Why There Won't Be An Alt Season This Cycle

I've been pounding the table pretty early that there's going to be no alt season this time. There will be sector-based seasons. Why? There are just too many coins, and there's not enough capital for an alt season to happen.

In the midst of a market meltdown, Jonah and I have come together to give you guys the take that everything is going to be okay, that you shouldn't worry so much, and that you should go outside and touch some grass. I tweeted that there's a lot of dispersion in market opinion recently, and that's unequivocally bullish on the market. Then I followed up with, "I'm looking for entry points this weekend."

What ended up happening is that Sunday night we imploded. What tends to happen is that if you get an implosion on a weekend, or on a Sunday specifically, it comes to a climax on Monday because everyone's adjusting to the new information and they all get out. I think that's what just happened. Jonah, do you agree with me? Are you unequivocally bullish on this market?

1. Fading The Market Meltdown

Yeah, I am. I think it's notable that Bitcoin—well, first, we can go through your tweet. Your tweet was brilliant. I couldn't have articulated it better myself.

I tend to get scared when everybody's consensus bullish, and greedy when everybody's consensus bearish. I like the Warren Buffett quote about that. There's not a lot of consensus right now. You have some really prominent, respectable people in the crypto trading community calling for the cycle peak to have already happened, and others like you and me saying there's much more to come.

There's a big debate about which inning we're in. Frankly, who cares about innings? It's about price. Some people are saying we're in the 8th or 9th inning of the ball game, while others are saying we're in the 4th or 5th inning in terms of this bull market.

When everybody's all over the place, the fundamentals of our asset class are still really strong, and you get what we've talked about as a fundamental sell-off versus a technical sell-off, this is sort of a technical sell-off. We had a crazy technical sell-off last year around midsummer—I think it was August. I forget why off the top of my head, but that was a big technical sell-off related to some rate-hike or liquidity thing that was completely exogenous to crypto. That was the buying opportunity of the year.

I wouldn't call this a massive buying opportunity because it's already bounced back and rebounded from most of what we lost overnight. Bitcoin traded down to $97,500, and now we're back up to $101,500. It's not a screaming buy. I think you're supposed to look at the chart and say that the fact that Bitcoin is still right smack in the middle of the recent range, despite all this, is notable.

2. The DeepSeek Impact

The NASDAQ went down 3.5%, and Nvidia went down 17% or 18%. The Nvidia sell-off was really funny to me because everyone's attributing it to DeepSeek, and I think that's right. What I spent today doing was trying to figure out if I was missing anything, because to me DeepSeek doesn't seem like it should send the markets tumbling.

This reminds me of the age-old blockchain debate that we've actually had on this podcast. The debate is: if blockchains reduce fees tremendously and become extremely scalable, how could they ever have any real value? They're not going to generate any meaningful revenue. If fees come down, then you need usage to go up.

The argument is that it's like a highway. You can widen the lanes of a highway, but what you're really doing is allowing more people to drive on it. There's still latent demand for all of this. That's how I feel about AI.

Even if you can run these models on far less compute power than we originally believed, that doesn't mean that demand is finite. To give everyone some background, why are people freaking out about DeepSeek? They've claimed that you can run these models with less compute power than originally believed. They haven't proven it, but that's the claim.

Why are people worried? If you can run models with less compute power, then you need fewer chips if you assume that demand stays the same. You need fewer data centers. Meta has invested in a data center the size of Manhattan, and everyone and their mother is building out data centers. Why? Because they think there's going to be a massive increase in demand.

I don't think we've reached the point where we've increased scalability for AI so much that demand isn't going to get us back to where we were. If anything, this makes AI more attractive and more usable across a variety of different applications. Things that were cost-prohibitive before are now economic, and they're going to come online.

You can say that maybe this means all of these companies that we thought had massive advantages in AI aren't going to be able to compete. But none of these companies other than OpenAI had a moat anyway, because it's open source. Facebook's AI, Llama, is open source, and DeepSeek is open source. You can integrate it if you want. Hopefully, there are no Chinese spy bugs in it, but open source is open source.

