市场崩盘、加密货币对决股票：这波反弹值得买吗？

This is the beginning of the bottom right here. I don't know if what tends to happen is you get back up to a level—maybe you'll get back up to 92 or 93 here—and then you'll trade back down to 87, and then you'll go back up. But this area that we're in right now, if you buy and wait 3 months, I think you're up 50%.

1. Are We So Back?

Oh man, what's going on, Jonah?

Hey, Avi. How's life?

It's good. I'm a little bit poorer than I was last week. A little bit. And definitely poorer than a few weeks ago, when Bitcoin was trading at $125K. That's how I'm doing. How are you?

I'm doing great. I think I'm actually pretty excited about what's been happening over the last 2 weeks, and I'm excited to talk to you about it and share what I'm thinking.

Basically, everyone got so bearish, and to their credit, a lot of people were right about Bitcoin going down. But I think we've ended up in a situation where, because price has gone down, everyone's calling for the end of the cycle and saying that prices are just going to keep going down forever.

Really, this has nothing to do with Bitcoin or crypto specifically. This is an equity market selloff. A lot of people calling for the end of crypto are doing the same thing that happened in November 2021, which just so happened to perfectly coincide with the end of the cycle. The Fed starts saying inflation isn't transitory: We're going to hike rates, et cetera, et cetera. That nukes the equity markets. Then crypto goes tumbling down.

To me, it's like the simulation theory played out there. Everyone's like, “Yeah, there's a 4-year cycle,” and then God made it so.

Self-prophecy.

Self-fulfilling prophecy. But I don't think he's always going to make it so.

2. Aster & CZ Debate

So I think the way that I'm looking at this now is, hey, we're actually in a pretty good spot to start getting back in. I bought a little bit early. I bought before the latest puke, and that was because I was mainly buying equities. I bought a little bit of BTC and a little bit of ETH, but most of the stuff that I was buying was equities in that list that I tweeted out that got 1.3K likes.

One thing, just to finish up my rant here—and I hate to do this to you guys—is that whenever I'm bearish and my bear post gets too many likes, or if I'm bullish and my bull post gets too many likes, I always get really nervous. When I tweeted out that I was buying, it made me very nervous that I got 1.3K likes, because that doesn't necessarily happen.

By the way, I do want to clarify: I can't say that on air because that's a Russian curse. But this is actually live right now. It is Monday, November 24th, 1:06 p.m. I'm sitting here in my apartment. Jonah is sitting there in his apartment. We're recording live. This is genuinely live.

This is live. Speaking of quitting crypto and just the cycle being over, if I were to go on your Twitter, Avi, and read what you've been up to, I would assume that you've literally—it's like, “What's up with this guy's comments?”

Here's some advice to 30-year-olds about how to be your true self, be authentic, and live your truth. Here, look at this picture of the LSAT study guide that I've got on my table. I'm going to law school. Just take a little time to walk out. Look at the stars; they're so beautiful outside of New York City. This is me hiking in the snow with some guy.

And I'm just like, “Wow, Avi, how long is this podcast going to last? Have you rage-quit crypto?” I think that's why everybody's so happy with you coming back to the table and buying some friggin' coins, because that's what we need, man. We need bullish Avi back.

He said that we're faking it. It's a Jewish trick.

That's a Jewish trick, guys. The entire show is just one big Jewish trick. Actually, before we click the Go Live button, it's all sorcery and magic here. Then we conceal our horns and go on air.

Yeah, I guess if I looked through your Twitter, it's like, here's some advice to 30-year-olds about how to be your true self, be authentic, and live your truth. Here, look at this picture of the LSAT study guide that I've got on my table. I'm going to law school. Just take a little time to walk out. Look at the stars; they're so beautiful outside of New York City. This is me hiking in the snow with some guy.

And I'm just like, “Wow, Avi, how long is this podcast going to last? Have you rage-quit crypto?” I think that's why everybody's so happy with you coming back to the table and buying some friggin' coins, because that's what we need, man. We need bullish Avi back.

It is a little bit of a Jewish trick. Maybe it's the wrong form of trick, but I like to keep all of my crypto to the podcast because I find that it's just the most fun way of expressing myself. The only people who tune into the podcast are people who actually want to listen.

On Twitter, whenever you tweet something, you just get attacked for it unless it's extremely general. People are very angry on Twitter. People are much less angry if they're watching a live. Generally, my Twitter feed has become terrible, and hopefully I'll actually be able to give you some good thoughts on how I've been trading and how I've made money over the last week.

Rest assured, I'm not going anywhere.

I nibble. I'm sticking in crypto. I'm addicted to it. There's no question there.

What a relief. There's so much opportunity here, too. When the chief tweeted out that he bought some BTC at $84K, I replied as well: “I'm nibbling. I'm nibbling around these levels.” I got some 85s and 86s. I don't think it goes much lower than here, frankly.

So many people that I know in my life, just anecdotally, feel like they missed the boat. I'm Mr. Bitcoin to them, Mr. Crypto, and they're all reaching out like, “Hey, I want to buy. Are these good levels?”

3. Market Fear Overblown

There's so much of the world that understands crypto now, that kind of missed the big run-up—people who started to understand it post-FTX—and this is their chance. This is like when the S&P went down to 2,300 during COVID, and a lot of people who hadn't really bought into the 2010s recovery had their moment to double their money. It feels like the same thing for Bitcoin.

4. Crypto’s Internet Moment

I think right now I'm pretty damn bullish, Jonah. I think we've washed out all the bears. Equity markets are looking good. One thing that I'm looking at as well is that I think Tesla's a good barometer for how the punters are feeling. Tesla's doing really well. Google is ripping. Google continues to push all-time highs, and I think the fears around equities are massively overblown.

