Taiki：150万美元 ETH 空头、市场情绪、多空之争及更多 | TG 播客

Dude, you’re like our—

You’re speaking like I’m the most bearish person on crypto. I mean, I was temporarily, but—

But dude, you were right.

I guess so. I just got one thing right, you know?

Yeah, but you got one thing really right. You know what’s crazy? We also—good to see you again, by the way. Welcome back.

Yeah. Good to see you.

We got dinner a month ago, maybe two months ago, and Bitcoin was over $100,000. I’m pretty positive Bitcoin was over $100,000 when you, me, and Malcolm got dinner. It was really fun, and you were really bearish, because I remember I was on stream with Trader Mayne the next day. I was like, “Dude, Taiki is a gay bear.”

This is—yeah. He sucks.

Basically, right after that, it played out pretty much one-to-one. I’ve got to give you some flowers for it. I guess to start, before we get too deep, most people here are probably familiar with you. Maybe they’ve known you for all of the arcs—the farmer arc. Maybe they only know you for Fartcoin, and maybe they only know you as the millennial Michael Burry. Do you want to give us a quick introduction to who you are and what you do? Then we can get into some fun stuff.

Sure. First of all, I think 12 months ago, I was on your stream talking about why Fartcoin was going to flip GOAT. Now we’re talking about me shorting ETH and stuff, so it’s crazy how far we’ve come.

I used to play poker in 2020. I pivoted to crypto, started making YouTube videos, and taught people how to yield farm. So people call me Farmer Taiki. Ever since then, I’ve been farming—airdrop farming, yield farming, trading, investing. I’m just an active market participant and active user on-chain, trying my best to navigate the markets.

You’re one of the few quality crypto—I don’t want to use the word “content creators,” but I mean that in a nice way—who are still locked in, which is awesome.

I try. I’ve been touching grass this past week, but I’m back in the trenches. I bought some coins today to dispel the bear narrative.

I really don’t think the bottom’s in, but I’m playing the bounce.

Okay, so this is what I want to do. We could spend a decent amount of time talking about the market, and then I honestly want to talk about some old stuff, comparing where we are to where we’ve been.

1. The ETH Short Thesis

To start, there were a lot of people who were publicly bearish. Some of them flipped on that fake, scam all-time high, like Ansem. I think Trader Mayne was relatively bearish as well. They all kind of got scam-bullish and flipped.

There weren’t that many people who were publicly bearish, took the positions, posted them, stuck to their guns, and then actually let it play out. You posted many shorts, but I think your ETH short was north of $500,000. How much did you make on the ETH short?

Like half a million, probably. Then I made some more on altcoin shorts, but most of the sizing was on ETH.

Shorting ETH. How did you build conviction to take that position? There was no reply guy or quote tweet that was going to change your mind about where you stood.

Obviously, I think everyone used to be a believer in ETH. Maybe some people still are, but I used this analogy in my last video where ETH is kind of like a hot stove. If you touch a hot stove and burn your hand, you stop touching the hot stove. But with ETH, people just keep touching the hot stove because they feel obligated to own ETH for whatever reason.

After I got burned on ETH about 5 times in the past 5 years, I started seeing ETH for what it is. It’s really good technology, but the token itself isn’t that great as an investment.

Once Tom Lee started pumping billions into ETH, I viewed the DATs as a vehicle to pump tokens above fair value. Once they stop buying, everything is going to retrace, which I think is what’s happening with Bitcoin. Michael Saylor is mostly tapped out. Tom Lee’s average is around $4,000 for ETH.

Also, the on-chain metrics were looking really terrible. The October 10 crash pushed me over the edge. People thought it was a bullish liquidation event, but I thought it was fairly clear that once altcoins start puking, there’s no reason to deploy capital on-chain.

You should expect DeFi TVL to be at the top. You should expect stablecoin supply to stop growing. You’re forecasting what’s going to happen to fundamentals before they turn. So I slammed the short.

If I’m wrong on shorting ETH, I won’t lose that much money anyway. It’s an asymmetric opportunity.

Because it doesn’t go up ever.

It doesn’t go up.

Were you bearish before October 10?

Yeah. I wasn’t short ETH before October 10, but I was shorting alts. I started shorting alts around late September.

My mental model was that as soon as ETH breaks new highs, I need to start raising cash. It hit $4,900 in August, so ever since that point I’ve been trying to slowly scale out of the markets. It’s really hard to call the top, so I just have to sell when no one else wants to sell, which is really hard.

After round-tripping about 4 times in my life, I figured this time wasn’t going to be the fifth time. I need to learn from my past mistakes.

2. Good Technology Bad Tokens

It feels like you made this comment in your first response that ETH is good technology but a bad token—or good business, good technology, bad token. Crypto is littered with good products, good technology, and maybe even good businesses, but terrible tokens.

The one I always think about is Jupiter and why JUP is so cursed. I use it all the time. It works, it’s perfect, it’s awesome, and I love it. Is this a fundamental crypto problem? Why do we have so much technology that’s great while the token is just utter dogshit?

Most projects don’t make any money, right? They launch at billions of dollars in valuation. It’s really hard in real life to create a successful company, let alone a billion-dollar company. But in crypto, we create these out every other week. Pre-product TGE launches at a $3 billion FDV.

I just think the token model is broken. Maybe people forecast that all the fees on-chain are going to trend toward zero. What moats do these products even have? What moats do L1s even have? What margins can you even expect 5 years into the future?

For example, dYdX used to be the king of perpetual exchanges a few years ago, and now they’re literally at zero. It’s really hard to invest in crypto because there can be new players that just flip everything. It’s a terrible time to try to build conviction unless you’re buying Bitcoin or something.

Do you believe that basically all DeFi fees go to zero over a long enough time frame?

