Why It's Time To Be Bullish

1. Trump's Impact On Markets

I guess if some alts have bottomed out, or they're starting to rally even now despite this dire fucking sentiment, then we could see some pretty explosive price action. There's no way the cycle is going to be over if Bitcoin's on the highs, or basically close to the all-time highs, and sentiment is this bad. No. Cycles end when you run out of buyers, not when you have a bunch of depressed people who are on the sidelines. No way. It's going to keep running.

What's kind of nuts, Jonah, is that until today—Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday—if you turn on the candlesticks on Bitcoin and pull up the chart, we literally closed within a $100 band every day. There were wicks, for sure, but it's kind of insane. The close was $96,564 on Thursday, $96,476 on Saturday, and $96,475 on Sunday. Bitcoin literally did not move at all. It did get up to $100,000 on Friday and then came back down, but if you're just checking in once a day, this thing didn't move.

What's bullish, I'll say, is that we're holding the 100-day moving average, so that's nice. There do seem to be a lot of bids stacked lower, but there are also a bunch of asks stacked higher. We're kind of in no man's land right now. What are you thinking, Jonah?

Yeah, it's interesting you bring this up. If you just set your candlesticks to daily, we've got 8 candles that cross through the current price—8 consecutive candles—which is pretty nuts. If you go back to the first time we breached this price level, which would have been November 21 of last year, there are dozens more candles like this. We've been locked in this range for almost 3 months.

What's weird is, I think you tweeted this, Avi: rarely do markets just sort of plateau and consolidate into an equilibrium range on the highs. That's what's happening. What Crypto Twitter and everybody who cares about trading this asset is trying to figure out is: should we despair? Is this it, or are we going much, much higher?

The question is really consequential because I think if we trade back down like we've traded down in previous bull markets, which would be a 30%, 40%, or 50% pullback or worse, you're going to see a lot of people blow up. You're going to see a lot of people lose everything. Even this move from $108,000 down to $92,000 took out billions of dollars' worth of value; people got liquidated. To me, these are big questions that we need to answer.

I err on the bull camp, but I think we should spend some time debating the sentiment in the market and whether it's bullish or bearish. Do you think that the current apathy and lack of enthusiasm, despair, and anger at the overall meta in crypto being kind of too casino-y is right before the next leg higher? What do you think?

All very good questions, and I want to start by framing it a bit differently. For the longest time, the way that we've talked about the market is in terms of up or down. While we've said in the past that there's going to be a lot of dispersion—and there has been—our framing kind of remains the same: are we going up, or are we going down?

I think we have to start talking about assets asset by asset, whether they're going up or going down. We're just in such a different place today where Bitcoin can be basically at the highs and everything else is trash, except for a few assets here and there. Just looking at the market, Bitcoin is off 10-ish percent from its highs, while your average alt is down 50% to 90% from the highs. That's also a huge range by itself.

Then you have random assets like LTC, which are also only down 10% to 15% from the highs, and that's because there are catalysts for LTC, like the ETF. You have things like Optimism and Arbitrum, which are at their 2023 lows right now. You have something like Worldcoin, which is basically making new lows. Then you have something likely called Aave, which has performed extremely well since the 2023 lows—up 5x from the 2023 lows—but it's off 40% from the highs.

The world is just a very different place today where you can't just talk about up or down. You have to specify exactly what assets we're talking about when we say, “Are we fucked?” When you say, “Are we fucked? Is sentiment bad?” for Bitcoin holders, I don't think sentiment is bad at all. For people who hold ETH, I think they're ready to jump out the fucking window. Does anyone still hold ETH? It's not trading like people are hanging on to their ETH.

Yeah, I think a lot of people are chipping out. I think there's still a lot of holdover from uninformed market participants who bought Bitcoin and Ethereum a long time ago. They've seen their crypto portfolio do well, and maybe they're not checking it that closely. They see ETH—maybe they've made a little bit on ETH—but they don't realize how poorly it's done in general. I think a lot of those people are slowly getting out.