This is an overreaction, and to me it represents a great buying opportunity. That's why I bought today. I dipped my feet in and used some cash that I had on the side to go buy equities. I'm already at full crypto exposure, but I just don't think that this is a real concern.

I don't think so either. The economically bearish argument that stock-market gurus are talking about right now is the fact that there's been this $100 billion gold rush spent on AI buildout and AI infrastructure, like you alluded to. Maybe that's going to stop or slow down, and that's short-term bearish for Nvidia and any other provider of data centers.

If DeepSeek is real—which I doubt it is, by the way—

What do you mean, you doubt it is?

The CEO of Scale AI came out and said that it was trained using a cluster of Nvidia H100s that they didn't report. It may be a little bit lighter than they're purporting, or it may be a little bit heavier. My main point is that even if we assume that DeepSeek is telling the truth—which is already a stretch—maybe it means a little bit less data-center spending in the near term.

That's bad for Nvidia and any other provider of data centers. Maybe some private-equity group within Blackstone is saying, "Dang, we're going to have less demand for data centers." But to me, it's bullish for everything else in the S&P 500.

If you can just create o3-level AI at the edge with a couple of Mac Studios stacked on top of one another, that opens up a whole bunch of new applications. If AI becomes cheaper for the masses, there's going to be more demand. Prices come down, but volume goes up.

Ultimately, this should be massively bullish for equities. As far as crypto is concerned, Bitcoin is just correlated with the NASDAQ at the moment, and it's kind of outperforming the NASDAQ right now. It's only down 1%, whereas the NASDAQ is down 3%, like you said. Bitcoin is showing relative strength, which tells you something.

As far as AI coins and some of the altcoins that tanked on this news, I think cheaper AI is good for crypto. What's bad for AI coins right now is that there are just too many coins, including too many AI coins. There's a lot of dilution out there, and investors don't know which token to buy because there are too many choices.

3. Ads (Kraken OTC and Ledger)

What's good for AI coins is that the argument against the intersection of AI and crypto, and its future, is that crypto isn't a fast enough platform to have access to this world-beating AI that's being developed inside these centralized companies. If DeepSeek is real, then anyone can spin up a super-powerful, decentralized artificial-intelligence application, slap a token on it, give it some utility, and before long be off to the races with what could potentially be a really useful product.

I was thinking about this earlier: the market has so clearly become more efficient and smarter than it was even 2 years ago. For the longest time, if you had an announcement about a specific sector in the traditional world, the crypto coins would rally for no reason.

4. Memecoins

I remember when OpenAI would launch a new model 2 years ago, or even a year ago, all the AI coins would rally off it. Render would rally, or Nvidia would announce earnings and AI coins would rally. I think that worked even 6 months ago. Then you get this, in theory, insane development and breakthrough in AI, and nothing happens. The market has gotten smarter because the reality is that there was no reason for these things to rally.

There was 1 standout here: something called Alchemy Pay went up about 90% because it's a "Chinese coin." Conflux also went up 10%, outperforming the market. But there was no broad-based reaction from AI coins, which brings me to my next point: the market is genuinely rewarding research, and there's a tremendous amount of dispersion.

One of the biggest discussions on CT over the last 1 or 2 months has been alt season. When does alt season happen? First, let's define alt season. Alt season is when alts across the board go up, no matter what they are or what they do, because people are trying to get more risk-on.

That happened for about a week this year, but it didn't really happen in the way people expected it to. We've become conditioned over the last few cycles to expect alt season to be a period of 3 or 4 weeks where everything does 5x. Alt season this time was more like things going up and outperforming by 15% to 30%.

Litecoin going from $82 to $120 was a 50% move, but it didn't go from $80 to $400 like it has in previous alt cycles. That brings me to a question: Do you think that will happen again, or do people just have to start actually buying the good stuff?