I think that’s kind of what happened to TradFi, right? Robinhood has zero fees, but I guess they monetize through payment for order flow. That’s the direction Lighter is going to go, too. I’m sure Hyperliquid is going to have to lower its fees at some point; otherwise, it’ll lose market share.

I think most of the value is in the front end. But I’m not trying to forecast anything. I’m mostly sidelined, letting things play out, and not taking on that much risk.

By the way, I didn’t realize how high Hyperliquid’s fees were. I was looking at how much I’ve paid, and I thought, “Oh my God.” You don’t even see it. I didn’t even realize how high they were.

Most people are price-insensitive, right? If you’re trying to market-buy Zcash or something, who cares if you’re paying 10 pips or whatever?

But at some point, the rake is really high. I have a poker background, and you understand that the casino always wins. You typically want to click less on-chain because you leak so much value.

Fees are really high across the board, and liquidity is terrible, too.

You have to be really selective, especially nowadays.

Especially. It’s wait for good spots, and even the good spots have been seen. Zcash retraced 50% to 60%.

There’s one way to look at your take, which is that it’s really hard in two ways. It’s really hard to build a billion-dollar business in the real world. There aren’t that many of them, and usually the ones that are worth a billion dollars have either changed the world or been extremely successful. They’ve built something crazy.

The other side of the equation is that it’s really hard to invest in crypto because you could be OpenSea and be worth $10 billion, and tomorrow Blur launches, arbitrages your fees to zero, and your whole moat is gone. Nobody cares about you anymore, and you’re worth a hundredth of what you were.

Is there any sign, or any way to look at this and say, “The fact that there’s still capital and excitement in crypto that will pump vaporware to billions of dollars fundamentally means that people believe in and are hungry for what’s being built here”? When there is good technology—the Hyperliquids and Pump.funs of the world—we have the capital to support it. Is there a glass-half-full side to that take?

Of course. Good tokens go up and bad tokens go down. The problem with crypto is that most tokens are bad, and they launch at really high valuations, so you just can’t touch them.

Hyperliquid launched at around a $3 billion valuation, and now it’s still around $30 billion or something. It’s a huge success. But I was listening to your stream before I got on, and things are going to be hard. You can’t just expect to follow random Twitter influencers, buy coins, and make money.

I worked really hard on my ETH thesis. I generally work really hard when it comes to allocating capital. So you just have to work for it, you know? Especially now, all the speculative, dumb capital just got wrecked, right?

So if you're trading right now, you're just trying to compete against people like me—veterans. It's just really hard. So I'm choosing not to participate by taking on that much. I'm not being compensated with enough upside to take on a lot of risk right now in markets.

I think dollar-cost averaging Bitcoin, stuff like that's fine. But generally, who knows what the next pump is going to be, right? It can just be some new meta that pops out of nowhere. So you don't want to be holding dead stuff from last year.

Yeah. I think an optimistic way to look at the altcoin market is that good tokens can and will go really high. Most of them suck, but we do exist in a market where good tokens can go really high. Even, I don't know, the MetaDAOs of the world are still at $200 million right now.

Good tokens will go really high, and I think that's something to latch on to. When you made your thesis—you said you worked really hard to enter a trade like ETH—and I think that process sometimes gets lost between the lines when people talk about, “Oh, I'm long. Oh, I'm short.” You don't really know how they got here.

I think at the very beginning you said something along the lines of all on-chain metrics and things like this were looking really poor. What exactly are you looking at to determine the health of the on-chain market?

3. Reading Onchain Health

Yeah. I think when I say health of the on-chain market, I don't mean meme coins, right? Meme coins aren't pumping, therefore on-chain is dead.

I'm a farmer first, as evidenced by my farmer hat, and I talk to a lot of farmers. I think generally farmers have a good pulse on a chain. Sometimes there's stuff worth farming; sometimes there's not. If experienced farmers aren't deploying capital on-chain, then the risk-adjusted return of deploying in DeFi apps is just terrible.

I don't know why this is, but I think generally, in bear markets, there are more exploits and rugs. I don't know if it's an inside job or what it is, but at some point you just have to start withdrawing capital from on-chain. That typically coincides with—it’s kind of a leading indicator that things are about to turn.

You have to expect TVL to go down across DeFi. That's kind of what we're seeing. Generally, when TVL goes down, people start selling, and then it's this negative reflexivity. Generally, people have conviction until their coins go down 30% or 40%, and then they start selling.

So it's also trying to identify who's the marginal buyer and who's the marginal seller. The main marginal buyer for majors was the DATs. Now that they're mostly tapped out, who's the marginal buyer? I can't really identify that. Who's the marginal seller? It's a lot of these people that just hold overvalued stuff.

When trading, I think about who's the marginal buyer and who's the marginal seller. That's a good framework, I think, to approach markets going forward.

4. The DAT Exit Liquidity

That was the dumbest thing we've ever done in crypto. I think we've done some dumb stuff.

Yeah, it's terrible. Bitcoin and ETH are great decentralized assets, but now the VCs got angry that people bundled memecoins, so now they're bundling DATs.

I don't think it's that bad, but it depends how you look at it. If you've been holding ETH for 5 years, it gave you tremendous exit liquidity. But if you're trying to invest for 10 years, then, yeah, it kind of creates this Christmas tree pattern, which is terrible for sentiment.

Well, the thing about it, too, is that I don't know how high ETH would have gone without Tom Lee's existence, but probably not that high, though it would have gone up a little bit.

Like the price.

Yeah, right. Tom Lee.

BitMine got announced when ETH was $2,500, and then it pumped to like $4.9K. So I think ETH would probably be around here if it weren't for Tom Lee.

The thing about it is, it didn't do anything. BitMine had the biggest effect—it feels like ETH had the most direct, “Oh my God,” effect on ETH. Saylor does what Saylor does, but everywhere else, what they did with Solana at $235 or whatever—

Solana did pump. It did pump—

From $200 to $250, right?