2. Has Bitcoin Topped?

You had that realization. I think I bothered you so much about getting rid of all your ETH that you finally did it a while ago. I think you were one of the early guys to get out of that ratio. Since the time I've been badgering you to get out, which is early last year, it's down 50% against BTC.

Yeah, you saved me a lot of money. It wasn't like we had some sort of back-room conversation: I got out and then we podcasted about it. It was like you convinced me slowly over the course of about 6 podcasts last year that I should do it, and then I just ditched out of it eventually. You literally sold me on it in a public forum, so hopefully everybody listening listened to you, too. That was crazy, so thank you for that.

So let me reframe the question, then, given your suggestion. Let's talk about Bitcoin and non-Bitcoin. Let's start with Bitcoin. Bitcoin sentiment is bad right now, too, right? People are not bull-posting Bitcoin. People are like, “The cycle's over. The highs are in.” You have some prominent accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers saying, “If you buy Bitcoin here, you're going to regret it in 2 or 3 months.” What do you think? Then I'll tell you what I think.

I tweeted, like you said, that it's very rare for an asset—for Bitcoin specifically, after a parabolic rise—to go sideways for a long period of time and have that be bullish. I don't think I agree with what I said anymore. I should probably issue a retraction to that statement, because Bitcoin has actually held up better than I expected on the sell-offs.

There seems to be at least a substantial amount of demand for BTC even at this $95,000 level, which has been tested. I thought that the next time we hit those levels, we would go lower, and we haven't. It's not like we're up a ton since then—up 2.5%—but Bitcoin's been performing a lot better than I thought.

3. The AI Trade

One of the biggest arguments people make for Bitcoin having topped here is that there's no more good news coming out for Bitcoin, and that Michael Saylor is running out of ammo to buy BTC. That's the only thing that's been keeping us up.

One interesting thing happened this morning: Michael Saylor announced that he bought Bitcoin at around these price levels and that he was allocating to the market, and Bitcoin didn't sell off a ton. Normally, after Saylor comes out with an announcement like that, Bitcoin will sell off because people will go, “Well, I guess that's what was keeping us up, so we should get out of Bitcoin.” Clearly, that didn't happen.

I think Saylor's impact on the market might be lessening over time as Bitcoin becomes bigger. We're still getting good ETF inflows for BTC. Yes, there's no immediate good news left for Bitcoin, but I don't know if I should discount the fact that the president of the United States has voiced support so often for this thing that it's changed investor behavior with respect to Bitcoin. People are now allocating to it in the same way that they're allocating to the stock market, right?

Every month they get a paycheck, and some of that goes into their 401(k), and then they buy the S&P and the Nasdaq. Some of that's now clearly happening with Bitcoin. It's possible that, when I said it's rare—it basically never happens—for something to go sideways for a long time at the highs and then continue higher, this time genuinely is different.

4. Ads (Kraken OTC and Ledger)

Yeah, I think so, too. I'm of the mindset that any buy below $95,000 on BTC is probably a very good buy.

5. Bitcoin ETF Flows

I don't buy the whole “there's no good news coming” thing. Before we move on to non-Bitcoin, let me just give you my response and my two cents on Bitcoin, and touch on what you just said.

Let's start with the “Michael Saylor is holding up the market” argument. Michael Saylor's not holding up the market. What's holding up the market is those ETF flows that you alluded to at the end, and those are only going to accelerate over time. There may not be a headline that says, “Investors now put 2% of their portfolio in Bitcoin; it used to be 0%.” That's not going to hit the front page of The New York Times. The catalyst hunters out there will probably be disappointed, but this is just steady inflows.

First, let's talk about Michael Saylor, and then let's talk about the ETFs. Every market that I've ever been in, there's always been a whale that other participants refer to and assign responsibility to when there's a big move, a big inflow, or a big outflow. When you're on the outside, when you're not working inside of that whale, you don't know who the whale is.