It's a great question. I've been pounding the table pretty early that there's going to be no alt season this time. There will be sector-based seasons.

We did see a dino season, where XRP, likely HBAR, and some of these random 2017 and 2013 coins went ballistic. I fully expect an AI altcoin season. I think that mania will hit crypto later this year. I think the catalyst will be agents crossing the chasm into mainstream usage, along with token-related activities, games, and gambling inside these agents, or terminals related to these agents that you access with tokens.

I think tokenomics can definitely translate into an AI altcoin season. I don't know if I get to take credit for this, but when I started posting that there wouldn't be an alt season this time, this cycle, I think I was the only one. That seems to be consensus now, and I feel like I was early to that idea.

Why? There are just too many coins. As we mentioned earlier on the podcast, it's bewildering. How can everything go up? I think Brian Armstrong tweeted that Coinbase's new whitelist policy for which tokens it puts on its exchange can't be a whitelist anymore, because there are 1 million tokens being created every week.

It's going to switch from a whitelist to a blacklist, where Coinbase will use AI to identify things that violate its terms of use and block those, while letting everything else through the floodgates. When you're in that world, there's just not enough capital for an alt season to happen.

To your point, we did kind of have an alt season for a little bit, right around the period between the election outcome and the inauguration. But it wasn't an alt season in the sense that altcoins outperformed Bitcoin. Bitcoin dominance went down, and vast swaths of altcoins rallied, but they underperformed Bitcoin. I wouldn't really call that alt season.

I would call it a period in late November and December when there were a lot of rotations. Chainlink, for example, went from $14 to $28 and then went straight back down. Litecoin did that move. Ripple was sort of a standout, but I wouldn't place that into an alt-season bucket because I think Ripple was actually a genuinely good coin to buy.

There was a period when those shitcoins did rally, but they're all back down, with Bitcoin at the highs. What that tells you is that the cycling of capital is pretty insane right now.

Yeah, and it also tells you that if you can tolerate the pain of being underwater on some positions, there are probably some very compelling trades out there. You might not nail the exact top on something, but there are trades that can work.

For example, a month ago, when we talked about SUI, I said that you had to wait for it to break the 50-day moving average, get a bounce, and then short it. That's what's happening right now. It did break the 50-day moving average, so that's probably a good short.

If you're not sure where the market is going to go, or you're just looking for an alpha trade, you can look at some trades or assets that you think will do well. Maybe you're looking for a catalyst like JTO. Jito is releasing some stuff over the next few weeks, and that has underperformed for a while. Maybe it starts performing.

Then maybe you want to hedge out market risk by shorting SUI against it, because SUI looks particularly vulnerable. These types of trades present themselves. You might be down 10% or 15% on the SUI trade at some point, but it probably works over a month or 6 weeks.

That's a lot of the type of trading that I'm looking at doing right now. Another example was getting long XRP and short ETH. I think that was a good trade, and I still think it's a good trade, although I'm a little bit more nervous about being short ETH now, so I might have to move that over to something else based on how poorly ETH has performed.

5. Ethereum

Thank you for talking me out of ETH last year, by the way. What a dud. Oh my God, it's still a dud.

I would have thought by now it would be performing. I thought the regulatory moat that ETH has built from years of people caring about ETH more than any other smart-contract platform would protect it, and that it would start to perform even if its technology were inferior. But I think it's pretty clear that it's too awkward. We are very close to being completely over this asset.

Yeah, I hate to say it. I really do hate to say it, but they're in bad shape for so many reasons. It's not just the technology. They have no real leadership. The Ethereum Foundation is a joke. Vitalik is checked out, as much as he claims he's not.

The main thing they had that I kept saying they would be able to take advantage of was the ETF, and they're going to lose that advantage in the next 6 to 8 months. I think that's very clear. There's going to be an XRP ETF, there's going to be a Solana ETF, and there might even be a Litecoin ETF. Who buys ETH in this scenario?

