But how do we make money from it right now? How do we get rich quick with this stuff?

How do we position ourselves for the next day, week, or month? Because it's a little bit harder to get excited about hanging on to something for 8 years, especially if that thing—even if you're in the right place at the right time—if you're in the wrong asset, you just get left in the dust.

So, on that note, maybe we should kick it off with what's happening right now?

Jonah, I know our podcast is called 1000x, but I don't know if we should say “get rich quick.” “Get rich slowly” in an asset class that's growing substantially, so maybe it happens very quickly.

2. Unwinding Of The Trump Pump

Jonah Vanborg

Yeah, there you go. Give a little bit of a hedge to it. To be completely honest, things have happened really, really, really quickly over the last 6 months.

Yeah, if you look back to where we were in mid-2024, we had this amazing run of BTC going up to $70,000. Then, for 3, 4, 5 months, we went sideways and went down. We went all the way from $70,000 to $50,000 because, at the time, there wasn't really good news propelling Bitcoin up.

What had sent Bitcoin to the heights of $70,000 was the ETF flows. After the ETF got launched, a ton of people piled capital in, and we were seeing tremendous inflows. Then we didn't really get anywhere until Trump got elected, at which point a bunch of people started flooding into the market, expecting that Trump was going to be amazing for Bitcoin and the rest of the crypto world.

Now we sit here today, where we're actually only 20% above the peak of Bitcoin. If you go all the way back to 2021, we also hit $70,000 back then. We're only 20% higher despite all this good news, despite talk of a strategic Bitcoin reserve, despite the actual setting up of the National Strategic Reserve, where the government has announced it's not going to be selling Bitcoin. So how is it possible we're only 20% higher? That's a big question.

Jonah Vanborg

I've been struggling with this question as well because it could telegraph one of 2 things. Either A, the price is too low right now and there's this tremendous opportunity coming our way in the next 1 to 3 months that we should be prepared to capitalize on. We should be hanging on through these difficult times.

Or B, weakness when there should be strength, as a trader, is usually a pretty big red flag that should tell you to run for the fences. Ultimately, I remain extremely bullish from here.

I think that one of the things we need to pay attention to is the Bitcoin-S&P ratio. I think a lot of this sell-off has absolutely nothing to do with crypto. That ratio has been fairly stable throughout the sell-off, unlike 2022, when the ratio tanked, and 2021, when the ratio ripped.

Really, you need to disaggregate how much of the price action is due to just general macro factors and how much of it is due to fear and greed related to Bitcoin, which is obviously the bellwether asset for our space. We can talk about how crypto ex-Bitcoin is suffering a little bit price-wise right now in a way that Bitcoin isn't, but let's leave that for later in the conversation.

Right now, I think Bitcoin is holding up much more than it should throughout this macro sell-off. I'm not really worried about the macro picture either. Just a very quick sound bite on it: I think it's time to talk about Donald Trump a little bit.

He's got some big things going on. He's transferring taxation from income to consumption. That's one big thing he's got going on. Then there's another effort within his administration to transfer GDP contribution from government spending to private spending.

Those 2 big realignments are shaking markets. Volatility is shaking markets. But I don't think he has the mandate—I don't think he got elected on a mandate—to tank asset prices.

I think that if the S&P drops another 10%, then you're in real correction or recession territory. I don't think they have the mandate to suffer a much bigger drawdown than that. I think they'll put a floor under the market. They have ample tools to do so.

Rates can get cut a lot from here before you even have to start QE. There's tons of cash out there, tons of private credit to cushion any dip. So I think the S&P is floored 10% under here.

Meaning, if the Bitcoin-S&P ratio stays consistent like it has been, I think we've got maybe another 10% dip in Bitcoin, 20% max, before the stimulus or the rate cuts start buoying things. And 10% is a lot in the S&P. It's not a lot for crypto.

3. Bitcoin Value vs Momentum

Not a lot at all. I think you hit on the answer to why Bitcoin is trading the way that it is.

Jonah Vanborg

Yeah. And it's that once Trump came in, there was all this enthusiasm. A tremendous amount of people, as I said, poured into the market because of all this speculation about the SPR and the fact that the government might end up buying a ton of Bitcoin.