Right now, everybody thinks the whale is Michael Saylor. Everybody's like, “All right, it's Saylor buying. Oh my God, he's going to stop. The market's going to nuke.” I guarantee you that Michael Saylor is not the one holding up Bitcoin. I bet Michael Saylor is just sitting there watching all these people speculate about what he's doing, assigning every big move to him, and probably chuckling a little bit.

The reason why I think that is because I've worked inside 2 giant whales. When I was at Goldman, we were the whales of the oil market. Every time any massive trade went through the floor, the entire market was like, “Oh, it's Goldman buying. Oh, Goldman selling this option.” 9 times out of 10, we weren't doing it, and we'd be laughing: “Wow, the whole market thinks it's us.” We were fucking huge, but we weren't even remotely as big as the market thought we were.

When I worked at what sounds like Vitol, it was the same thing. There'd be some massive physical trade that would take place between 2 sovereigns, and there would be this shadowy trading-house intermediary. Or there would be a huge deal that would go through in gasoline or fuel oil that would be way, way too big for anybody else. People would assume it was us. I'd go over and ask the guys, and they'd say, “Nope, not us.”

Sometimes you do a couple of big deals and people think you're doing every big deal, kind of like how people think everything that GCR says is right. He's probably laughing to himself about all the mistakes he's made, too. These larger-than-life characters in the market are, in my experience, much less relevant than you'd think.

And so, I reject the fact that Bitcoin is being hoisted on Michael Saylor's shoulders the way Atlas lifted the globe in Greek mythology. It's just not fucking happening. No way. So, what is holding up the market is these ETF flows. If you go to the Farside Investors dashboard...

If you go to the Farside Investors dashboard, Farside.co.uk/BTC, and look at the actual ETF flows, you have a pretty decent breakdown of all the different issuers and where the flows are coming from. What strikes me as the most interesting when I look at that page every day is that IBIT, the BlackRock ETF, which is definitely where your random 26-year-old guy is putting 2% of his monthly paycheck—or 10%, or whatever—the non-degen types who are just attempting to keep a little bit of a toe in the Bitcoin pond, is seeing inflows every single fucking day.

Where the outflows have come from is Fidelity. It’s FBTC. To me, that ETF is kind of a niche ETF. It’s the second biggest, and it’s possible that somebody who bought a lot of Fidelity—one big institutional investor who bought a lot of that ETF when it was first issued last year—is taking some profits now. Those are lumpy outflows: there’ll be multiple days of zero, and then $177 million gets sold; another few days of zero, and $287 million gets sold.

To me, the picture being painted here is that we’re going to see steady inflows for a long time from IBIT, and the FBTC outflows can’t continue. It’s just one or two guys doing that in FBTC, and every other ETF is kind of a nothing burger. It’s not about the news or the catalyst; it’s about the flows. You have less miner selling because of the halving, daily IBIT inflows that seem to be accelerating, and that’s enough.

I don’t think that this cycle will be the same as previous cycles, where you have despair on the lows and euphoria on the highs, it all fits neatly into a 4-year window of time, and then you revert back to the middle of that while the upward megatrend remains intact. I think this cycle is going to be different. I think we’re just 2 years into a 10-year upward grind for Bitcoin, and what would scare me is if I started seeing daily outflows from IBIT instead of daily inflows.

6. Altcoin Unlocks

Yeah, I think you’re spot on, and that dynamic is really important, especially on weeks like today, when everyone’s a bit nervous. Shifting the discussion to the alt market, everybody’s very nervous about alts, and the reason is because they’ve underperformed tremendously since Bitcoin sold off from the highs.

In this market environment, over the last 2 weeks, what we’ve seen is that headlines are driving a ridiculous amount of price action. Basically every 2 days, if not every day, something comes out about something Trump is doing that is causing the markets to gyrate. I think that’s led people to assume that we need some sort of positive headline in order for the market to start going up again, because they’re so used to the market gyrating on these headlines.