That's why I think a great trade is to short ETH. I don't love shorting ETH on days like today, when ETH/BTC is down 1% or 2%, but basically every 10 days for the last 6 months, ETH has gone up 3% against Bitcoin in a day because of short covering. That's just been the trade: short it every time it's up.

Yeah, sell every pop. You don't want to be one of those guys who shorts on a down day and then gets squeezed into the up day. You want to be one of those guys who shorts the up day.

Even if ETH ends up going up, if every single short on ETH covers, it probably goes to 0.045 BTC. That's a big move. That's a 50% move. That would be the greatest short of a lifetime.

Yeah, I think the trend is down. Crypto is such an interesting asset class because, consistently, people try to find the contrarian take. The contrarian take for the last 6 months has been that ETH is going to outperform. I've said this myself, and I've been wrong before.

Every time I'm like, "Okay, maybe it's time for ETH/BTC to do well," it does well. It makes a 10% or 15% move, and then it immediately goes straight back down. I'm like, "Okay, maybe not."

Sometimes there's a reason people are bearish. Sometimes the collective has realized that this thing is shit. Just because everyone realizes it doesn't mean it can't go down more.

Yeah, you bring up a good point. The contrarian take has been wrong for so long in this one that it's hard to get behind it.

It kind of reminds me of how I felt about Solana just after FTX. Solana was breaking left and right. I forget what the name of that app was where you had Solana sneakers and the thing gave you tokens for the distance you walked in them.

STEPN.

Right. Just a few people using that walking app bowled over the network. I was basically like, "Okay, the monolithic L1 doesn't work. Solana isn't charging enough. It's too centralized. It's not fulfilling its promise."

But the core team, Anatoly and the rest of the team, shipped and fixed what they had to fix. They got past FTX, and then Solana went from $8 to $280 in a straight line. It was one of the best trades in the history of crypto for a mature token.

I'm wondering out loud if we could see one of those moves in ETH. I think what it would take for that to happen is for Base to become ETH. The core team and Vitalik would have to ride off into the sunset and hand over stewardship of the asset and the ecosystem to whoever is building Base.

Base is great. There's stuff going on on Base, but it's a buzzkill that you have to bridge assets from the Ethereum mainnet to Base, either through Coinbase or through these random protocols that look kind of sketchy. Why can't Base just be a monolithic L1 with an ETH token and move on from this?

Technically, I'm sure that's difficult or impossible, or somebody who's really in the weeds could tell me why it's not an option. But the Ethereum mainnet is outdated. It's like using telephones where you have to swivel your finger around.

You mean a rotary phone?

Exactly. Have you tried trading on ETH recently or doing anything? It's just awful.

No, not trading on ETH. But it took me about 10 minutes to move all my money off ETH. I was getting it over to Base.

ETH was something that got me very excited about crypto, but I also feel like we've flogged this horse a lot. It could come back, though.

Are you combing your hair right now?

Yeah. I have a comb on my desk, and I'm just styling.

Why are you also combing the side of your hair? You're not even fluffing it.

I'm not fluffing it. I have headphones on. The side is what's at risk: low risk, high reward.

I wish I had hair.

It also feels good just to run a comb through your hair. It's like a little head massage.

Exactly. Have you ever used one of those things?

Oh yeah, those things are great. It's always better if somebody else uses one on you rather than doing it yourself.

It's amazing how that works. Here's a trick: you can just sit on your hand until it doesn't feel like your hand anymore, and then give yourself a head massage.

I've heard of that one.

It's a temporary fix, like everything ETH does to try to improve itself. It's a temporary fix.

I think there's always a lot of inertia to this stuff. It's never a fast death. It's a slow death. In the grand scheme of things, though, I think the death will be fast if you compare it to the death of BlackBerry or the death of Sears.

At least ETH is valued. What's the fully diluted valuation of ETH right now?

Let me look this up. It's $380 billion.