That all got baked in. We traded to $110,000, and then reality set in. What do I mean by reality? Well, Trump is governing in a reasonably unpredictable manner for equity investors.

What happens when volatility in a market goes up is that the value of cash increases commensurate with that. So where do people first raise cash? They raise it in the most volatile assets, like Bitcoin.

As we entered into a new regime of higher volatility in the equity markets because of a more uncertain political rule, people were going to sell their Bitcoin first because Bitcoin, one, is very volatile, and two, it just went up a ton.

This is why I think Bitcoin is maybe trading weaker than some people expect despite all of this amazing good news. Now, with that in mind, I think that there are always, in my head, 2 ways to think about buying and selling crypto, and Bitcoin specifically.

The 2 reasons why people buy this asset are, 1, for momentum: it’s going up, it’s a momentum asset, so I want to catch the momentum and ride it higher. Or, 2, they buy it at a value level where they feel like the risk-reward is extremely good. So, when Bitcoin hit $50,000 in the middle of last year, you were thinking, “Okay, well, if this thing can go to $100,000 based on a good political climate, that’s a 2x for me. And maybe I can stop out below the ETF’s first bounce at $40,000.” So I’ve got a really good risk-reward.

You always have to think of it in terms of momentum and value. Right now, we clearly don’t have momentum. We’ve gone sideways to down for 3 months now, so there’s no momentum in the market. The next question you have to ask yourself is, where do people find value in BTC?

You look at the price targets and try to construct a good ratio. You say to yourself, “Okay, well, if I think the U.S. government actually does buy even a tiny little bit of Bitcoin, this thing’s going to $150,000.” So you think, “Well, where do I get a 2x?” That’s $75,000, and that’s about where the Bitcoin price stabilized last week.

This is how I approach trading in a nutshell: you’re always looking for that good ratio of risk to reward. Then you’re looking for what’s going to drive this higher, and what are the risks? The risks, as Jonah said, are mainly the equity markets at this point. I think Bitcoin is like a beach ball underwater right now.

Once that resolves, if you see VIX come under 20 and sustain, and you see the S&P start grinding up and not popping up, that’s a much healthier environment. I always get really nervous in markets like this if you get a 3%–4% day in equities. What you really want to see is a slow, steady grind higher.

4. Who's Selling Crypto?

If we see VIX come down, then I think Bitcoin’s in a really good place because people are, in my opinion, underallocated based on the amount of good things that have happened for it over the last 3 months.

Jonah Vanborg

Speaking of underallocation, I would like to ask the audience a question. You guys are obviously—you have your fingers on the pulse of crypto. You’re here at D.C., really trying to understand the space better and network within it. How many of you sold core holdings? By core holdings, I mean I’m not talking about the meme coins that you play around with. I’m talking about Bitcoin, ETH, likely Solana—stuff that you want to be invested in for years to come.

How many of you sold a nice chunk of core holdings since the election? I’m going to try to see who’s sold. It feels like a very sparse number of people raising their hands here.

Yeah, not that many. So, okay.

To me, the ETF outflows have been huge, right? But it’s clearly not you guys. It’s not the crypto natives, the people who are closest to the space who are selling. I think it’s the people who are in for a trade. They’re out.

I think that clears the thicket for maybe another rally. There are a couple of exogenous macro catalysts that could totally screw everything up, though. One of them, I think, is a kinetic war in Iran. I think people underestimate that.

Yes, there’s a mismatch between the power of the United States military and the power of the Iranian military, but they do have what is likely the Strait of Hormuz, through which a third of the world’s oil goes. If they’re really threatened, they could shut it off, and the loss of that maritime traffic would cause oil to spike to God knows what price—$200 or $300 a barrel at least. That would tank the S&P, and I doubt anybody would be thinking about buying crypto, especially altcoins, in that world.

I’d put that at a 5% probability right now. What you’re seeing in the market today is reflecting not a huge probability of that happening, obviously, but the escalation yesterday in the Middle East is leading to gold being up 1% and equities being down 2% today. You’re seeing that fear start to creep into the market. That is a real threat for crypto.