Yeah, fair. But it was just the most uneventful, “What the fuck are we doing?” kind of meta that I feel like I've ever experienced in crypto. So underwhelming, and just, what are we doing? I don't even want to call it a meta, if you will.

Yeah, altcoin DATs are kind of gross because there's a lot of insider trading there.

Story Protocol DAT—it's like, brother, what's going on here? And I think there's also this element of—you do this almost every day, right? So you have a good pulse on the vibes.

I feel like the vibes have been terrible for 3 to 6 months. The only reason coins were going up is because Tom Lee or Sony is buying. That's not really something that excites me.

I'm still an optimist when it comes to crypto, like blockchain tech. But I think everyone just wanted to sell at some point, right? Everyone had plans to sell in Q4, this magical Q4 pump. So people are just taking chips off the table, and now we're left with a terrible environment where we don't know if Saylor's going to sell.

We don't know what's going to happen to Tom Lee, and then there's all this panic. But I think I'd rather be a buyer here than a seller.

What do you think happens to Saylor?

Everyone's freaking out.

Yeah. I mean, today he raised like $1.4 billion to raise cash and secure some runway. I think that was a good move. I'm surprised that he was able to sell that much.

I think today's MSTR news reduces the odds that he sells Bitcoin to fund interest payments, but he could sell Bitcoin to cover the mNAV spread. I think also that Saylor's basically done buying Bitcoin for the foreseeable future. He might buy $10 million a week or a month, whatever, right? But that's nothing to get excited about.

So now the question is, how much of MSTR at $120 was due to Saylor buying and the expectation that Saylor was going to buy? I don't have the answer to that. It could be lower. It could be where we're at now.

But I feel like eventually we'll revisit Saylor's average of around $74K, and then it'll trade. People would be like, “Oh my God, he's going to get liquidated,” and that could be a potential low. Maybe if MSTR sells some Bitcoin. I think that's unlikely, but it's possible next year. That could mark a low.

I think generally you can just expect Michael Saylor FUD to mark a bottom in the future.

I like—

Which is why I also bought some today, which I want to ask you about in a second. It felt like the $75K number, the April low, was a reasonable place that we get to. You could kind of say, “Okay, real gut punch there. We chased the whole move.” You mentioned that the vibes have been bad for 3 to 6 months, which they have—the vibes have kind of been bad the whole year 2025.

Yeah, it's terrible post-inauguration, right? Terrible.

5. Trading the Bounce

Coins are going up—Bitcoin, so ETH is going up—but alts are obliterated. The real separation there is that the money buying these coins is the DATs, the ETFs, the institutions. They're buying these coins. CT is not, and CT has just been getting destroyed all of 2025 on alts and on on-chain stuff.

How accurate of an indicator to buy or sell, go long or short, do you think vibes are? CT vibes—is that a good indicator? Because I kind of—I don't know, I use other stuff. I'm a vibe trader, though. Honestly, I'm a vibe trader and I trade vibes, and I lean long all the time. I'm a vibe trader; that's basically long always.

Yeah. No one should be trading off vibes alone, but I think it's also this element of gut feel. We've been in markets for many years. When we see a spot and our gut's saying to buy, then there's probably something there.

So I think if this is your second cycle or third cycle, then vibes-based trading, if you incorporate other fundamental elements, is fine.

No, when I say vibes are bad, I just felt like people wanted to sell, right?

Yeah, but people were wanting to sell into this Q4 pump. So, no, now I think people have done that. That's why price has gone down in a straight line. But now I'm not so sure.

Well, everybody was also doing this final-pump thing, which I hate. One last guaranteed pump, and then you sell. It's the running joke, right? If everyone says, “Billy to a billy,” it goes to like $500 million, you sell.

So, like, say Sol to $2K so we could sell it at like $800. There's no one last guaranteed pump.

Everyone's in on it. We're all going to sell it. You said you bought some coins today or recently. What did you do?

Yeah, I did. I was thinking about this, right? Because I'm still really bearish generally. But Thread Guy literally asked me to come on stream to be bearish. What's going on here? Twelve months ago, I was talking about Farcoin, and now Thread Guy is like, “Taiki is a bear. I've got to have him on.”

It's kind of like when a coin pumps and then you have the dev: “Oh, the coin pumped. Why did it pump? Here's the dev.” That's a top, because that's peak attention. Wait, if he's having me on stream, that's peak attention on the bearish side. I need to buy something.

So I just bought some SOL, but I don't intend on holding it for that long. I'm just like, okay, let's play the bounce. That's awesome—for the culture, for the culture, but—

I do think SOL goes lower, too. But what did you buy?

SOL. SOL.

Just SOL? Sole purpose?

Yeah. No good reason. But I was also shit-talking Kyle Samani on Twitter. I was like, “Yo, what are you doing with your DAT?” And then he was like, “Tune in for my investor call on December 2,” which is tomorrow. I'm like, “All right, let's see what he can pull out of his ass.” So I'm like, “All right, let's see. Let's see. Let's see.” It costs some money.

It went to $123, dude. It's bad. SOL's bad.

What is it now?

What's your entry?

You're up, certainly, like—

Like $2 lower. Yeah.

Okay.

But this is not me calling bottom. I'm just like—

Yeah, yeah. It's also vibe-based.

That's total vibe. I mean, dude, it's scary to buy right here. It really is. What's your general—

Buy? Scary. Sell when no one wants to sell.

That's when you buy, right? That's when it's fucking terrifying.

You say you buy, it just keeps going lower.

Go ahead.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. But like I said—sorry to interrupt you—I'm not calling a bottom. I think we go lower, but I think we're due for some relief.