The point I’m trying to make is that it’s exactly as you said: sometimes it’s just about flows, and it’s not necessarily about news. Despite the fact that there’s no good news, quote-unquote, left for the market, if everyone is done selling because everyone has been so thoroughly panicked out by these headlines, then the market can start to recover and go up again. We may have already exhausted all the selling.

Think about this: we had a massive alt nuke in which a lot of people got liquidated and washed out. Then, in the next 4 days, we had a retracement. From the high to the low, it went down another 20%—it bounced, and then it came down 20%—so there were a lot of sellers on that.

At this point, Bitcoin goes sideways for a long time, tariff news comes out, and we’ve got CPI coming up on Wednesday. It seems to me that, for the good assets that are fully unlocked—which includes Bitcoin—the sellers are kind of done. They might be out, at least for now. Assets tend to bottom not when buyers show up, but when selling stops.

It’s actually the opposite on the upside: assets tend to top when there’s just nobody left to buy. The question is, who is left to sell? Who is selling at these levels?

For some assets, let’s look at Worldcoin and likely Aptos. The answer is the team. They’re going to be selling a lot, they’re constant sellers, and they seem to never run out of tokens. Maybe you don’t want to go buy those things.

For things that are fully unlocked and that actually have potential catalysts coming up—what sounds like Aave has a fee switch, and then I have my favorite little basket of LTC, SOL, XRP, and DOGE—I call it my ETF, my high-probability ETF basket. I don’t know if there are that many sellers left for these things, given that we have potential ETFs coming up. Those are at least my high-conviction trades right now.

The way I’m thinking about it is: who’s left to sell at these prices after they’ve come down?

That’s a great way to think about it. I would have phrased it differently. I would have said the news is priced in: more bad news isn’t setting the market lower. But I think your phrasing is more elegant, which is: have the sellers been exhausted for a given token, yes or no?

For many tokens, I do think the sellers have been exhausted. They’ve either been liquidated, or they just don’t want to sell at current prices because the project is too promising. For others, here’s another actionable item: if you’re looking at a meme coin or something that’s traded more on-chain, just go to DexScreener. Pull up your token in DexScreener and look at the liquidity number. Also look at the FDV number.

If the FDV is $100 million and there’s $5,000 worth of liquidity in there, you know that the next person who sells that thing is going to knock the price down a lot. Basically, there isn’t a lot of dough left in the pool to bid the asset.

Maybe what I should do—I’ve been a bit lazy about this—is try to figure out a way to automate a liquidity-to-FDV ratio, then pull up a screener of all the different crypto assets on DexScreener and see where that ratio is the lowest. Where is there the least amount of liquidity relative to market cap? Those are probably good shorts. Those are tokens that could get absolutely annihilated in the next down move, or even if nothing happens and people just slowly start to throw in the towel on these tokens.

I continue to like being short WIF and SUI. You talked me into a small SUI short, and I talked myself into a large WIF short. I think these tokens just continue to go down. Even though you can’t see it quite as cleanly because these tokens are traded mostly off-chain now, you can kind of feel that there’s a lot of selling left relative to the buying power, the liquidity out there.

I think there’s a real opportunity to remain short vaporware projects or projects that are just valued too highly. I’m not calling SUI a vaporware project. I think WIF is a vaporware project; it’s probably got some CrimeFi rumblings attached to it. SUI is still too expensive for the number of users it has.

I think the theme of this conversation is dispersion, Avi. There are good projects at good prices; you should be long those. There are good projects like SUI at overvalued prices; you should be short those. Bitcoin is a good project at a good price. SUI is a good project at a bad price. WIF is a bad project at a bad price. You have your spectrum there.

Don’t invest in bad projects regardless of the price. Maybe you just put it into quadrants: good project, bad project, good price, bad price. The heuristic you attach for price is the liquidity-to-FDV ratio on DexScreener.