I think that's the main reason that people puked out of crypto, and crypto got this additional doom because you had this idea that DATs are going to implode on themselves. All right, DATs are going to blow up. When it comes to Bitcoin, I can tell you with absolute certainty, MicroStrategy is going nowhere. They're going nowhere for a long time. The rest of the DATs don't have that much Bitcoin to actually sell.

In aggregate, probably 10 times, if not 15 times, the amount of Bitcoin held by DATs has already been sold on the way down from $125K to $85K to $80K. I think that doesn't actually matter. It was a red herring.

Now we're looking at, okay, we found the demand zone. We found that Bitcoin bounced ridiculously hard off of $80K. I think a lot of people are nervous: “Oh, was that the buy? Will I not get to buy $80K?” Everyone's talking about 72 to 74 as this sort of level, maybe 75.

The reality is I don't think we're going to get there without at least a violent bounce to trap people, right? The only way that you get there is that you get back up to 90, you get back up to 95, maybe you get back up to 100 even, and everyone starts piling back in and everyone gets really bullish. Then the equity market turns again for some reason, whether that's Trump doing something stupid, a war breaking out, or whatever.

Earnings are good, Jonah. Earnings have been really nice. There is still a lot of fear in this market, but you kind of want to ride the wall of worry right now, which is why I'm back in. Like I said, I bought mostly equities, and that's been good. Equities have been trading well.

I sold a bit of equities this morning for crypto because, when I gave you my list of “These are the 8 things that I'm going to buy,” I basically bought them reasonably evenly. I was pretty underweight crypto. I think only 20% of my buys were crypto, and now I'm bringing that up to 30% or 35% of the overall portfolio being crypto, as opposed to 20%.

I like that. This is my trading portfolio because I do think that we're looking very good here. We're looking very good, and I love that everyone's so nervous. It makes me feel happy.

5. Bitcoin, Equities, Macro

Yeah, I mean, “Be greedy when others are fearful.” I think—okay, so 3 things to unpack in what you just said, 3 things to respond to: Bitcoin, equities, and macro. We’ve got to talk about all 3. I’m going to give you my quick thoughts on all 3 and then toss it back to you.

So, Bitcoin—let’s not talk about broader crypto until later in the pod. Using the good old Avi Felman value-and-momentum framework, we’re getting down toward value levels. At $75K, $150,000 per token is sort of a target for a lot of people. That’s probably why we didn’t make it there. We got up to $125K, and a lot of participants, especially OGs who have been selling like crazy, basically said, “All right, you know what? This is probably good enough. I’m not going to hold out for the extra 15% appreciation. I’m already a billionaire. Let me just start selling now.”

Equally, if everybody’s target to buy is $75K, it’s not going to get there, right? I guess you have a wick down to—where was the low print? We have a wick down to around $81K, but it never really went below $84K for any meaningful amount of time. If $150K is people’s target, you could almost double your money buying here, and that’s great.

The OGs have stopped selling. There were just walls of selling in the order books from old wallets all the way down from $125K. I said it—you heard it here first on the 1000x pod—I said those people would not continue to sell aggressively below $100K, and they haven’t. That selling has slowed. So, it’s looking great here, Bitcoin-wise. I don’t know. Do you have anything you want to say about that, or should I just go on to the rest of my rant about equities and macro?

I do think it’s important for people to hear this, especially if you’re a trader. Oh, look at this. BTC’s above $88K. Oh, God. This is good.

Guys, guys, pump it up.

Pump it up. We’ve got to pump it up here on the West Coast.

HOOD’s back above $114. Tesla’s almost at $420. Life is good. I mean, now, if you’re not already in the water, it’s time to get in the water. This is the type of move that really fucking pisses people off. There are a lot of people—if you just look at volume, there are a lot of people that sold that $86K to $80K, that 8% band there.

Now that we’re above it, I think you get us up to $100K at least. That would be my take. I also think that this is a general reversal in trend. The Nasdaq is doing very well again. I think we bottomed. I think we’re probably seeing all-time highs on the Nasdaq, if not in the next month, then in the next 2 months.

What I want to go back and say about your specific point—and this is again very important if you’re a trader and you’re trying to think of multimonth moves or where things might go—is that Bitcoin and crypto holders are generally traders, and they’re generally thinking about targets. That gives you all the information you need to know when you have a risk-reward that looks bad.

For example, when you’re at $125K and everybody’s talking about $150K, the risk-reward for you as a buyer is not amazing. What you need if you’re at $125K—what you really need—is for people to be talking about, “Oh, I think this can go to $250K.” You want the aggregate market to view $250K as a thing.

I love that. Right, you need unreasonable targets. My old mentor Ari always used to say, “When people’s targets are reasonable, it’s probably time to start selling.” If the average person is out there at $100K Bitcoin and they’re like, “I would love to sell $105K Bitcoin,” you’re like, they’re probably just going to fucking sell $100K.

Well, that’s what we have on the 1000x pod. Our target for Bitcoin is $1 million—or at least mine is. Maybe yours is $150-ish, but I think over a multiyear time frame, I’ve got a pretty unrealistic target for Bitcoin.

And that’s good, and that’s what’s needed.

Let’s move on to equities for a second. Sorry, did I cut you off, or are we good?

No, no, keep going.

Okay, equities. You said earnings are good. Google is breaking through all-time highs. I’m of 2 minds about equities, and I want to debate this with you before we go to macro, because I have tons of thoughts on that, too.