Yeah. So, what's your framework for “we go lower”? How do you think about us going lower? What do you think causes it? How much lower? You talked about what you think would be a local bottom for BTC based on the Saylor stuff, but what's your general framework for us going lower?

Honestly, the answer is no one knows, and I don't really know. One thing I was thinking about is, like I said earlier, Tom Lee's BitMine was announced when ETH was $2,500. So I feel like we should probably get back to those levels now that he's created exit liquidity for people. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know.

I think the 200-week moving average for Bitcoin is $60K or so. That feels inevitable to me—not that we have to go down there immediately. I'm just trying to think through what's the risk-reward for buying coins versus selling coins now.

And as bearish as I am, I mean, 2 months ago I said I'll buy Bitcoin sub-$100K, right? And I still haven't bought yet. So when coins start pumping, everyone moves their targets higher. It's like, “Oh, to the moon,” right? And then once we go lower, it's like, “Oh, we're going to $60K.”

So, yeah, I'm giving you non-answers, honestly.

No, but it's helpful to just talk. Even for myself, I want to talk through it because there isn't an obvious answer to it. I have this tweet, “Nobody really knows.” It's a Jez tweet, and it's honestly one of my favorites. I'm going to pull it up on my laptop, and I want to get your take on it. You were here for 2018–19.

No, I joined in 2020. You joined in 2020, like you joined DeFi Summer. I was buying Bitcoin to deposit to poker sites because that was the only way, and then all my poker friends started talking about DeFi. So I kind of just got pulled in. So, yeah, around DeFi.

6. Belief Based Capitulation

Oh, that's a movie. So, he basically has this little write-up on the 2018 and 2022 bear markets, and he basically—

Based.

Yeah, yeah. He's basically saying 2018 was a belief-based capitulation, where nothing exciting was happening. Basically, all of it was these existential questions of, “What if everything was just a scam?”

2022 was a price-based capitulation. I believe this, even though I came in 2021, so I didn't really know better. But 2022 was a price-based capitulation where, as a result of Luna and FTX blowing up and taking down the rest of the market, people didn't stop believing in Bitcoin. They just lost all their money in FTX.

I agree with that. I even felt like, for the way more senior people than me in the bear market of the last cycle, nobody gave up on crypto. If anything, they were more bullish. They were just really bored. There wasn't anything happening.

It feels like what's happening right now is kind of belief-based. I'm not the most technical with how macro and markets work, but it's easy to get demoralized right now because you look at gold, right? It's $4,250 right now. Silver is $80, just ripping.

And you're like, okay, the narrative of Bitcoin as digital precious metals is kind of out of the cards, at least locally. Then you look at equities, and Nvidia is basically at an all-time high. The S&P is at an all-time high. You're like, okay, we're not really the leveraged tech-stock trade on Bitcoin, and we're just somewhere floating in the middle of the ether. It's unclear. There's kind of no narrative right now.

People are floating around quantum FUD, Saylor FUD, Zcash and privacy FUD—just a lot of FUD somewhere in the middle. OG whales are selling. Even if you weren't here in 2018, do you carry this sentiment that it feels like belief-based capitulation, and that a lot of the smart people in your circles are losing faith? Are you losing faith?

I think the better way to think about it is that last cycle, we realized the tech sucks, but the coins pump hard. Now we're realizing the tech is pretty good, but the coins are terrible. And I do think there's a belief issue. The average belief in crypto has gone down across the board, and I think for good reason.

The memecoin stuff is fun, but I didn't get into crypto to buy memecoins. Last cycle I was like, “DeFi is the future. ETH is money.” Even if you ask an ETH maxi this time around, they're like, “Yeah, I want ETH to do well, so I hold it, but I don't really know if it's a good investment now.”

I feel like people have gotten to a point where maybe the tech is good, but most of the coins are bad. The problem with crypto is that we don't really know how to value these things. Why is Bitcoin worth $85K, or why is ETH worth $2.7K? I can't tell you.

People just draw lines on charts and say, “Oh, this is support, that's resistance,” whatever, right? So, yeah, it's also bad because I think there was this Hayes post about exponential L1s or whatever, right?

Even you talked about how Amazon topped and then it took like 6 years. Even the most optimistic bull case is, “Oh, it might take 5 or 10 years to reach all-time highs.” People in crypto generally expect there's a 100% chance we're going to see new highs in under 12 months or something, right?

I think people are underpricing the probability that we might not see new highs for 2, 3, 4, or 5 years. The probability isn't zero. Maybe it's under 10%, but I think it's quite possible that assets like ETH just trade like oil and go sideways forever, while Bitcoin is doing well and getting hyped.

I think there's a lot of uncertainty right now, and that makes it a really tough environment for anyone with size to allocate a lot of capital. That's why it's going to be super choppy from here on out. The market is going to be on turbo hard mode.

I think it's best for people not to capitulate, especially through time-based capitulation. It's one thing for coins to go down, but I think people—

Yeah. If for the next 3 months we just go sideways, that's going to be terrible, right? There's going to be nothing to talk about. People are going to start leaving. Things are also going to keep going down with unlocks.

The good news is that we're in month 2 or month 3 of a bear market. Maybe it's a 6-month bear market, a 12-month bear market, or a 4-month bear market. I don't know. But at least we're already in the bear market, right? That's a reason to try to be optimistic.

That's the hardest part: being optimistic when things are looking so terrible.

I think there is some level of sick optimism in the idea that we have great tech but terrible tokens.

Yeah.

It feels like—I now understand why people who are super OG and senior get cynical. Guys like Cobie can come off as super cynical because we've been doing this thing for 10 or 15 years and we still have the same problems.

But something about great tech, bad token feels fixable. Good token, bad tech does not feel fixable.

Is it fixable? I mean, we’re kind of fixing it, right? All the coins are going down 90%, so we’re in this fixing process.