7. What Will Perform In This Environment?

Yeah, that’s great for on-chain alts. Going down the list of tokens, nothing outside of AI and the ETF-flow tokens is particularly compelling to me. I think that for on-chain to come back, we require a little bit more euphoria in the market. People need to feel safe to gamble again.

That being said, a lot of what’s going on right now is people chasing tweets. This Dave Portnoy thing going to $200 million shows that people are still aping when there’s a reason to ape, or when they can at least construct a reason to ape in their mind. Outside of that, I think a lot of people are on the sidelines because they’re very scared.

Just surveying my analysts and a lot of people that I talk to, nobody really wants to touch altcoins right now, which could actually be a pretty good opportunity for the ones that have catalysts coming up, are still good, and don’t have foundation sales.

For alts to do well in a sustained manner across the board—for what people like to call altseason—I think you need the Fed to be comfortable cutting, because you need easy money to come back into the system. CPI is really important for alts.

For Bitcoin, I genuinely think it just doesn’t matter. This thing is probably going to end up higher in 2 months regardless of what happens in the market, just because of the change in dynamics. Again, that doesn’t mean that we’re going to get alts going up.

8. Ads (Kraken OTC and Ledger)

A lot of people have degrossed. A lot of the funds and traders that I talk to are super, super, super, super heavy in cash. I’m waiting for that moment that gives them the go-ahead to buy, which makes me think the upside is a lot more asymmetric than the downside at this level.

9. Don't Catch A Falling Knife

I agree with those hedge funds, though, Avi. I cannot—I’ve never had success trying to catch a falling knife in crypto. I’ve tried too many times, and I’ve always failed.

What about a sideways knife? Easier to pick up a sideways knife. The knife’s already fallen; it’s just that nobody’s picked it back up. It’s just lying on the table.

Yeah, it’s just there, just sitting there. My point was that some altcoins are steadily spiraling to zero, like WIF. I’ve tried to buy many of those charts in my career as a crypto trader and a retail trader, and I’ve always failed. It doesn’t work.

If you’re all over the catalyst, maybe you can get ahead of one of them and buy something that’s going down right before it reverses and pick the bottom. But the odds of doing that are so bad, or so thin, that maybe it’s better to wait until it plateaus or bottoms out, and then buy.

Usually, I don’t even buy it when it has bottomed out. I try to buy it once it’s starting to rally. I try to have an itchier trigger finger than the hedge funds you refer to and get in ahead of them. I try to catch the U-shaped recovery while it still looks like a J, before you get the big up move.

I hadn’t really thought about buying the ones that have just bottomed out and are going sideways, but I take your point on that. Just to talk about alts for a second, and then we’ll get on to macro and CPI, there’s this guy on Twitter, Root Tui, who wrote, “One thing I hate about this cycle is that no one believes in anything. I feel that even most founders don’t believe in their own tokens.”

Last cycle, you had founders in the forefront incentivizing the community to buy, hold, and believe, with a positive feedback loop. This tweet goes on, but I think this is the meta right now: everybody’s super disenchanted because casino-style meme-coin gambling on farts is not what smart contracts were supposed to be about.

There’s really bad sentiment, pain, and anguish out there about the alt market. I don’t think that’s bearish. I think it means people are going to get complacent that crypto is just a shitcoin casino, and they’re going to sleep on the next big up move in alts.

I don’t think that move will necessarily happen right away. Low inflation sets the stage for it, but I think the stablecoin bill that David Sacks said will get passed in the next 3 months will set the stage for the legitimization of smart-contract crypto—non-casino crypto—in a way that we haven’t seen before.

It’ll lay down foundations where all sorts of exciting projects can build again. If some alts have bottomed out or are starting to rally even now despite this dire fucking sentiment, we could see some pretty explosive price action.