Nvidia earnings were strong. Google crushed it. I can talk about my Meta investment, which hasn’t been doing so well recently, but I’m still super bullish. I basically think what’s going on here with Gemini 3 is a game changer. Have you tried it, Avi? It’s better than ChatGPT by—I would say by a lot, in my opinion.

It’s ludicrously good, and you can search through your emails and stuff. You can be like, “How much did I pay to get my pool pump repaired in 2021?” It’ll pull up the receipts and tell you the exact amount. It’s really useful, in addition to also being better than ChatGPT for everything. It’s free for a certain amount of usage.

ChatGPT regular users who don’t pay $20 a month can’t upload a lot of photos or documents. But with Gemini, you can use Gemini 3, and basically it’s a game changer for the entire world. What I think is going to happen is that Google might end up eating a lot of OpenAI’s market cap. OpenAI isn’t publicly held, but basically that would be a transfer of wealth from a bunch of private investors to everybody.

That could be pretty bullish for the stock market if ChatGPT just gets eaten by Google, right after their antitrust breakup situation gets dropped by the Justice Department. So, things are looking good for big tech again, which is bullish. That’s going to support equities.

In my head, I’m so bullish on the stock market because I think AI is going to make everybody’s life basically—it’s basically magic that makes profitability per employee go up rapidly. I think every company in the S&P 500, whether it’s Google building state-of-the-art AI stuff or WD-40 making lubricant but just needing fewer middle managers, is going to be affected.

I think companies that totally fail to adopt AI or drop the ball will see their market caps disappear as they get disrupted so quickly that they’ll just drop out of the index. The rest of the S&P 500 and new entrants will rip because their return on equity will go up. They won’t need to pay as much compensation to employees because they can fire so many people, basically.

In my head, maybe this is a mid-curve take, but I’ve constructed the most bullish scenario for the S&P 500 ever. This is as disruptive as the internet was, but it’s going at 10 times the speed of the internet.

The problem with that—and this is where my gut fear, my bearishness of equities, comes in—is that I can’t quite explain it, so I’m going to try to articulate it now and then toss it over to you. What I’m worried about is that revolutions this impactful are messy. Obviously, on paper, this should be bullish as fuck, but we’re not displacing farmers so that they can take higher-productivity jobs in factories, or displacing factory jobs so that they can become lawyers, doctors, and service providers.

We’re displacing everybody so that they can sit on the couch. That’s where we’re headed. We’re basically headed toward a high-abundance society where nobody works, with humanoid robotics and AI, and that’s going to piss a lot of people off in the short run.

So, I’m worried that AI capex could deflate a little bit on its way to higher levels. I’m also worried about social revolutions that could get super bearish. With everything at the highs and something this disruptive threatening to just torch the entire market or change the entire world, it’s not entirely clear to me that the market needs to triple from here because of the unlimited promise of AI.

I think we could get some insanely painful bull-market volatility in equities, and I don’t know how to navigate it, really.

Well, I think, first of all, generally speaking, if you’re taking money off the table because you think a violent socialist revolution might come, I think you should take a walk around the block. I just don’t necessarily think that style of thinking is conducive, because I think you’re not wrong. I think you’re correct in your assessment of the situation.

I think that's probably where the world is headed. I think it's going to take a lot longer than people expect. In the meantime, the reality of the situation is that if companies can continue to be extremely profitable and make more money hand over fist, month over month, and they lay off a bunch of people and unemployment goes up, yes, that can lead to social problems. But in a world where enough people get laid off by these companies to allow them to cut their workforce in half and still increase profits, the market's doubling before we get any sort of revolution.

Profits are going to go through the fucking roof, Jonah. If that's what's going to happen, which is why I'm so bullish on this—yes, at some point—

We'll get to that.

We will. I actually do believe this, which is why I encourage everybody to go buy land somewhere, even if it's in the middle of nowhere in Appalachia. Just get some land at some point. You have to protect yourself. I know I sound nuts saying that, but I do think that's coming. You have to make enough money to do that in the next 15 years.

What do you eat when you're there? You drink creek water and eat what you shoot—squirrels? What do you do?

We're not sponsored by them.

Okay.

I wish we were. They're great. There's something called Mountain House, which makes a bunch of these freeze-dried meals, and they last for about 50 years. I would just stock up on a bunch of freeze-dried meals for eternity. As long as you have creek water, you can boil it, pour it over the freeze-dried stuff, and you're on your way.

I mean, it's a little expensive. You could, if you wanted to, make your own freeze-dried meals. We're losing viewers with this, but anyway, that would be my approach. I ate it on the camping trip this weekend. It's pretty good.

To get back to trading, I want to emphasize something that a lot of people miss sometimes, which is that I think crypto people in general need to catch every move perfectly. You need to trade it to a T. You need to buy the bottom and then sell the top, and you're never going to be able to do that. I'm reasonably good at trading, and I've never been able to do it. Jonah is an amazing trader, and he's never been able to do it. Stanley Denmiller is the best trader of all time, and he's never been able to do it. You're not going to buy the bottom and sell the top.

A lot of the time, what you'll see will discourage you from trading. You'll say, “Oh, man, but this guy bought at 80K and sold at 90, and I'm sitting here and I sold at 86, and now it's at 88. What do I do with myself?” The answer is to get rid of what you did in the past. Forget about all the decisions that you made in the past. Every day when you wake up and look at the market, you have to assess it for where it is right now. Are your positions correct for where you are right now?