6. Ads (Kraken OTC and Ledger)

Even if it dies slowly, you have a nice high-Sharpe trade for a while, just while it slowly and smoothly trickles lower.

7. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve

I want to talk about the Bitcoin strategic reserve for a second. I came across something today that was really interesting, and not many people have talked about it. We certainly hadn't.

I subscribe to a research service called 13D Research. I really like them. They're really good. This is not an ad—I pay them. They don't pay me. I wish they paid me, because I pay them a lot of freaking money, but they're really good.

I want to read you something from their most recent report where they talked about the strategic Bitcoin reserve. These are traditional-finance guys, but they really like BTC:

"The mere discussion of an SBR in the U.S., the mere fact that Trump has said that the U.S. will not sell its current Bitcoin holdings, not to mention the broader favorable pivot toward Bitcoin, are sufficient to confirm some early-adopter countries to front-run the competition and pursue their own version of an SBR, regardless of what the U.S. ultimately decides to do."

I think that's 100% correct, but I hadn't seen anything happen on this. Apparently, on December 9, a deputy from the Russian Duma submitted a proposal to the Russian finance minister to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve in Russia. It's quoted by Russian media and widely reported in Russia.

The proposal says, "I ask you to consider creating a Bitcoin reserve in Russia." Additionally, someone likely named Pierre Poilievre, this Canadian guy—I don't know how to pronounce his last name; it sounds very French to me—loves Bitcoin. We could see a pretty drastic reversal in Bitcoin policy from Canada, and we already see Canada being pushed around by the U.S. a bit right now. They might want to front-run us.

A Brazilian congressman also submitted a bill to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve for the federal government. It's unlikely that happens, but it's possible. Earlier this week, a group of Chilean deputies were apparently considering submitting a proposal for a strategic Bitcoin reserve to Congress. There's a lot happening.

It's not just nations. Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Oklahoma, New Hampshire, and North Dakota are considering strategic Bitcoin reserves at various phases right now.

That's actually something I hadn't paid attention to either. It's very possible that U.S. states lead the way. If a state like Texas creates a strategic Bitcoin reserve, you can be damn sure that the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, which is one of the largest passive-investment vehicles in the United States, is going to increase its allocation a little bit.

Oh, 100%.

I don't know whether the Florida Retirement System has any Bitcoin, but if Florida has a strategic Bitcoin reserve, maybe they'll dabble. Bitcoin is becoming regionally popular and accepted in a way that it hasn't been before. It feels like a really recent shift.

To me, if you're allocating your own portfolio, and your core long crypto portfolio isn't mostly in Bitcoin, you had better be really convicted in whatever altcoins you've chosen, because your alts are getting diluted every single day.

The only reason not to own alts—and this has almost always been true—is if you have a smaller portfolio and you're really gunning for the moon. Otherwise, it doesn't make a ton of sense.

There hasn't been a single altcoin in the history of altcoins that has consistently outperformed Bitcoin. Solana—maybe one or two. The point stands. Solana is below its 2021 highs.

Fair enough. The trade on these things tends to be that they go up really hard against Bitcoin and really fast, and then they bleed. The bleed doesn't mean there aren't periods when Solana goes up 3x while Bitcoin is flat. What it means is that if you're holding the thing for 5 years, you end up not making as much money as if you just held Bitcoin.

It kind of goes back to your point about what VCs do in crypto. Their edge is being early, not being particularly visionary. It's just getting into good deals at that pre-IPO price.

That's kind of what you have to do with alts. Maybe you can't get into certain deals, but if you subscribe to interesting services like our friends over at Blockworks Research, or any number of other crypto-savvy publications, maybe you can catch one of these alt moves in its early phases.

You might catch one of these altcoin projects right before it moons against Bitcoin, and then you have to be diligent about getting out quickly. You can't just sit on your bags for 5 years and underperform Bitcoin.

100%. That's why, right now, the best trade I see is just buying Bitcoin on liquidation runs and trying to trade that.