Moving on to the macro backdrop, I’ve been following some of the macro people I talk to, as well as some decently interesting accounts on Twitter that tend to get it right. There’s some talk that Scott Bessent is trying to convince Donald Trump to change his metric of success from what it currently is, which is a higher stock market, to a lower 10-year yield—basically saying, “I want the U.S. to be able to borrow more cheaply.”

The stock market soared under Biden, but Americans still suffered. Trump’s a populist president; he’s trying to appeal to Main Street, not Wall Street. Monitor that one closely. If Trump shifts the goalposts from a higher stock market to higher bond prices and lower bond yields, get out of everything. Get out of the way of that freight train; you could get ironed out by it.

I’d put the odds of that at 15%. To me, that’s the most important thing to look at. Bitcoin has kind of graduated, so it’ll probably perform pretty well regardless of what happens. But for altcoins, if the stock market is no longer his focus—he used to tweet, “Record-high stock market. The Trump bump.”—if he stops caring about that and starts focusing on borrowing costs and balancing the budget, it’s going to be carnage out there for stocks and even worse for crypto.

Do you still buy the argument that Trump is good for risk?

I can sum it up in a very short, non-rant way and then pass the ball back to you.

Trump is good for risk for several reasons. Number 1 is deregulation. That’s bullish for equities and crypto. Regulation stifled equities and crypto, especially crypto under Biden.

Number 2 is cutting out wasteful government spending. If DOGE is actually successful at that, it’s going to be massively bullish for productivity. That’s also bullish for risk assets.

Number 3: I don’t think any of the things that Trump is jawboning about that are bearish for risk—huge, detrimental trade wars that cause pain and basically nuke economies—are what he actually intends. I think it’s posturing. I think he’s coming in with a hard negotiating stance so that he can leverage it for something better for American companies, which is bullish for American companies. Crypto is highly correlated with American technology companies.

Number 4 is that his administration has taken a very pro-business stance on crypto and AI. If you’re trying to promote AI in America and you’re not trying to overregulate crypto, it’s kind of obvious that if you shower Nvidia, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and all these companies with a golden path to deploying AI at scale globally, with no roadblocks, that’s bullish for those companies. Those companies are about 60% correlated with Bitcoin.

All of that is pretty damn bullish. Am I missing something?

No. I think the only argument against it is that he’s so unpredictable and will continue to be unpredictable. The markets hate uncertainty, and we just don’t know what he’s going to come up with.

I’ll give you an example of a scenario that could end up really badly. DOGE continues to fire people left and right, and DOGE does in fact shrink the size of the government substantially. Those people don’t reenter the workforce, and suddenly you’re looking at rising unemployment.

You could make the argument that the Fed then has to start cutting, but I don’t think the initial reaction would be, “Wow, this is great. The economy’s doing well. Up, up, up we go.” I think the market would get a little bit nervous about that fact.

I don’t know how I feel about that. If the government mass-fires millions of people, they’re all out on their asses, and they can’t get jobs, how is that bearish for asset prices?

The idea would be that the reduction in consumer spending would have to catalyze a recession. It would basically have to take such a chunk out of the economy as those people retrench into a lower cost of living that the economy goes into a little mini-recession. Then I think rates go to zero, and it’s off to the races again. Like you said, maybe that’s a dip to buy.

I think that’s fair. As I’m making the argument with you, I buy it a little bit less.

I think it would 100% have to catalyze a recession, which isn’t out of the picture. But the idea of the government firing a bunch of people and that causing a recession, with interest rates currently at 4%, doesn’t compute for me.

That’s so foreseeable, and the Fed has so many tools at its disposal to mitigate it, that it’s just not going to happen. The idea that if you can think of something that would cause a recession that looks at all similar to any of the recessions caused in the last 25 or 50 years, that recession is not going to happen. The Fed is aware of it, it’s monitoring it, and the tools are available.