6. Crypto vs Equities

Forget it if you bought and sold Bitcoin 150 times, made no money, and just kept getting chopped up. You should probably take a break if you traded 150 times and made no money, but what I'm trying to explain to you is: don't get discouraged. Sunk-cost fallacy is a total [expletive]. Don't let it impact your trading moving forward.

When I see a day like today, I view these days as some of the most difficult days to buy. But when I look at a weekly chart—when I look at Solana on a weekly chart—we've sort of hit that exact level that has been defended a lot. This is a strong value level. Yes, we're up 5% from that strong value level, what I'd call 126 to 128, where people seem to really like buying Solana.

7. Ads (Kraken, Peaq)

I can count a lot of times—if you just go to a weekly chart and pull it up—that it's hit this level and gone up. This is a reasonable area to scale in, and when you're buying here, you're looking for probably 155 to 185. On ETH, I'm not a huge fan of ETH right now, probably more so Solana and BTC. When you look at these charts, they don't look so bad, Jonah. I think they look good on both a short time horizon and a longer time horizon, which is actually pretty rare.

Crypto charts look great on both time horizons. Equities charts, I think, look a little bit weird. I wouldn't feel comfortable yoloing big chunks of capital into the stock market or into single names here. Most single names are at the highs. I'm getting a little— all I can think about is reasons to be bullish on equities at the highs. That's usually a bad sign for me.

So I'd be waiting on equities and investing in crypto, kind of like what you just did in your PA.

Yeah. I guess one thing that has always stood out to me as a trader, which is pretty hard to wrap your head around because it feels ridiculously uncomfortable to do this, is that the things that are the strongest tend to stay the strongest until they break. Obviously, you can have something collapse on itself, but Google is a great example of this.

I texted a bunch of my friends because a couple of people hit me up asking, “What should I buy? What are you looking at?” I gave a whole list of things to the Twitter world. But what I emphasized to somebody who asked was—because I followed up with the list and said, “Why would you buy Google?”—my answer was very simple: it was the strongest. It barely went down.

What tends to happen is that the stuff that barely goes down on the way down actually rebounds extremely hard on the way up. The stuff that is strong and has a good narrative behind it, like Google, will continue to do well and probably continue to outpace the other stuff. Looking at it 7 days later, we probably should have just put everything in Google because it outperformed the whole portfolio, in some cases by 20%, when you compare it against what Bitcoin did since then.

8. The Fed, Ukraine War, Inflation

I view equities as strong right now—very strong. The other thing is, macro-wise, one thing that could happen almost by accident is that you could end up with a high stock market and high unemployment because of AI, as companies basically become autonomous and people get thrown out of their jobs. That would be a scenario where the Fed could cut interest rates, which would create an even bigger flywheel because there's still an affordability crisis.

Let's talk about that for a second, because what's going on with the Fed is that it has to operate sort of blind right now. The Trump administration is not releasing any data.

Yeah, I see them. I've always not envied the Fed economists. They're true public servants with incredible degrees. They could be earning way more money.

9. Ads (Kraken, Peaq, Katana)

My senior-year thesis in college was advised by a professor who was a PhD economist and ended up working for the Fed. We stayed in touch, and basically these guys just spend all day analyzing data with really menial paychecks. I can only imagine what it's like if the data spigot just gets turned off and the president of the United States is like, “You guys, you don't know what you're doing. You're all idiots. Just cut the interest rates already.”

It's like some real-estate developer saying, “Come on, let my guys refinance.” It must be very annoying for these people.

I feel like inflation is too persistently high for them to cut, and unemployment—I'm convinced that there's more unemployment than the data shows. Maybe the government's doctoring the data or withholding the unemployment data, but youth unemployment is the highest it's been in a while. It's like 9% or something.

Anecdotally, it just feels like people are getting laid off from their jobs left and right—Amazon, UPS, whatever. Something feels amiss to me, Avi. I think it's probably going to result in a huge affordability crisis. It seems weird to keep the economy in slowdown mode with higher interest rates in this environment, but I'm not a rates expert. I don't know.

To me, the big macro kicker that nobody's paying attention to is that the Ukraine war could literally end this week, and the world will be awash in additional wheat, crude oil, gas, and other commodities that will send inflation much lower. People have forgotten how much that war jacked up inflation.

Obviously, there have been some workarounds. Russia still sells its oil at extreme discounts, but if sanctions get paused or lifted, or the gas starts flowing a little bit more, or the wheat starts coming out of the port of Odesa a little bit more, global inflation is going to come down. Then rates really have to come down.

Even if the unemployment data still shows whatever it shows right now, I think people are sleeping on how bullish that is for everything. That's a big macro kicker.

I 100% agree with that. I do wonder—we've had all of these exogenous things depress the markets. There are a couple of release valves here, right? If the Trump tariffs get struck down, if the Ukraine war ends, there are some things that, for lack of a better word, take the boot off the neck of the markets, which have been rallying extremely hard.

Yeah, because the main things that are rallying, which we've talked about, don't really have anything to do with the tariffs and don't really have anything to do with the war in Ukraine. But there's this entire segment of the market that has been depressed because of it, and if that gets lifted, then you have a whole sector of the market that can start to come back.

I'm very hopeful and excited for that. Maybe Trump insulting Zelenskyy day after day will finally lead somewhere.

Yeah. Imagine what could be a crazy knock-on effect, and this goes back to our AI conversation as well. Basically, imagine this series of events: The Ukraine war ends, and the entire world is awash with Russian oil again, instead of just a few countries that are willing to take it at a steep discount. That puts pressure on OPEC to stop the cuts because they won't be able to support the market much with their current level of cutting.