Right? We’re fixing it right now, and now we have to wait for buyers to step in. But the reality is, we should probably go down another 90% before buyers step in, if they want to step in.

How did you play the cycle? How well do you think you did?

I think I did okay. The best thing I did was the recent selling and then shorting, but prior to that, I barely held any Bitcoin throughout the cycle, so I underperformed fairly massively.

You know me—I round-tripped Fartcoin completely. That was terrible for my mental health as well. I also bought a bunch of DeFi tokens that I basically broke even on, so generally, not too great.

I mean, I’ve outperformed Bitcoin, which is all I can ask, but I think I could have done better, honestly. Without the ETH short and stuff, I think I would have been an average player in the market. There are lots of things I could improve on in the future.

The Fartcoin round trip is tough.

Yeah, the chart is tough.

We noticed. We noticed. Yeah, I round-tripped some serious AI money. It was such a violent meta, if you will.

Yeah, I think the AI stuff was the only time when people actually believed ai16z was going to $6 billion. Zerebro was going to create a rap album that was going to hit the top 10 on Spotify or whatever. There was actual belief there.

This kind of touches on your previous question, but people are definitely capable of believing. The market has to provide something to believe in, and we don’t have that right now. So now people are just angry and pissed that things are going down every day.

At some point, there’s going to be a new meta. Maybe it’s next year, maybe it’s next month. I don’t know.

There is this—okay, it starts to feel like a spiritual bottom and a price bottom are just not the same, right? We can go way lower. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, or whatever it is.

But there’s this increase—first of all, every single person on my feed, smart, dumb, and different, is writing articles about why it’s cooked. Every tweet’s an article. The second is, there’s all of this “crypto is solved forever” discourse happening. We solved memecoins.

Solved as in—

Solved as in everything’s GTO, everything’s solved, and there’ll never be asymmetry again.

And I think there’ll never be—every game we have is solved. The thing about new games is that there’s no new game until there’s a new game, and if it’s a new game, fundamentally, it can’t be solved.

I don’t know. When we were in the depths of 2023, I didn’t really know what it was going to be, but I definitely didn’t think memecoins were going to be the thing that drove us into pandemonium again.

There’s one side of this which is, “That was it. Full nihilism. Memecoins. There’s nothing after that.” But then there’s the other side of it, which is kind of your thought: the capital is here, people are willing to bid whatever it is, and something will come. It just has to be a little bit different.

But it feels like people are really over-indexing on “everything is solved forever.”

That’s the same way that the stock market is solved, right? Markets are getting more efficient over time. If you’re just scrolling Twitter and trading, you’re probably not going to have any edge. Maybe you had an edge 2 or 3 years ago, but now you need to work harder.

Crypto is maturing as an asset class. Maybe that means coins go lower, and then you have to be super selective and work really hard. Markets are hard. It’s really hard to make money.

I think if anyone’s making money right now, they should be really proud of themselves. If you’re still here, you should be proud of yourself. It’s supposed to get hard.

The markets will constantly get harder. You just have to get better than the rest of the market. That’s the only way to win, so that’s what everyone should be striving for.

It is supposed to be hard. No one said it was going to be easy. Are you trading anything else right now besides crypto? Are you looking at other markets?

No. I’ve been trying to play Polymarket stuff, but I have zero edge there. Negative edge.

Congrats. Shout-out to Polymarket.

For stocks, I only buy index funds in my retirement account. Maybe I’ll get back into poker a little bit. I want to play the WSOP next year, so maybe I’ll get better there.

I don’t know. It’s mostly farming. I think farming is probably the main way retail can actually make money in crypto. I’m trying to farm good stuff and teach people how to farm good stuff.

So why aren’t you maximally cynical and jaded? Why are you still talking about crypto on this stream?

I was maximally cynical when ETH was above $4,000. Now we’ve dumped a lot, so I think you have to look for buys. The problem is that things can always get worse. That’s the problem.

No, no, go on. I was going to say “or better,” but it’s not worth interrupting you.

Yeah. Things can always get better or worse. The real money is made in the bear market, right? The real money isn’t made sniping GOAT. Maybe you could, but that’s a handful of people.

The best way to make money is having cash, buying Bitcoin low, and then just chilling for a year while you take some other trades here and there. I’m really bullish on my ability to buy lower and then just ride it for the next 24 months.

Obviously, I’m going to be greedy, and I’m going to try to buy the bottom. But maybe I’m too bearish. That’s also the reason I don’t want to be too bearish, because once you start shorting and making money, I think it’s easy to view the world in a negative light: “I need this thing to go down. That thing is going to zero. That thing’s a scam.”

But things are down so badly that there has to be some value here somewhere. I’m more interested in making money on the long side. Unfortunately, it might take 6 months to find a bottom.

There’s no reason to be pessimistic. Obviously, there are reasons to be pessimistic about certain assets and never touch them again. Maybe short those if you want, but bulls make money at the end of the day, right? Bears make money sometimes, but it’s usually the bulls that—

The dumbest bull makes more money than the smartest bear.

Yes.

7. Farming the Next Winners

What are you farming right now?

I’m farming perps. I think these are always good. Variational, Lighter, Ink Chain, Kraken’s Layer 2.

Okay.

USDai, which I think you had David Choi on.

I love that guy.

I know. Yeah, he’s kind of crazy. I like it.

But the thing is, most people should probably not be farming right now. With stables, I think the risk is probably super high if you don’t know how to do proper due diligence.

I think perps are going to be the goated farms over the next 12 months. I view perp DEXs as the altcoins from the last cycle, where there are going to be multiple billion-dollar outcomes.

I’m grossly oversimplifying here, but let’s say there are 5 perp DEXs that launch at an average of $1 billion FDV, and they all airdrop 15% of supply. That’s $150 million of value per protocol. You should probably be trying to take advantage of that.