Bitcoin is in a bit of a precarious spot in the short term. We could easily trade back down to the bottom of the range at $90,000, at which point I think it's a buy again. But right now I'm holding tight.

The reason I'm holding tight is that while I am unambiguously bullish over the next 2 months, we have an FOMC meeting coming up, and it's very unlikely that news about the strategic Bitcoin reserve is going to come out in the next 1 to 2 weeks. That allows selling to take place.

The way I'd phrase it is that cash is very valuable right now because there's high uncertainty over the next 2 weeks. It would be great to be able to buy Bitcoin 10% lower. If news comes out, you can get back in, but for right now I think Bitcoin is ranging, like you said, and it will eventually resolve this range much higher.

I think what sends it back up is sovereigns and governments buying. That flow is coming, and it seems like it's not very far out. I definitely wouldn't be shorting Bitcoin if it heads back to the high end of the range.

Higher Bitcoin will bleed money into certain sectors and certain leaders of certain sectors, like you said. I like the leaders in the AI space, and I think certain agents will perform.

I wonder if there are any other sectors that are going to explode when we get a broader crypto-market rally later this year. People are talking about DeFi again. I don't think meme coins are going anywhere, but I think old-school meme coins are toast.

Maybe Dogecoin and Trump perform, but I think WIF is going to zero, as well as POPCAT, MEW, and all this random crap that people got excited about for 10 minutes last summer when there was nothing else to do.

It's a good question. I haven't run this exercise yet, but I should. There will be meme coins that do well, and it depends on their communities—how involved and outrageous the community still is.

There have to be some. The WIF community is pretty depressed, and I don't think anyone actually likes the WIF memes anymore. They're not hitting. They're not doing it for people. It doesn't have staying power.

There's probably a meme out there somewhere that does. It's my job to go find it. If any of you listening to this have ideas, or are part of communities that are still having a great time despite the depression in meme coins, let me know. I probably am going to allocate to you.

The way you have to think about this is to go into the Discord. Are there good vibes? What memecoin still has good vibes? Maybe Trump.

8. Berachain

One other big thing that's coming up is that Berachain is going live soon. The rumors are that it could be a liquidity suck, which would also make the SUI short really good, because SUI is kind of the only new, sexy L1 that exists.

All the other new, sexy L1s—I guess you can say Hyperliquid, but it's not ready yet. I think Hyperliquid and the HyperEVM are coming in Q1, so we have 2 months.

Whenever a crypto project says Q1, what they really mean is the first week of Q2.

Yeah, that's what I've learned. If it's ETH and they say Q1, it means Q1 4 years later.

I do think the short-L1 trade is interesting. If you want to sell anything that isn't Solana, Solana has some potential ETF tailwinds. Berachain could, at least for a few days, suck the wind out of the room for these guys.

I would assume that TVL goes over there because people are really excited about Berachain, including myself. They managed to garner a substantial amount of TVL pretty quickly.

The 1 thing I've always appreciated through my discussions with the Berachain team is that they were so focused on usable applications. They refused to launch anything before they knew they could go live with actual applications that people would enjoy using.

I think we're going to see that. If, on the first day, we don't see it, then I'm wrong about the thesis.

What's the thesis for Berachain? I know they have a couple of different tokens. They have their liquidity token, their main token, and some random thing that's hard to access. I haven't done too much research on the Berachain ecosystem.

It's not an interesting trade to me because the world just doesn't need another L1, in my opinion. I think we're good with what we've got for now.

I'm not saying you buy Berachain and ride it 10x. I'm saying that if they launch with usable applications on day 1, which is their intent, then all the other L1s probably suffer a lot.

I agree. What valuation are they talking about in terms of FDV?

I have no idea. It depends on whether it comes out at $1 billion, $5 billion, $10 billion, or $20 billion. Who knows? If it comes out below $3 billion, I'll probably buy it on a yolo. Above that, I'm not touching it with a 10-foot pole.

9. Finding Crypto's Next Trade

I think that's reasonable. What other things are happening?