Oil collapses, inflation comes down. This is a 1- to 2-year process, right? Then, by that point, the crazy AI has gotten so crazy that it's discovering novel science, including alternative sources of energy like cold fusion or something else. Now I'm really putting my tinfoil hat on.

And then aliens come and pump everything up with their superior technology.

Aliens are discovered on Mars. No, before we get there, we get unlimited energy from cold fusion, and then the Middle East no longer has a product or a service to offer the world, and then there's crazy warfare over there. That's what I mean by the road to infinity being fraught with plenty of scary drawdowns.

10. Do We Need New L1s?

Oh my God. Tokenized robot.

This is truly the future, Jonah. Maybe we'll bring back IOTA. Do you remember IOTA?

Yeah, that was like a 2017 one, wasn't it?

Yeah. It was supposed to be that your car was supposed to pay, your fridge was supposed to pay, your washing machine was supposed to pay, and then they were supposed to talk to each other overnight. Then it was a whole thing.

And it was a complete and utter scam. Complete and utter scam.

Kind of similar to what a lot of people are saying about Monad.

Good transition, Avi.

I just tweeted out, “I don't get Monad. What is the point of Monad? Please explain it to me like I'm a child.” So far, it's like, okay, fast EVM chain. That's one answer. Another answer is to make VCs rich. Another answer is, if Ethereum came out today, it would be Monad. No one can really explain why or what this thing is.

I can tell you exactly what Monad is, and I can tell you exactly what basically everything is in crypto. Other than the stuff that makes money, it is created in a factory by venture capitalists to provide a short leg for their longs. That's what these things are.

This is not to say that this is a dig at Monad or any of the other L1s. I actually think that the vast majority of projects are staffed by good, competent people who are trying to do their best. I think the reality is that we've had 5 years of building new, novel L1s and 5 years of these L1s not having any real success. That's not because of the competency level or ethics, although in some cases perhaps; it's simply because you're building in a market where there are no real active consumers other than a small subset of people who use it.

What really needs to be done again is the application layer, and there have been a few attempts at this. I love Berachain. I've been a little disappointed with the level of applications that exist on top of Berachain, and I think that level of disappointment kind of expands to the whole realm of L1s and L2s. This is why people got mad about MegaETH: The reality is that there are no applications being built. You don't vape to earn on Berachain.

Well, I quit nicotine, actually.

So, which meant it was one of the most annoying things I ever had.

Mazel tov.

Very annoying. If you smoke or vape, just don't start.

What's annoying, Avi?

What?

Lung cancer. That's annoying. Good job.

Lung cancer is a terrible app.

Yeah, okay. So, you're not vaping to earn on Berachain. I agree. This is a shill that we've had on the 1000x pod. I think we were early to this shill, which is that blockspace is a commodity.

Infrastructure is hard to invest in if there's no shortage of uses for that infrastructure, no shortage of space to use that infrastructure within it. I don't know. I got a lot of hate for saying that, and so did Santi, and so have you. But it's really true. Why invest in something that's commoditized and abundant? You're investing in providers of a commoditized, abundant thing.

In technology, the word “commodity” is like a dirty word. It's like a 4-letter word that's considered gross. Where I come from in commodities trading, the word “commodity” is the sexiest word in the dictionary.

There are 2 different parts of the value chain here. If you are producing a commodity, that sucks for you. If you are trading a commodity, there's tons of money to be made. These things are volatile and rangebound. You sell when they get to the top of the range, and you buy when they get to the bottom.

We were hating on Solana and ETH all the way down. Well, maybe not—we had a moment where we thought ETH would break out, but we were kind of wrong. Right now, you just pull up the weekly chart on Solana. To your point earlier in the pod, this is probably a good level to buy. When it gets back up above 200, you sell.

Solana and Ethereum are basically commodities now, and the blockchains behind them—the teams—are producers of the commodity. You don't want to be invested in Solana Foundation equity. You can trade the token in a range. They're commodities now.

As for Monad, who needs it? It's another L1 when no one's dying to have a different L1 to launch on. It makes no sense. Show me the applications, and then maybe it'll rally. But there's nothing right now. It's a ghost.

Look, I am hopeful because I do think that if we're able to launch an L1 that does well as an industry, we're back. We're back, baby. The whole thing is just back, and that would be phenomenal.

I don't want to be one of those guys. One of my biggest pet peeves with people in crypto is that they can sometimes be too pessimistic, especially the traders. We're inherently cynical people. We are. I do think that you need to have a little bit of optimism in order to exist in this space. You need to be optimistic. If you want to be on the cutting edge of tech, you've got to be an optimist, because that's how we get anywhere.

I don't say this to denigrate. I say this to push. Let's do better as an industry. That's where I'm trying to go, and I think it would be awesome.

One thing that's happening now that I'm bullish on is that Robinhood is launching tokenized stocks. Our ads are talking about tokenized robots.

The world is now seeing crypto as something that they can bring in and adopt. And I do think that will lead to some innovation within companies, which is what we were talking about with Santi on the last podcast: crypto is akin to the internet. There will be internet-first companies that will succeed widely. There will also be companies that adopt the internet extremely well but have existed for a long time. They take the internet technology, they adopt it, and then they're off to the races.

That's a great point. What's a good example of a company that adopted the internet profitably? I guess you could say Microsoft. That's like the canonical example.

Yeah. I mean, Microsoft, 100%. Like any computer company, I guess, they adopted the internet.