On the opposite side of that coin, a potential exogenous macro catalyst is if a likely détente and maybe a ceasefire happen in Ukraine. Commodity prices are going to tank, inflation comes down, and then the Fed has pretty much no excuse to hold off on cutting rates, especially with unemployment ticking up. I think that’ll be a nice macro tailwind.

We have this very conflicting macro backdrop, but ultimately we’re really just talking about Bitcoin here. Bitcoin does feel like great risk-reward in the low $80,000s, especially in the high $70,000s. At $75,000, I think you’re buying with both hands. That’s kind of the top of the pre-election range. Things are so much better for crypto than they were before this election. There’s no need to deny that anymore.

5. Alt's Are In A Savage Bear Market

It’s just funny because when we first got into this asset class—when I first got in, in 2017—this stuff didn’t matter at all, right? Whether there was a war brewing or what the equity markets were doing, it didn’t really matter that much for the price of Bitcoin because all of the gains that Bitcoin was getting were from new people allocating to a completely new asset and driving prices up. Today, we’re not early anymore. Bitcoin is a truly mature asset.

I disagree with that, actually.

Okay, let’s dive into that.

I think we’re all at the institutional Bitcoin and crypto conference. I’m sure everybody in the audience can think of a trillion-dollar pool of assets that has a 0% Bitcoin allocation. What if that goes to 10 basis points? It’s sort of the “institutions are coming” narrative, but it seems realer now because the SEC stopped suing institutions.

I think for Bitcoin there will always be new pools of capital coming in: new sovereign wealth funds, new SBRs at the U.S. state level and at the sovereign level around the world. I’m not worried about new capital coming into Bitcoin. I’m worried about new capital coming into altcoins.

We’re in a savage bear market for altcoins right now. Sentiment is dire. You wouldn’t know it from the price of Bitcoin, but you talk to people who are invested in altcoins and they are down bad. They should be rallying. Retail is tapped out. It’s unclear where the new source of funds is coming from.

So how do you navigate? How do you invest in altcoins in this climate? You can’t just sit there with Bitcoin in your bottom drawer and feel okay about that. That’s always been my biggest issue with crypto, basically ever since 2021: I don’t really think crypto outside of Bitcoin is an asset class you can just sit in and not look at. If you’re buying anything that isn’t BTC, you constantly have to be underwriting that position.

If you told somebody in 2019 that just 3 years later Ethereum would be losing a substantial amount of its market share to a new L1, people were calling you a bit nuts. There were only a few people making big bets on alternative L1s and really sticking to it, thinking, “Okay, I think these things, likely including Solana, can really grow.”

That’s because the world of crypto is open source, and that makes it very easy to innovate and iterate on any sort of platform. The people who use crypto, basically up until today, have had very low switching costs to using new platforms because the reality is most of these platforms are used for speculation—even today.

Basically every single project outside of Bitcoin, which is now, I think, proving itself to be a macro asset and a store of value, can be disrupted in a month, 2 months, or 3 months. There has to be constant underwriting of the situation, which is why Jonah and I are traders.

Jonah Vanborg

Yeah.

That’s why we try to take advantage of situations like this. If you look at the broad alt space, 4 years ago there weren’t that many choices.

There were a few hundred reasonable things that you could put your money into. Today, there are thousands, including meme coins. I wouldn't call that reasonable, but there are so many different things that you can put your money into. That kind of ruins, for a lot of these things, the core value, which was that they were used as assets of speculation.

If money is spread out too thin, then you can't have these things go up in aggregate. I think a lot of people talk about the concept of an alt season, or Bitcoin lifting everything with it, and what we've seen is that this actually is not happening anymore in any meaningful way. If you look since the election, the vast majority of assets ex-BTC are down since the election or flat. That would have been crazy back in 2021 if you said Bitcoin was going to be up 20% or 30% and everything else was going to be down, because for a long time, everything outside of BTC acted as beta to Bitcoin.