It’s not like interest rates are at zero and quantitative easing is at maximum. The Fed has plenty of tools left to mitigate that particular type of very foreseeable recession. It looks just like the last one: COVID happened, a bunch of people lost their jobs, and the Fed handled it. The same thing would happen if you reduced a bunch of government jobs.

To me, a recession has to be caused by something out of left field that the government is totally unprepared for. By definition, I struggle to come up with those scenarios. One potential example would be a war in the Middle East metastasizing into a global energy crisis, an oil crisis, while the government hasn’t bought back the Strategic Petroleum Reserve that it sold during the Biden administration to mitigate the Ukraine crisis.

There, you’re missing slack in the system. If I’m really trying to think outside the realm of possibility, that’s something that could cause a mini-recession: an oil shock. It’s highly unlikely. Again, I’m using my imagination. It would have to be something crazy.

Absent any of that, if inflation continues to moderate and we get a decent CPI print, maybe some of these AI coins will run. Maybe I should be looking at a Venice token or Virtuals right now while I’m sitting here, since you brought it up. Maybe this is the J-shaped recovery before the U-shaped recovery that I was alluding to. Maybe I should be aping here. Damn, I’m starting to think we should be aping.

I’m starting to think we should be aping, too.

You know what’s funny? I’ve gotten so much pushback from so many people about being bullish. I’ve been talking to people over the last 3 days about whether maybe now is the time to start being bullish.

Let’s think about this in terms of one trick I like to use to challenge my bias. I think about a time when I was really long: what was I thinking then, and how does it compare to today?

I was unfortunately pretty long in December. I got long alts in early December, maybe mid-December, because Bitcoin went up to $108,000, and I thought, “All right, now’s the time to get long alts.” I thought they were ready for a follow-up, and then we nuked straight down for about a week.

I obviously closed out of that, but if I was that long then, how can I not be that long now? Either I made a horrific mistake then, which is possible—and obviously, I was wrong—or it was a process mistake. Am I making a huge mistake now?

I think the answer is that if you were bullish on your favorite assets at any point in the last month and now you’re bearish on them, you’re probably making some sort of mistake. I don’t think that much has changed.

I called for another flush on alts after the bounce, and we got it. ETH bounced to almost $3,000. I tweeted around $2,900 ETH, “Okay, still kind of bearish here.” That was when our agent started arguing with me.

The agent is getting really good. All of you guys should go check it out, and we’ll be launching a terminal for it soon. It started getting good enough to argue with me over things and was bullish. From the time the agent and I discussed our bullishness, ETH went down 13%.

So, screw you, agent. It’s still good, because it’s good to have somebody you can talk to who’s smart. AI is not taking over anytime soon.

Definitely not. Isn’t it amazing how ChatGPT just sucks for trading? Claude, Perplexity—all of them. You can’t talk to these chatbots about trading.

I think this is an opportunity for our community. I’m not trying to shill our token; I’m just saying that if we could build a chatbot that acts as a debate partner for various trades, I think it would be valuable.

I already use the agent as a source of news. Once we get that terminal up and live—shout-out to our dev, who’s a fucking machine—it’s going to be good. I think we’ll have a terminal shipped in a month or less, and then we’re going to plug in a bunch more sources.

I want to be able to sit here and trade. Trading is very lonely. Trading crypto is very lonely. You’re not on a big trading floor where you can go over and have lunch with people, do water-cooler talk, and hear noise when something’s active.

If the AI guys are screaming a lot, you can talk to them about why there’s flow or volatility in their sector. It’s kind of lonely. I guess you can sit there refreshing Twitter all day, but that’s psychologically unhealthy.

It might be nice to have a more natural chat with traders. You and I are in tons of Telegram rooms, chatting with each other and other people all the time about crypto. It would be nice to have a bot with an approximately 30,000-foot view of all the news, price action, sentiment, and technical indicators to talk to as well.

Hopefully, it’ll be able to include some visuals in the responses, like relevant charts. We’re going to have to do some partnerships, but I think there’s something there. I really do.