Yeah. They used to just sell CD-ROMs with software preloaded onto them, and then you'd stick it in the disc drive. And now Microsoft Office is a cloud-based service that you end up paying way more for than you ever used to. So, yeah, that's a perfect example. And I guess Google was internet-native. There was no pre-internet version of Google or Facebook.

Here's a good one: Netflix.

Oh, yeah, that's a great one.

Netflix was not an internet company by any stretch, but they adopted the internet. They used the technology to improve their service.

Yeah, that's a great one. I thought that too. They just did it.

So, I think, look, this is obviously a much more regulated industry, so maybe the winners are the banks here. But, for example, if everyone decides to start trading tokenized stocks on Ethereum or Solana—whatever chain they choose to do it on—it's going to go up. It's going to go up a lot. It's going to go up bigly, Jonah. It's going to go up a lot.

I would love for Kyle Samani to come on this podcast and talk to us about tokenized equities and what he's doing with Nasdaq, the regulators, and stuff. I know he's got a whole thesis on Solana around that thing you just mentioned.

What I can't help but wonder is, in an era where launching a chain is relatively commoditized, especially if you're at the scale of a Nasdaq, why would you just outsource your entire business to Solana? To me, even the most Luddite, antiquated 70-year-old TradFi CEO who's used to doing their bookkeeping with a pencil and paper—surely 35 years into the internet era, or whatever it is, 30 years—surely they would have enough instinct or gut feel to say, "That is a poor business decision," handing all of that value capture to Solana token holders instead of just holding onto it with your own chain that interoperates with Solana or ETH or whatever else. All the exchanges would be like, "Who would do that?"

I mean, I think the issue—the issue is that—

It's like IBM outsourcing its OS to Microsoft, you know—

I mean, everyone outsourced. Nobody builds an OS.

No, I'm saying back in the '80s, that was the decision that made Bill Gates, right? Like, I—

Well, they got—I mean, they got eaten. That was the issue, Jonah: they got eaten. And I think—

That's well-known business history. So why would Nasdaq do the same thing, make the same mistake with Solana? That's what I want to know.

Because I think what the world has started to realize is that crypto can be a very good backbone for financial infrastructure. But the reality is, the majority of value capture comes from the interface, and it always will. The majority of value capture will always be the customer-facing thing, at least in terms of building huge, huge companies.

The only thing that I can think of where that's not true is with credit cards. Obviously, Visa and Mastercard make a killing. But so do all the credit card companies. American Express owns their own network.

But JPMorgan, yes, they outsource all of this value capture to Visa and Mastercard. Bank of America—anyone that issues a credit card—yes, they're outsourcing, but it's because they're still making a ton of money on the consumer-facing application, right?

So, let's debate this. Sorry, are you done? I didn't mean to interrupt you.

I'm done. No, I'm done, Jonah. You know what? Actually, I'm done with you. I don't want to—how dare you disagree with me.

I knew this day was coming, Avi. I knew it. It's just so sad.

The people want drama. We've got to give it to them, Jonah.

We've got 5,700 viewers now. We're streamers officially. I think if you get over 5,000, you're officially a micro-streamer.

I don't know if that's a lot or a little. I think it's—well, anyway, we love every single one of you, the 5,693 that are on here. Thank you for tuning in.

We love you guys. Let's debate this, though. Let's debate this.

We have to stream. I guess we're going to have to stream a lot more.

We've got to keep streaming. We're streaming. We're streaming. All right. So, basically—

11. Applications Will Beat Protocols

ETH keeps pumping up while you're talking, Jonah.

The markets are up the same amount. It's just the L1 trade except Monad. That one's not pumping.

So, here's my idea. Crypto kind of talks out of both sides of its mouth there. On the one hand, crypto protocol founders and evangelists and the VCs behind them will say, "As soon as stocks are traded on Solana, the price of SOL is going to be $1,000 a token. It's going to be crazy. It's going to be so ridiculous." And then, on the other side of their mouths, they're saying, "No, no, we don't capture any value. Build applications on us. We're not going to steal all your money. All the value goes to you, the application developer." They're inherently incongruous concepts.

To me, what I think is really interesting underneath all of this is that blog post from, I think, around 2015, the Fat Protocol Thesis, which basically says the L1 takes 80% to 90% of the value, and the scraps are left for the applications. That's kind of unanswered. I used to be a big believer in the truth behind that, but now I'm starting to think that I'm wrong and that applications will eat the lunch of the protocols. That inherently means you can't say, "Okay, when the entire world runs on Solana, the price of Solana is going to be a gazillion dollars," because it's probably not going to be capturing much value, and blockspace will still be commoditized.

I have a long history with this. I don't know if I—maybe I can post it. I'll post it in the comments over here. But 7 years ago, on June 26, 2018, I wrote an article that debated the Fat Protocol Thesis. It's very short. It's not particularly long. But I kind of stand by every single point in it. Back then, a lot of these things were hotly debated.

For example, one thing that I said here is, one, applications often end up building their own application-specific protocols. At the time, if I had rewritten that today, I would have said application-specific blockchains. We weren't using that nomenclature at the time. But I stand by that. I've always been very consistent on this for 7 years: applications will end up winning this war.

The fat protocol thesis is complete and utter nonsense. As much as I appreciate its impact on the state of the crypto industry, I'll tell you guys a secret: the reason that it is the bedrock of our industry is that it's a lot easier to build infrastructure and make money than it is to build an application and make money. When you build infrastructure, there's the promise of application. But when you build an application, there's just the reality of the user. And so you gravitate toward building infrastructure because it's easier to get high valuations. That's kind of what's been happening.