They were used as basically leverage to BTC. Today, the fundamentals of these assets and companies genuinely matter, and the fundamentals change pretty rapidly. What's really interesting is, if you actually look back over 4 years, the total value that was locked on Ethereum—the amount of money sitting on Ethereum in the form of stablecoins or in the form of what you deposit into a protocol likely called Aave, which is a lending protocol—the TVL, total value locked, is actually down both in USD terms, because obviously ETH's price is down, but also in ETH terms, which means that it's bleeding usage.

Meanwhile, the likely Solana chart looks a little bit better, but who knows where it's going to be in 3 or 4 years, which is why you constantly have to be paying attention. What we always talk about is that we don't want to just give you high-level platitudes about what's happening. How do you make money on that? Where are you looking?

The beauty of today is that we have all these different instruments. Basically, every coin that trades more than $10 million a day has a derivative on it. What you can do is look at the stuff that's really bad and short it, and look at the stuff that's pretty good and buy it. You can wait 6 months if you've done your research right, and you can end up in some pretty good risk-adjusted positions.

That's a little bit of what we do. It's all about getting smart, which is why you come to conferences like this. You talk to people, you get to understand where money is really being allocated, what's really going on, how to make money on this, and where to put your own money.

Basically, ex-BTC, the only thing that's done extremely well is stablecoins. Unfortunately, you can't put your money in USDC and have it go to $2. It's going to stay at 1. So how are you going to make money on stablecoins? We've come up with a way to make money over the course of the past 2 months.

We call it inverse alt season. It's the new alt season. Go on your platform of choice and short garbage. The Sharpe is pretty high. It works. These things are just down-only every single day as the mania fades and as another 1 million tokens a week get minted.

Now that creating a blockchain and creating a token is basically commoditized, there's just this never-ending supply of blockchains getting thrown out there with their attached tokens. Lots of alts to short, a finite amount of capital, and an infinite amount of alts makes for some good shorts. So we've been shorting a lot of stuff.

It's definitely a good thing to do because it feels like consensus mentality is still kind of anchored in this 2017 or 2021 cycle mode of, "Hey, altcoins are beta to Bitcoin." They're not anymore. There's Bitcoin, and then there's ex-Bitcoin and crypto. Crypto is a misleading term now because it encompasses both Bitcoin and non-Bitcoin.

And not to be too pessimistic—I'm getting to the optimistic part—I don't want to go out here and be like, "Everything's garbage. Sell it all."

Jonah Vanborg

You've got to let me get out of this, obviously.

No, no, no. You're the bear now. I'm the bull.

Jonah Vanborg

Okay.

Basically, to finish the thought, my point was that I think that's going to work for another 2 to 3 months. I really do. Going back to the Bill Gates technology truism, after all, this is just tradable technology, right? Bill Gates's saying is, "People overestimate what technology can do in 2 years and underestimate what technology can do in 10 years."

Maybe you shorten those cycles a little bit because crypto is faster. I think we're in the sort of despair phase, where overestimation of crypto's near-term potential is being reckoned with. But just listening to the previous panel in the green room back there, it's abundantly clear that this asset class is going to enable some pretty spectacular financial outcomes.

That's why we're here, and we really believe in this stuff. It's just a question of how you navigate the short term: be short stuff, be short bad stuff, and then figure out how you're going to know when the turn comes.

Jonah Vanborg

My particular way to have my fingers on that pulse, just in the spirit of what Avi said, is to give you actionable insights. During the last podcast that we did, during the Trump Crypto Summit, it was clear that Cardano was not going to get included. They were walking back their comments about how Cardano was going to get included in some sort of strategic reserve, and it was abundantly clear during the conference that no sovereign buying of Cardano was going to happen.

Equally, we noticed that Litecoin was well off the highs ahead of a potential ETF approval. So I did a pairs trade while we were talking on the podcast. I shorted Cardano, and I got long Litecoin, notional-neutral. A week and a half later, my P&L on that is flat, which makes no fucking sense, right?

Litecoin has a story. Cardano has a bad story. There should be some P&L in there, either proving or disproving my thesis, but it's flat. On a percentage basis, they're trading tick for tick, which means that all that's going on right now is market-maker-on-market-maker violence. There's just one correlation algo battling another. This pair hasn't moved.