I’m not saying it’s going to be easy. You have to figure out ways to farm and stuff, and not everyone is going to be a millionaire. But I think one thing people should do right now is make decisions that their future self will thank them for.

I’m like, “Okay, what does future Taiki want me to do right now?” Don’t buy the dip too early. Don’t blow your load all at once. Retain the cash, and put yourself in a position to succeed in the form of airdrops.

Are you farming Lighter?

I was, less so now, but I think Lighter is going to do really well. I’ll probably buy the Lighter TGE. I think that’s going to be a really good ape, especially in the market environment we’re in now, because I think it’ll probably launch too low.

Which would be a change of pace for TGEs going down only.

Yeah. Good tokens can go up. Lighter will probably be a good token. I don't know the tokenomics, though, so don't quote me. The perfect environment is if Bitcoin is nuking, Ethereum is nuking, Lighter's drop happens, everyone sells because they want to capitulate, and then you want to be on the other side buying that.

What is the correct environment for more casual people to be farming? The problem is that all the coins launch at such high FDVs, right, where you can't make money buying them in the public markets. Retail's way to counter that should just be to farm these things so you can dump them at the high valuations. I just think people should farm good things they can believe in. The people that made the most money this cycle were maybe the Bitcoin maxis and the people that farmed Hyperliquid, held, and believed.

How do you counter these tokens just never launching? How do you counter Photon never doing a TGE, Axiom never doing a TGE, and you've been farming this thing, leading in points, and it never happens? How do you counter that risk? It's a time suck, almost.

I guess you never really know. Usually, teams will tell you that they're going to TGE. I don't think Photon or Axiom ever did.

Oh, really? Okay.

Yeah. That's also a savvy business idea, right? Or business move. Tease the token, and then the degens will pay fees. It's a risk you should be willing to take, but there has to be some risk in order for there to be upside. You just have to believe. I choose to believe in good tokens over time.

By the way, just to give you an update on your notion, all my trench chats right now are like, “FC SOL, TIKI long, TIKI long, long SOL, long SOL.”

It was like, “Long SOL, long—what?” Okay, maybe I shouldn't market-dump. Don't buy too early, I think, is a really good take for the majority of the cash if you have it. How did you play 2023's bottom into the back half of 2023, really into 2024?

Not well. I think in 2022 I sold near the top, and then I just started buying way too early. There was a period where ETH went down 11 straight weeks in a row, right? Eleven straight red weekly candles. That was terrible. That really traumatized me.

Eleven straight is disgusting.

Yeah. I think Bitcoin had 9 or something. Things can always get that bad, you know. After the 2022 FTX bottom, I was honestly still an ETH and DeFi guy, so I was buying all these DeFi tokens that never pumped. I got a 2x on Maker. I bought some ETH. I farmed Hyperliquid and stuff, I guess. But honestly, people call me a midcurve, and they're probably right. I'm trying to grow out of that.

Why do you think you're midcurve?

People just say that. First of all, it's kind of funny, right? Do you think you are?

I mean, I think it's always best to believe in yourself but not have too big of an ego.

People call me a midcurve because I focus a lot on fundamentals and why something should go up or down. A lot of people in crypto would rather just do technical analysis or say, “FDV doesn't matter.” But it does. Valuations do matter, as we've seen in the past few months. I just do fundamental analysis on an industry that maybe doesn't require fundamental analysis, but I think it's a good way to justify buying or selling something.

It feels like at the top, or close to the top, rational fundamentals go out the window. But at the bottom, they're really important.

Yeah. People say the fundamentals put a bottom in valuations, but it puts a ceiling. One thing I'm thinking about is that there's a reasonable chance that if we do go lower, you can just buy Ethereum DeFi—Uniswap, just ape, and just chill. That's also something I'm thinking about. I think you traded UNI. I also traded UNI. The price action has been terrible.

Awful, that coin.

Yeah, I don't know. There's probably something there. There's probably some problem in the asset itself. But actually, what was your question?

Well, fundamentals at the top don't matter.

Yeah. I think they matter at the bottom, right? How do bottoms form? There are value buyers, right? People think it's good value, so they buy. How do you know it's good value? There's probably some fundamental element that puts in a bottom. It doesn't matter at the tops. It does kind of matter, but I think it helps you buy bottoms, hopefully.

I also feel like the inverse happens psychologically. At the top, all anyone can talk about is revenue numbers. At the bottom, at least the way this last cycle played out, people are nihilistic and just want meme coins. The two things are inverted.

You mean the opposite, right? Once prices start going down, it's like, “At least Pump.fun is buying $1 million a day.” People kind of latch onto that. But if it goes on hard enough, people are like, “Everything's a scam. Just give me fucking Pepe.” At least that's how 2023 played out, right? It was Bonk and fucking Pepe, then WIF, then the Pump.fun launch. That really kick-started on-chain craziness.

Yeah, I missed all the memecoin stuff, honestly. I just didn't really get it, in my midcurve. But maybe you're talking to different people in the market. Generally, people buy coins at obscene prices near the top, right? Plasma went to $18 billion or something like that. I was like, “What the fuck? What even is that?”

You know what was kind of the kiss of death to a lot of people's capital?

It was Hyperliquid propaganda into Aster going crazy, and then everyone's on perps. Then Plasma launches and gives you a 2x, and everyone's like, “This is the freest 2x ever.” Then it just goes down only every single day with the rest of the market.

Then October 10th happened.

Yeah. It gave everyone scam confidence that perps are amazing and they're perp traders, and then it just blew everybody up. I feel like, at least in my brain, I underindex significantly for how catastrophic the 10/10 thing was.

Because I wasn't trading.

Yeah, I think so.