The death—and not death, because obviously they're still raising money—but the realization that infrastructure plays are not really where a ton of money is going to be made anymore is really good for the industry. Really, really good for the industry, in my personal opinion. And that makes me bullish on this. I think we're finally there. I think we're finally getting it.

Which is why, when you look at my shopping list, I do think that this is the start of the beginning of the bottom right here. I don't know if what tends to happen is you get back up to a level—maybe you'll get back up to 92, 93 here—and then you'll trade back down to 87, and then you'll go back up. But this area that we're in right now, if you buy and you wait 3 months, I think you're up 50%.

You just have to not stare at the charts every day and not get all, "Let me make sure I'm perfectly positioned here and there." We blew out so many people. And one of the things that kind of confirmed it for me is when you have a market leader like HYPE kind of blow up, that, to me, is the capitulation. That's like, "Okay, the market is finally—you're finally selling. You're getting the last sellers out." When the strong token that has held up through the drawdown finally collapses, then I think you're closer to the end. That's my view.

I like that view a lot. You know, I think another reason why HYPE might be outperforming has nothing to do with fat apps or fat protocols.

Aster is starting to eat into some of that mind share. Let me just caveat what I'm about to say with the notion that we have no idea if Aster is real or fake, if it's just another scam, or whether it's real. But if you go to Aster.fi—I don't know how to pronounce it—it has all the stats on-chain. They're buying back $5,000 per minute worth of Aster, I think.

That token has outperformed, speaking of buying strength in a weak market. That thing has outperformed the most out of pretty much any major crypto project in this sell-off. The people buying or investing in that—every dime that goes into Aster is a dime that's not going into HYPE. You can debate how valid or invalid it is as a product and whether its future is real or not, but it is taking some mind share away from the number-one DEX in the world, Hyperliquid.

What I will say is that I think it would be weird if CZ, a guy who's worth, let's just say, somewhere between $20 billion and $80 billion, goes to jail, gets out of jail, gets pardoned, and then the first thing he does is try to make an extra $1 billion or $2 billion with a pump-and-dump. That would be weird. I think he's worried about his legacy at this point, not increasing his net worth by 1% to 5% at the expense of becoming a known scammer again after having just gone through all of that.

To me, I think there's a credible story here that a CZ-controlled vehicle will basically become the most hated rally in crypto over the next year, just because it's an application. It's an app chain. There's a token. The buybacks are real as fuck, and because of the history and the chip on his shoulder, he doesn't want to see Hyperliquid destroy his legacy after the, quote-unquote, crime just destroyed his IRL legacy. I don't know. I think there's something to that. It's one of the apps that I'm looking at.

Do you really think that CZ cares about his legacy? Do you genuinely think—you look deep into his eyes, sit with who CZ is as a person, and then look at me and tell me he cares about his legacy?

Let's say that he doesn't, right? Let's say it's just about the money. Let's say I'm wrong and that he doesn't care about his legacy. I think it still doesn't make sense for him to do a pump-and-dump scam to increase his net worth by 5%. I think he's going for a 50% to 100% increase, which means that we all have a lot to benefit from holding Aster at these levels.

The presupposition here is that he's uniquely behind Aster and that he has never treated another project this way, and I don't think that's true. He used to pump and dump all sorts of weird BNB scams back in the day, when BNB Chain was starting. He was huge on it. Talking about PancakeSwap—we love PancakeSwap, and look what happened to PancakeSwap. Who cares about PancakeSwap now?

Yeah, maybe I should actually. Maybe we should look at it again, because I am bullish on BNB, but I'm not bullish on BNB because of CZ. I'm bullish on BNB because Binance makes money hand over fist, and they're going to figure out how to deliver that back to BNB holders because they're the largest BNB holders in the world.

I think that if you want to bet on CZ, and you want to bet on Binance, and you want to bet on the growth of CZ caring about his legacy, go 3x long BNB. That's my take, right? You can buy—yeah, maybe Aster does this, but the moment that he gives it up, that man will cut. If Aster starts performing poorly, if it doesn't get traction, if it doesn't go anywhere, he's going to throw it out.

You're right. I guess I don't have any insight. I'll tell you a time when I was completely bamboozled and befuddled by statistics. Have you heard of Rollbit?

Yeah, I don't know what it is, though. I've just heard the name.

It's a casino coin, and they have the best buybacks in the world. They're always buying back their token. They're buying back tremendous amounts of their token. That's the only thing they do: they buy back their token with all the revenue, and it goes straight down. Nobody has any idea why, because they're like, “If you're making this much money, you keep buying back your token. Why does it keep going down?”

I like Rollbit. I'm a much bigger fan of Shuffle. I love Shuffle. I think Shuffle is like the next MGM. This is because Shuffle goes up and Rollbit goes down. If Rollbit starts going up and Shuffle starts going down, I'll obviously reverse course, but for now, I actually like the founder of Shuffle a lot. He's a genuine person.

I'll check that one out.

We've talked about it on previous episodes. It's actually off a little bit since the highs. I think it's at $0.38 right now, with a $300 million market cap. It just has very low volume. But basically, to bring it back, if you don't know what's actually happening with the buybacks, it's kind of hard to make the case that you should buy it.

You have to make the case outside of the buybacks, and I think the case outside of the buybacks is also a little bit flimsy. I could be completely wrong. I don't know.

The case is flimsy.