As soon as fundamental stories start to reemerge and I show P&L on trades like that—or you do—that's when you know a turn is coming. That's when you see that it's not just this big macro, algorithmic correlation trade within crypto, and that suddenly there's a little bit of buying of the good stuff and people are getting out of the bad things. That's when you know that actual catalysts are taking place.

6. Ads (Ledger & Wallet Connect)

So I think we're in short mode while it's just algo-on-algo violence. I think it's going to be 2 to 3 months, but my fingers are on the pulse with a couple of these pairs trades. I'll say I'm starting to see a little bit of green shoots in one specific sector, which is the RWA sector.

I want to go back to the point about stablecoins. Like I said, we're not going to—you’re not going to make money buying stablecoins. So what can you take away from the trend? If people are saying, "Stablecoins are going to be the next really big thing," your question has to be, "Well, why? Why are stablecoins growing so much?"

The answer, at least my answer, is that the crypto world and blockchain offer better technology for moving value around. When you go down that a little bit more, you say, "Well, what other forms of value need to be moved around?" You look at every other security that exists on the planet, and it's going to be better if it lives on blockchain systems.

What we're seeing is growth from some real-world asset, or RWA, platforms that are tokenizing things like Treasuries. Up to $4.6 billion of U.S. Treasuries is now tokenized on blockchain. That sector is going to continue to grow.

And you're seeing it. I'm not going to name names. I don't want to be accused of shilling for anything, but in that specific area, the inflection point is hitting: it's growing reasonably rapidly, and it makes sense, right? It's like, okay, well, we know that's what crypto is good for, so these things are probably going to grow faster than what is likely Dogwifhat, which is just a lottery ticket. It's not working, by the way.

Jonah Vanborg

Yeah, that was a good short and probably will continue to be. I agree with you, Avi. I think that stablecoin growth, while uninteresting from a short-term profit perspective, is an interesting metric to monitor insofar as it's like, okay, so how much of finance has proliferated on-chain? Well, you could divide total stablecoin market cap by the market cap of all the fiat currencies in the world. You can have whatever metric you want, but it's still basically telling you the story behind DeFi's TVL metric on Ethereum.

7. Surviving Crypto Cycles

Yes, in ETH terms, it's below the 2021 highs, but it's been rallying a lot recently from the 2022 lows. All stablecoins—what's that telling you? Well, okay, more money is moving on-chain. And the next thing that the money on-chain is going to want to do is earn yield. The thing after that is it's going to want to trade tokenized equities.

And the thing after that is it's going to want to tokenize startup equity. And, you know, we collaborate on some software projects. Tokens are a great way to align people really easily across sovereign borders without a whole lot of paperwork. It's awesome tech. We all believe in it.

We're all aware that if I want to send you a dollar here in a developed market, it's easy. You can do it in 10 seconds on what is likely Zelle. If I want to send you 1 share of SPY, the S&P ETF, it's going to take 2 weeks, a million questions, and 2 hours on the phone with somebody. We all believe in crypto for that purpose. So it's a question of when, not if. And, yeah, I agree that stablecoin adoption is definitely the metric to look at for when that happens.

What's this red clock ticking down to a minute? I think we just have a minute left to talk to each other. It must be that. We can go speed round. Speed round. What's my last name? Do you remember it?

Okay, good. No, it's Vanborg.

Okay. What's my last name?

Jonah Vanborg

Feldman.

There's no D. Felman. It's my biggest pet peeve.

You know, it's like we try not to be so pessimistic on things, but at the end of the day, that's how you survive in this asset class: you have to be pessimistic because it's so easy to get caught up in the hype. I've been through this cycle quite a few times, and at the highs, you're looking at your portfolio and you're going, “I am the most brilliant man—or woman—that has ever existed on this planet. Look, it's just straight up: I'm never going to sell. This thing is going to change the world.”

It's our job to provide that sober outlook that maybe you should really consider what's going on under the hood.

Jonah Vanborg

Thanks, Avi. I'm going to go have a glass of cold water. Thank you guys for sticking with us through this monologue. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much.