VC币周期：以及他为何不持有 Bitcoin——Rekt Mando

Boom. How are you, dude?

How are you, dude? How are you? I’m fine, man. Welcome back. I like the suit.

Thanks, dude. I like the T-shirt. How many costumes do you have on your list at this point? It seems to me that I see you in a new way every time.

That’s right. There’s a podium outside. You should see it.

Yes, that’s where all the profits from Ze go.

Yes, I already took some. It seems like those were profits from the pumps.

Dude, how are you?

Good. I didn’t really have the best August, but September was very, very good.

I know when you’re not having a very good month—when you’re not tweeting about profits and losses—but you’re back on the menu.

Yes, I can definitely tweet some of this month’s profits and losses. This month, like last month, I honestly just had a few bad decisions. I wonder when we last talked. I think we were both very optimistic about PUMP.

Yes, weren’t we? And then PUMP didn’t become the cryptocurrency of the cycle. It seems like that quickly moved to Zcash.

But I was a little bit long on PUMP. I was long on Eli Liy. I was long on Lily. It wasn’t a super trade, but there were a few things where you break even when you hit.

I think the last time we talked was right before the Nebia trade.

Yes, I was in a short position. I was short on some of them. I was long and then I got short on CORE, which is a very good indicator.

You were bullish on gold.

Yes, it was a long time ago, and gold has barely moved since then. It stayed at the same level. There was a short uptick, but gold feels like a long-term deal. Cryptocurrency in general, though, I got a good shot. HYPE was probably the best trade I caught in this entire period.

And then NEAR—I mean, you’re the only guy I know who traded NEAR. I’ll let you discuss that in a second. I have a question for you. I’m trying to imagine how the last cycle unfolded. I wasn’t that active a trader, but it was kind of strange.

I feel like PUMP led the bull in a lot of ways. It started the bull for me in a lot of respects. The whole thesis was social trading for you, while for me it was leading with this on-chain mania, then Bitcoin explodes. PUMP had already gone up 50–60% before Bitcoin exploded, then PUMP was clearly the best alternative, with a few 30% days, and then it completely stopped paying.

Now it’s somehow become vampirized. Robin has appeared out of nowhere. Stone appeared out of nowhere. Pawns in long positions, all that. But I almost thought, “I’m just going to sit in this long position for the entire bull market.” This obviously did not happen.

Did this unfold the same way last year, in the last cycle? For example, something completely breaks and then we come back?

Yes, I think this happens quite often. What everyone considers to be consensus growth, whether it’s a meme or an L1, eventually either gets vampirized or something else surpasses it. So I don’t think it’s rare.

I thought PUMP had a certain first-mover advantage. I thought that would be the case, and it was, but it still looks undervalued if you think the revenue numbers are legitimate. Compared with something like Hyperliquid, it was very easy to pick this. We were going to have a catch-up trade, where social trading was leading, and people were looking at Zcash as the strongest trade at the time.

I would say that all the institutional coins—the ones held by liquid VC funds—have done really well during the last craze. The lighter ones, VVV, VV, even almost to some extent, as you saw. Every coin that a VC would buy in the last 2 months has been a winner in some way, and PUMP hasn’t been that great of a play.

You could still hear Mike Dudas shouting from the rooftops, but PUMP still felt like this rally was largely driven by retail deciding to buy PUMP along with bundles of memecoins. What we really saw was venture-capital coins destroying all of that. The best moves over the past 2 months have mainly been in coins favored by venture capitalists.

What about the hype around Zcash? Do you think this continues?

Almost. In fact, I think it’s hard not to argue that the coins experiencing any kind of downturn are seeing the most resilient demand. You don’t even see small dips in things like [unclear], NEAR, [unclear], and Zcash. These things are falling maybe 10%, but not 30–40% like we saw with PUMP.