We talked about the HyperEVM and Berachain. One thing that was kind of interesting is that, in 3 days, the Jito tip router goes live. Apparently, it will route an additional $40 million to $80 million to the Jito DAO treasury annually.

Jupiter has done well recently with its announcements. There's currently no buyback or yield distribution for JTO, but what's interesting is that $40 million to $80 million number. I didn't realize how much money these things are generating.

In this new regulatory environment, the things that actually generate real money are going to figure out a way in the next 4 years to pass that money back to users—to pay some sort of dividend. I'm pretty bullish on that idea.

Things like Uniswap, things that generate reasonable fees, and maybe even Maker are going to figure out how to use those fees properly because they're not going to be scared of the SEC coming and shutting them down for being a security. Accumulating things that generate real revenue could be the next trade.

Yeah, I think it will be. It's a sleeper because people aren't really talking about it. We've talked about it on the podcast for over a year now. That's going to be crypto's moment: when you can tokenize your project and pass through any gains to users.

That's when crypto effectively disrupts traditional equity. Traditional equity is inefficient because it's heavily regulated, difficult for a lot of people around the world to access, and involves a lot of paperwork. In some cases, you have to prove that you're an accredited investor. There are all sorts of things that make investing in equity difficult, and they're completely frictionless in crypto.

For example, with our THX project, our THX agent, if we want to get people to help us with something, we can distribute tokens pretty quickly. If we want more people to buy tokens—which we haven't really gone for as a message yet, although we might—it's simple: you give the token some utility.

If you say, "This token is the equity for a business, and if you hold tokens, you get paid," that's the ultimate reason to go and buy a token. Even without that utility, attracting a software developer, some branding people, and general help where we needed it was super easy.

It was way easier than trying to create an LLC and distribute shares in the LLC. That would have taken thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and people in multiple jurisdictions around the world probably couldn't have accessed it very easily.

Tokens are just so much easier to work with than what's out there for aligning incentives in these projects. That's 1 of the reasons I got into crypto. It seemed so obvious to me. Maybe I was a little bit early to that trend, but I think it's going to be 1 of those slower-than-all-at-once moves.

We might wake up 6 months from now or a year from now and some bill will get passed. Then there's that moment of crickets, and everybody realizes, "Oh, shit, this means millions of people are going to flock to buy these tokens because they generate real, dollarized yield."

People at hedge funds, people with any sort of financial savvy and access to funds, will buy something that offers a good legal investment return.

You know what? I'm going to start making that bet. After this podcast, I'm going to go to Token Terminal, look for the highest-revenue-generating projects, make a basket of them, accumulate them, and short L1s against them.

L1s like these are shit. Who the hell is buying Optimism or Arbitrum right now? Who the hell is buying Avalanche? Who's buying Polkadot? Who's buying EOS? Who's buying this shit?

Nobody needs them. We need Berachain. We need Solana.

You need Berachain?

Yeah, exactly. I need Berachain. I'd like Berachain.

I like Smokey. He's a funny guy, and he's really articulate.

He is articulate.

I do like how they managed to get all these institutional allocators in. Can you imagine sitting in front of those guys? I think they got Brevan Howard in.

Imagine sitting in front of them and saying, "Listen, we're called Berachain. We started because we launched a bunch of NFTs of bears smoking a bong. Take us seriously." And then they did, and got hundreds of millions of dollars of investment.

That has to say something about their marketing ability. They are excellent at marketing, which is maybe all it takes to launch a successful chain. As we've realized, it's not just the technology that matters.

No, it's definitely not just the technology. Supposedly, they threw the best party at TOKEN2049 in Singapore. It was just a big Berachain rave.

The idea of a token being launched on an entire ecosystem with the token being launched on vibes, humor, and a dude in a bear suit wearing a Hawaiian shirt makes me love crypto, but also makes me kind of ashamed to be associated with it.

Don't be ashamed. Be happy that you get to be part of an industry.