I've used both Hyperliquid and Aster just as a test user, and basically, Hyperliquid has a better UX than Aster. Both of them are—Hyperliquid feels a little bit more decentralized. Aster kind of looks just like Binance, but with a shittier UX and a Web3 login. Both are no-KYC. Hard to say. It's an early bet, but—

And also, the FDV of Aster is $9 billion, which is, okay, look, HYPE's FDV is obviously $32 billion, but still, that's—

That 3:1 ratio probably is, if not fair, maybe even overvalued on behalf of Aster. I don't know. I would be a buyer of HYPE, not a buyer of Aster, but I'd also be a buyer of BNB because I'm super bullish on BNB.

I'll note that the comment you brought up is true. When Binance first started, everybody called it a scam. Everybody called it a wash-trading exchange, and it won. So I do think if you want to buy Aster, your number-one goal should be to figure out how much CZ cares about this thing. That's your goal. That's the only thing you should be seeking to answer. If you come up with an answer, let me know.

I've got a theory, which is that it's basically been a stablecoin throughout this entire crypto puke. My only thesis is that CZ's been buying it, maybe to dump on all of us later, but it trades like someone cares, put it that way.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, it's held up.

BNB. Wow, that's a sell-off right there.

I might nibble at these levels. That could be a good entry.

It's a sell-off, but it's a sell-off because it performed so well, right? If you look at it in BTC terms, it outperformed BTC in aggregate over the sell-off. Obviously, that's a low bar.

Low bar, but, yeah, it's performed very well.

Oh, God, we're almost at $89,000, guys. I'm telling you, this was—the stream started an hour ago. Bitcoin was $1,000 lower. We started this stream telling you that it was the bottom. I'm not sure how much more straight we can give it to you.

We own our L's and our W's on the 1000x podcast. We love a victory lap here, but we also love a losing lap. I try to stay grounded and not puff up too much if I don't have anything to puff up about. But if I lose, you'll know. If I win, you'll know.

Fair enough.

Do we have enough time for me to just quickly do a 2-second spiel on Meta?

12. Meta Bull Thesis

Oh, yeah. I mean, I've got all the time in the world.

Basically, Meta: I've owned Meta from lower levels, so I'm still deeply in the money, but I started shilling it closer to the highs, which is a bad look on me. It's definitely gone down since I started laying out my thesis on it publicly. What I will say is that I think no company has more to gain other than Nvidia. No company has more to gain from AI than Meta, right?

Meta has the best business in the world, which is selling ads. You and I sell ads. It's a great business, right? And basically, the way to target an ad better is all inside Facebook, and it's all enabled by AI. Sorry, Facebook. Everything inside Meta is ad targeting.

Unlike Google, where AI can legitimately disrupt its ad-selling business—which is its business, right? Waymo is great, YouTube is cool, but its main business is the blue links. AI can disrupt that, and it probably will. Within Meta, there's no way to disrupt networks of social connections, right? Meta basically owns 2/3 of the planet's attention.

And I do think that ad targeting will work. I also think one thing that you're seeing from these platforms is that there's a lot of copying and pasting in and out of LLMs, and that's why Cursor is so valuable as a product: it just disintermediates 1 layer of copying and pasting. The AI is inside of your code editor, so it just watches and knows what you're coding. The context is all there.

I continue to think that what Meta is being punished for, which is those AR glasses, will become the platform that allows you to just stare at something and speak out loud without having to hit the microphone button, take a picture with your phone, and hit the microphone button. I do think that technology will become basically ubiquitous in a few years. And I think they'll own it—they'll basically become the new Apple, just owning the entire tech stack, from the platform, which is the glasses, all the way down to the software, which, in 2 to 3 years, I think all LLMs will be far better than our actual human uses for them.

So I think even if Meta isn't quite caught up with the state of the art now, where there's still more demand than there is supply for LLM thinking, that'll reverse quickly, and owning the platform—the iPhone of the future—will be more valuable. I really think Meta is getting punished for something that they shouldn't be punished for. I think there's much more upside to Meta at a lower market cap than Google. And I think the market's attacking them for not having a state-of-the-art Gemini 3-level LLM.

It's attacking them for spending money on hardware like these glasses, when I think that both of those things—the LLM will become commoditized, and the glasses will become super, super, super freaking valuable. Also, the ad targeting within Meta, I think that business is defensible, whereas ads on Google are more of an open season for other platforms to steal that ad revenue. So that's the spiel on that.

Yeah, I do genuinely agree that the emphasis on LLMs—the quality of the LLM model—is probably overblown. It's about what that will be used for and what the capture is. I think what Google was getting hit for is that people were moving away from the product, right? They were moving away and using ChatGPT and using other LLMs, and moving away from the core product of Google, which is: you go to Google to figure out what's going on, whether it's in the world, where you go to eat, or whatever it is. Google was your portal to learning things.

That shifted to LLMs because they didn't necessarily have a good model. And LLMs are not commoditized right now, and the fear from the market was: How long will it take Google to come out with a comparable product? If it takes too long, will they lose their standing among consumers as the entry point? And that's why you're about to see Google go on an absolutely generational fucking run, in my personal opinion. It could quite literally double from here because, like you just said, they now have—they're now better than ChatGPT.

And not only that, they're back to being the entry point of the internet. This is true for me: I was using ChatGPT as my entry point to the internet.

Right. For questions that I used to go to Google for, I went to ChatGPT, and now, if I could just go to Google—

Candidly, it's a lot easier to just look up something in Safari while I'm here than to pull up ChatGPT and have a dedicated website. That's why ChatGPT released a browser. That's the whole reason: they're trying to keep users there. But Google's so far ahead.

The only fear for Google was: Would they get there in time? And it looks like they did. It looks like they got there in time. So, to the fucking moon.

To the moon.