PUMP and [unclear] will fall at the slightest hint that something has gone wrong. Whereas these other coins clearly have a stake because the institutions are back. They decided these were the coins they wanted to own. They’re also reaching historic highs, so I wouldn’t downplay that. They will still be very strong; they’ll be the strongest coins.

There are a few more in the second group, for example, things like Arrow that some of these venture capitalists like. There’s another coin that I hate: MakerDAO.

You hate MakerDAO?

I hate MakerDAO. There are a few more, right? If you talk to venture capitalists, you can determine whether this is their next purchase. So it can be argued that these projects will be the next ones.

But I think an almost equally weighted basket of these is venture-capital investments. Under VC investment, it’s a little different from the last cycle, when they owned them from the time they received their tokens and then just got rid of them. These are the ones they bought during the bear market and liked as the best projects. All of them are usually related to income.

So this isn’t just venture-capital investing?

I think these projects are pretty strong. The research firms that serve venture capitalists have done a pretty good job. For example, if you listen to the Delphi podcast, they covered almost every single one. That tells you it was more like a venture-capital investment.

Good. Hey, tell me this. I think you’re generally pretty sharp about the size of good on-chain coins, and I didn’t play very well in the first round of on-chain. Now it’s kind of a waiting-for-the-next-stage period, and I started to get really frustrated with Sonic and some of these things.

I started off thinking, “Okay, I understand,” but in the end I just said, “You know what? Stone at $3.4 billion against Venice at $1.1 billion, $1.2 billion, $1.3 billion, $1.4 billion, $1.5 billion—these values are just too cheap, and there’s still so much you can squeeze out of them.”

I would prefer heavy alts over larger-cap on-chain coins, especially when there’s no clear narrative. I’m curious how you think the flows will develop if these alternative cryptocurrencies go much higher than people think—or maybe you disagree—as opposed to investing in some of these bigger on-chain pieces and catching on-chain exposure on an exchange.

I think you will see a return of institutions as cryptocurrency grows. It was a wasteland for venture capitalists and liquid funds. But there are cross-asset funds, family offices, and funds that just like to dabble in cryptocurrency, and I think they’re starting to pay attention as Bitcoin retraces some of its long-term moving averages.

You need to choose coins where an institutional exchange is betting, or where they might buy your bags. So this could still be the case for stocks. The only problem is that, first, I still think you need to apply a significant discount to how plausible some of these returns are, and second, how sustainable they are. They’re always a little complicated.

I like stocks, but how many assets will we play? For example, dividends are another token, as if there are only a limited number of shares. There are only a limited number of cryptocurrencies you could do this with. The most popular is Zcat, which does not trade well. It doesn’t bargain very well.

Zcash is great. It just costs somewhere between $90 million and $100 million, and I like this story. I actually think this is one of the best stories on Stonk. It’s kind of a funny meme, but if you can’t do it with this, it’s going to be hard to do it with anything else.

So Stonk is probably my favorite. If Long had a token, I would want it.

Going back to what you said initially, I think they’re going to come in and buy these altcoin packages. There was a post yesterday by [unclear] Alexander talking about Near shares, which have apparently experienced a huge increase. Suddenly they look much better at a multiple of 4.5 than at a multiple of 2.

Yes. The reason for this is that suddenly it seems like institutions have decided to buy it. They want to support it a little more.

Two days ago, I think I saw Naval, who was something of an early investor in NEAR, suddenly retweet about NEAR. I thought, “Okay, maybe they’re going to launch this.”

So you would look for coins that seem to be gaining institutional momentum?

Exactly. It looks like this is a crowd that was already on a bit of a run, but I think VVV could go much higher. NEAR can go much higher. They don’t even look that good from an income-multiple perspective.

No, I think NEAR makes tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in commissions. VVV is a little more opaque. But income multiples are a naked market phenomenon, aren’t they? It seems like people are buying it simply because institutional capital is gaining momentum again.

NEAR has a pretty good story. It’s fully endowed with capital. This has been around for a very long time.