Well, even if you don't trade perps, generally, tops are formed by some random big liquidation day, because that destroys a lot of capital. There might be dead bodies emerging over time. Crypto bottoms and tops tend to be very violent. The narrative with alts is that people kept calling for alt season in Q4, but the marginal buyer of alts is retail, and retail got rinsed on October 10th.

Got cut.

So we literally burned all the marginal buyers. It made no sense why people were bullish at that moment. It's more about seeing the writing on the wall that the market's probably topped, and then you have to act on it, right? The market isn't going to give you—think about the most recent dump. People have been calling for this dead-cat bounce, up 50%. The market will give you this perfect right shoulder to sell into before going down 80%. Do you think Mr. Market is that kind to you? No, we're going to go straight down.

The funniest thing crypto people spewed after 10/10 was, “Max pain is $200,000 Bitcoin right now.” It's like, no.

Max pain's up. Max pain's always down. Max pain is always down. Never let people fool you.

Yeah, max pain is definitely not the god bounce at all.

Like a 2x candle, a 100% candle.

“Oh, I'm in so much pain.”

What's your plan now? You've touched on it, but what's your plan from a trading perspective, and more so from an information-flow, day-to-day-focus, staying-locked-in-on-content perspective? What are you going to do if we chop for 3–6 months?

I don't know, actually. I'll take it day by day. Last week I told myself, “I'll either short ETH higher.” I was thinking $3,200, where I would just short again, and ETH peaked at around $3,100 and then went straight down. That was unfortunate. I didn't catch that. My mental model is very simple: short ETH higher if the market gives it to me, or buy good coins lower.

Right now, there's not much to do. Until then, I just wait and farm. On the content front, I think you'll experience this too, but if we go sideways for 2 months, our viewership is going to go down a ton.

Like last cycle, in the bear market, I lost subscribers every single day. Every time I uploaded a video, I lost 100 subscribers. You’ll probably experience that too. So I think you shouldn’t be too discouraged, right? It’s not your fault; it’s just that the markets are terrible. Most people in crypto just leave after some period.

I’ll take it day by day. The thing is, Hyperliquid launched, I think, in March 2023.

Yeah, sounds right.

Which was like 4 months after the bottom, right? In a way, there’s less competition in a bear market because everyone just leaves. There are going to be pockets of insane opportunities in the future. You just can’t force it. No one forced Hyperliquid to launch at that point, right? No one forced GOAT to launch 14 months ago.

Just be grateful that markets might go lower. I can buy at lower prices, get more coins per dollar, wait, and not get too beholden. I think that’s the hardest part.

You’re kind of the GOAT. I feel bad. I was hating on you like crazy for the bearish sentiment, and then you come out and whip up the GOAT trade, bro. I was hating like crazy.

Oh, yeah. For the audience, I grabbed dinner with this guy, and he was like, “Yeah, I fucking hate you, man.”

Well, I mean, you didn’t say that, but that’s kind of—

I was thinking it, low-key.

I’m like, “Taiki, what are you excited about in crypto?” You’re like, “Nothing. We’re going lower.” I’m like, “Bro, what? Stop. Nothing’s exciting.” And then it just plays out. It was one of the more goated trades in a while because you were getting hated on like crazy when you tweeted your basket of alts. You were short, and everyone was clowning you.

People clown me all the time, right? I’m used to it. It’s better if people clown me because if I get it wrong, it’s like I’m a clown, right? But if I’m right, it’s like, “Holy shit, maybe he’s not 80 IQ. Maybe he’s 105 IQ.” I’m like, “Yeah, baby.”

The bottom is when I start playing poker again, by the way. I had an arc in July 2024, I think, which is like—

I remember that.

—the extended end of celebrity meme coins. There was nothing happening. Then there was the poker stream, and the next day GOAT launched in October.

If you see me playing poker now, bro, posting, “What should I have done on the river?” you should probably buy some.

I think the bottom is when that guy takes a mental health break from burning out from streaming every week.

No, don’t say that.

Burn out, please.

No, DON’T BURN OUT, PLEASE. No, don’t say that. By the way, I glaze you for this all the time, but you have the single best crypto interview of all time: Taiki–Jez.

Oh, yeah. Jez—yeah, he’s great.

You should run that back. I asked him, but I don’t think he wants to just take a chill—

When he resets—

When he buys the bottom. You should bring it. That’s the single best interview of all time. I commend you on that.

That’s also the reason I lost $1 million on GOAT because—

Why would you ever put money behind your second-best idea?

Thank you for that.

Same with me for Fartcoin, man.

Yeah. [laughter]

I was like, “It’s going to $10 billion. It’s going to be the best coin.”

Chat says what? I’ll send it in the chat.

8. Surviving the Long Bear

As a sign-off, there are a lot of new people who watch my content who weren’t here in 2024. There are still a lot of meme coiners who weren’t here for 2022 and 2023. These people are relatively new, but they deeply believe in crypto, which is pretty fucking fire.

I’ve been telling people in the chat, “All right, if you’re still here right now, I know it happened pretty quickly, but the risk-reward of leaving is pretty bad, so you probably shouldn’t. You should have already left, even though it happened quickly.”

Can you give us some motivational advice as a sign-off? If you were here in 2024, saw the mayhem, missed the trades, haven’t made it, and don’t want to be stuck in the permanent underclass, so you’re still here through bloody price action, what do you do? How do you stay locked in? How do you make it?

Fuck.

First of all, I think the idea that you need to make it in the next few years is really bad. It forces people to take on excessive risk. If you think about all the rich people in the world, it took them decades. Maybe they built a good business, or maybe they traded profitably for 30 years.

I would take the long-term view. Markets will always be here. Thread Guy and Taiki will always be here, hopefully. I would probably expect the next few months to be really slow, boring, and terrible, but that’s not when you want to leave.

I said this last cycle, too, but people end up leaving. You can’t really control whether people stay. You just have to not take on too much risk. Follow the right people. Follow bullish and bearish people. If you only follow bullish people, you’re always going to round-trip because you’ll never hear the bearish side.