Trump made me ashamed.

Trump definitely made me ashamed. Crypto is about being ashamed occasionally.

We're all blessed that we're in a bull market. That's why you have to be so careful when you enter a proper bear market in crypto. Once prices start trending down, you take 2 steps back and look at some of this shit—or most of this shit—and you're just like, "There is no value. This is going to zero."

This is where ETH can go from hundreds of billions, which is why you need to be so careful around ETH and attentive to the music, making sure it's still playing while you have money in this stuff.

Bitcoin's music is going to keep playing for a long time. Some of these other projects, though, like I think you brought up, have rotations that you need to do so much faster than you would have even 2 or 3 years ago.

I think it's inevitable that Trump goes to zero. I might tweet that just to see the reaction. When I tweeted that WIF was going to zero, people were just like, "Fuck you, man." But the community is tired. Constant posting is always a great way to figure out how engaged a community is.

Did you just tweet it right now?

Yeah, I just tweeted it right now.

Cool.

It's literally inevitable. WIF was really sad because so many people coalesced around it and genuinely believed in this thing. At the end of the day, it's a dog with a hat, and people bet their lives on it.

I know 2 people off the top of my head who had at least half their net worth in this thing. We somehow collectively deluded ourselves. I didn't delude myself, and you didn't delude yourself, but people were deluded into thinking that meme coins were going to take over the world—that they were going to become the casinos of the new world.

They're just a game that comes in and out of fashion. Maybe meme coins won't go anywhere, but I think people were right that memecoins are the games that are going to take over the world. What they've misunderstood is that a given memecoin isn't the casino that generates the revenue.

The casino is called Solana, and the memecoin itself is just a game within the casino. Don't buy the game; buy the casino.

It's a weird world we live in, where we have to think about this kind of stuff. That means Trumpcoin is going to be a phenomenal short in 3 years, unless Trump becomes God Emperor of the United States, which I put at an 18% probability.

It's not zero. You saw that he was talking about a 3rd or 4th term.

I know. He's just trying to trigger people.

Is he? I thought he was trying to trigger people by talking about buying Canada—or Greenland.

I thought so too, but he seems pretty serious about that. He actually took it seriously.

It's 1 of those things where Trump will say something, see the reaction, and if he has enough core support, he'll just go for it. That's actually not a bad strategy. I kind of respect it.

I think there's this great framework for decision-making in business—Jeff Bezos came up with it, I think—and it works for politics too. You have to assess, when you walk through a door, whether you can walk back through it and reverse your course.

If you can exit the doors that you enter, you should just enter those doors and see what's behind them. You have to be very careful when you make a committal decision where you can't go back.

I see a lot of that approach in Donald Trump. He's opening a lot of doors and trying a lot of random things. Maybe the thing with Trump is that he has a unique ability to go through a door that you think he can't come back through, and then just walk right back.

People do so much mental gymnastics to support Trump that you automatically assume that if he said something, did it, and then walked it back, it was actually an 8D chess move. He always meant to walk it back. He only did that to get something out of it. It's crazy.

He's the master of memes. We all need to be a little bit more like him in terms of being completely Teflon. I let things get to me sometimes, but in crypto we have to be a little bit more like Teflon Don.

The best way to make sure that things don't get to you is just to deny them. That's what he does. Did you ever do anything wrong? Deny, deny till you die.

No.

Wasn't there? Didn't see that. Wasn't me.

Wasn't me.

Anyway, I went to WashU in St. Louis, and I was there when the 2016 presidential debate was happening. I volunteered for the Donald J. Trump for President campaign.

Wow. You were early, weren't you?

I was an early adopter. I should have gotten an airdrop for this.

You haven't changed at all, by the way. You look identical.

Do I?

Same haircut, same general look.

I have a few more wrinkles, but other than that—

Crypto put a few years on you.

Maybe I should take a picture of this and say I should have gotten an airdrop for it. Anyway, until next week.