I think it’s going to be a good month or so here. Let’s see how it plays out. We can make that call now and check back next week. I think BTC dominance is going to be down a lot.

A lot of what people are nervous about is the idea that we get one single Trump headline and, boom, we’re down 20%. But I think that’s already baked into the positioning. Look at the tariff headline: it just doesn’t have the same impact anymore.

What matters, as we’ve talked about on this podcast, is the second derivative of the news. Everyone fucking knows there are going to be tariffs. Everybody knows that the tariff thing is happening. We have to ask ourselves whether the tariff wars are going to escalate or de-escalate from the current perceived level of tariff war.

I don’t think it’s going to get worse from here. I think it’s going to get less bad, which is probably why the market agrees—it’s not nuking anymore on these headlines.

That’s fair, but maybe the argument is to be patient because the market can be choppy. Be ready to step in on any small dips.

This week specifically, hopefully we get this out quickly so people can pay attention to it: Trump is signing executive orders today. By the time you hear this, that will already have happened, so it won’t really matter. There will be tariff updates at some point in the next few days, but we know those probably aren’t going to impact the market substantially. That’s already been absorbed.

There’s congressional testimony Tuesday and Wednesday, which could cause volatility, and then CPI on Wednesday could cause volatility. If there’s a sell-off with CPI—unless something is really bad—I think it’s probably a buy. No, unless it’s medium bad. If it’s really bad, that’s good; if it’s medium bad, that’s bad; if it’s good, that’s bad or neutral. We’re kind of just looking for that medium-bad scenario.

Will there be a chance to buy 1% or 2% lower? Probably. Will there be a chance to buy 20% lower? I don’t know. Things are looking good.

The more I look at this, the more I progressively talk myself into being bullish throughout the whole podcast. It’s kind of funny. That’s why I love these things.

I may go ape some stuff after we hang up the phone here. I’m sitting here thinking, “What alts are up?” I haven’t even really noticed, because I’ve been too caught up in this swoon on Twitter of negativity and sadness.

There’s no way the cycle is over if Bitcoin is at the highs, or basically close to the all-time highs, and sentiment is this bad. Cycles end when you run out of buyers, not when you have a bunch of depressed people sitting on the sidelines. No way this thing is over. It’s going to keep running.

It also kind of looks like likely Berachain has bottomed. By the way, I’m an investor in likely Berachain. Everyone got very mad at me for not disclosing that, despite the fact that I’ve talked about it hundreds of times and said that I invested in likely Berachain.

We had Smokey on the podcast. We literally had Smokey on the podcast. I’ve tweeted about it. I don’t know how much more I can tell people. Do I have to say it in every tweet that I mention it? I guess so. That’s what I’m going to do from now on. Every tweet will just say, “By the way, I hold positions in these assets.”

Maybe that should just be standard procedure. Maybe I’m complaining for nothing. I thought that reaction was really funny. People got very upset with me over saying, “Hey, likely Berachain actually looks reasonable.”

I’m not going to pat myself on the back too much, because it’s all locked up, but I could have sold staking rewards and I didn’t. You could have sold perps.

I could have sold perps. I didn’t.

Yeah, that’s true. Fair. All good points.

Thanks for backing me up here, Avi. I’ve got you. This has been a great podcast. One thing I value about this is that it’s rare to have actual market chat in a sea of online Twitter garbage.

I learn a lot from these conversations. Maybe I’m going to go ape some stuff after we hang up the phone here. I’m sitting here thinking about what alts are up, because I haven’t noticed. I’ve just been too caught up in this swoon on Twitter of negativity and sadness.

This was awesome, Jonah. Thank you so much for spending your time with me. Let’s get this one out immediately.

For the boys. We’ll have the producers ship it quickly. As always, none of this is financial advice. We’re just 2 guys who don’t know what we’re talking about. All right, see you, man.

See you later.