Ask yourself who the marginal buyer and marginal seller are. Valuations do matter. Stables are a good position. Airdrop farm all the time. And watch that guy.

Dude, you’re the GOAT, man. Thanks for coming on, dude. I felt like we had to do it now. The timing just made sense. We had to do it now. I know you’re a busy guy, and you’re lost in all these profits and shit. You’re off now, but—

I really am not.

I—[laughter] Thanks for doing it, bro. Honestly, I’m hyped you came on.

Yeah. Also, what is that sign behind you? “Thread Guy: Exit Only.” What are you trying to exit from, man? No. [laughter]

Exit bearishness, bro. Exit being a gay bear. Enter being a euphoric, buying-the-bottom Chad. Good coins only. You’ve got to be a—

Good-business, good-coin bull.

Yeah, heterero mode.

Not that I’m a hero right now, but—

Also, when you joined the stream, someone said, “SOL mooning.” Is that $126.82? It’s up like 60 cents.

Oh, man. Time to sell.

When you joined, everyone was like—

Honestly.

Yeah. I mean, I’m not bullish on SOL, honestly. [laughter] I really am not bullish. I think it goes lower. Usually, when I ape long stuff, it’s a top signal.

So should I short your long?

I think—

Like, barbell strategy?

Barbell what? Like—

I don’t know, long and short at the same time.

No, no, no, no. I usually only do naked stuff, like—

Okay.

Only long. Or I should get into pair trading.

No, but it’s kind of tough, you know. Hey, they’re calling you the new DJ Ping in the chat, by the way.

Oh, no.

You’ve got the—

I don’t want to be DJ Ping. I really don’t want to be any form of main-character energy, you know?

You are the main character right now, low-key.

I really am not. How am I a main character?

What do you mean? You’re the only guy who’s publicly made a lot of money.

I guess. I don’t know. I think crypto people shouldn’t put people on a pedestal because, historically, I’m wrong. I’m going to be wrong at some point. If people just bet their net worth on what this random Japanese guy is saying, come on, man.

I just want people to hear what I’m saying. I’m an ETH hater from an asset perspective. I want people to actually hear what I’m talking about—about how ETH is not a great investment—and have my reasoning incorporated into their investing.

I might be wrong. If I’m wrong, I’ll admit that I’m wrong. But if you really fully understand why I’m bearish, I think it helps you navigate markets a lot better. I actually believe this.

I was not bearish because I wanted things to go to zero. I was bearish because I wanted people to sell. One way to do that was just to be this bear, right? It’s like, “Oh, I’m shorting ETH,” whatever.

I’ve gotten DMs from people saying, “I sold ETH. Thank you.” I do think people should learn how to sell. That’s my number-one piece of advice to make it because I think you and I have historically both been terrible at selling, right? We just believe it pumps, and then we think it goes higher.

But selling is really hard. You need to learn how to sell. Otherwise, you’re never going to make it. You have to learn how to sell. You have to enjoy selling. When I say “sell,” I don’t mean shorting, right? I mean literally taking your random altcoins and selling them, you know? Just like

Who has a really good clip on your stream talking about this?

Oh, was it—

Oh, yeah. Crypto's a butthole. Exit only. You don't put cash back in. You don't put it back in the butthole, right? Things only come out of the butthole.

Well—

Well, if you're Thread Guy, it might be different, but at least for me personally, it doesn't go back in.

Oh, yeah. Well, this is Thread Guy's favorite toy.

Dude, dude, dude. In GTA?

You have it on your desk?

I just have it here. I'm just holding it during the stream.

No, no, no, no. It's just here. There's a green one over there.

There's a red one there.

Bro was streaming. He's like, “Yo, red guy.” But, on that note—

Do we really end it this way? How about you give me—give us some motivation?

Give your viewers—

I mean—

You're going to get used to me doing a lot of motivation over however long we chop here for. But I feel the same way that I felt at the bottom of 2022, 2023, whatever. You either believe in it or you don't. If you do believe in it, piggybacking off your take, you're going to get an opportunity to buy some really good coins really cheap.

If you don't believe in it, then you're getting a head start on being able to leave, pivot, and go somewhere else. The reality of the situation is, all roads lead to Rome. All roads lead to crypto, lead to programmable money, lead to crypto. I'm in the camp—and I think every one of the 180, or however many people are watching the stream right now, are in the camp—that it is going to win, and you're going to get the opportunity to buy really good coins really cheap.

The only thing standing in the way of you buying the equivalent of $15,000 Bitcoin again, like you could do in August 2023 or whatever, is how long you can sit through some chop. It's easier said than done. Honestly, you could argue that doing content every single day in a bear market or in chop leads to crazy burnout.

Or you can argue that it gives you something to do every day, to stay locked in, and to not capitulate—to be in the right place, right time, with cash this time. I didn't have cash last time. With cash this time, and a job to buy the $15,000 Bitcoin when it comes. So that's what we're going to do on this stream.

Mr. Taiki—

Yes?

Promise me this: when you start deploying—actually deploying, really putting six-figure cash back into stuff—you've got to come back on stream and tell us when.

I mean, I'll make videos when that happens. I'll try to be as transparent as possible, obviously. I think you need skin in the game to make good content. That's my personal philosophy. So, yeah, when I start buying, you'll know about it. Happy to.

Hopefully that's not when Thread Guy's having a mental health break.

It's never happened. It's never happened.

Taiki, you're the GOAT, bro. Would you come back to L.A. if I still live here? Hit me up. Come out to dinner with me. This was honestly really fun, dude. I appreciate you coming on.

Thanks, man.

Go tweet some shit for us.

Yeah. Good luck.

Good luck.

Good luck, everyone.

Good luck.