They’re using all the big buzzwords now: privacy, artificial intelligence, authenticity, and agents. This is $5 billion.

So you seem to be fully endowed with capital. You look at it compared to some others and think, “This could actually work.” It could work if institutions come back and start playing the L1 game.

Hmm, that might actually work. And again, suddenly Merz is tweeting about N. It’s not like he wasn’t around for it, like Zcash, but a lot of people are suddenly tweeting about it.

You say it like you know they’re just going to try to run it. I have to give you flowers, too, because I think you’re one of them. You’re not the only one on my radar anymore, but you were definitely the first one on my radar by spamming publicly.

I’ve been telling a lot of people and I’ve been in a lot of chats saying, “Look, I think this is the one you traded. I mean, you did it. Was that a huge deal for you?”

It was a six-figure deal for me. It wasn’t my biggest deal yet. HYPE was my biggest deal. I sold 50% for $3.50, like I told you, and I still hold 50%.

I actually think I’ll buy more. My personal opinion is that the market is going to be a little volatile over the next 2 or 3 days, or sometime next week, but I think NEAR can actually outperform Zcash. That’s the next step.

My general thesis is really just to own a basket of these coins.

So what are you holding right now?

I have all the coins that I mentioned: Zcash, HYPE, and NEAR. My biggest bag now is HYPE. Next is NEAR, then Zcash. NEAR and Zcash are about the same, then BBV.

I don’t own Lighter, just because I don’t know. I really regret that damn coin. Remember when I came on stream and told you to buy Lighter? It was around $1.10, and then I came out at about $1.70. I kind of sold it short somewhere between $2.20 and $2.40, and now I’m just like, “Hey, I’m not going to trade Lighter.”

My point is that they have a lot of upcoming unlocks, so I don’t like it as much as the others. I’m not a big fan of Lighter, but I’ve looked at Derive and a couple of others. I haven’t pulled the trigger yet.

Okay, so how far is this cycle going to go? Where are we now, and how high can this Bitcoin bull market go?

I think we’re at the beginning of a bullish cycle. We’re not really going to have some monster move. That’s where I’m different from other people. I don’t think we’re going to have something like a monster move to $200,000, but I think this is the beginning of a long-term bull trend, probably for at least the next year or two.

I think we’re going to have a retest of that $80,000–$82,000 area, maybe even $80,000 in the short term. But I think this is a market that’s going to go up, and I think the institutions are going to come back.

I think you should buy the bags that have a good institutional history, so I would look for exactly what you mentioned.

So what do you think is the reason? Is it just that cryptocurrency has gotten really good? Have we been so oversold, or is this a 4-year cycle? Is this AI trading, or the rotation of the rich? Why is this happening right now? What started this?

I was talking to someone else about this this morning, and we said this is probably the first cycle where we’re using all the technology that people are talking about, like the bags that I have. We use Hyperliquid every day in DeFi.

Really? Venice—that’s what we use.

So these are real things that people use. Maybe one of the differences is that suddenly there’s a cycle where you can have a little more faith in the product.

I think the AI-agent stuff is obviously picking up, as you can see with Meta and Grok. People are getting a little more optimistic about that as a trend. Privacy is also picking up, especially after M&A and the lack of regulation in the U.S. These are long-term trends.

I honestly just think we had an average AI trade, and some of the data-center and memory stuff started to slow down. Suddenly, crypto was looking a little bit better.

Interestingly, one of the reasons I think we might have a little more volatility is that almost every company in the Magnificent 7 has gone up in the last 48 hours because of what happened with Meta.

Something is so messed up about this Meta trade. It’s so weird.

Yeah. I use Grok, but is it that much different? I think it’s pretty much the same, right?

And that’s good. For example, Grok was really good, and from a business perspective, it’s really good. I don’t think there are many integrations that are still missing. For example, you can’t connect it to Telegram.

No, but what you can do, I guess you’ll like. I think people are already seeing that. It’s right in your face. You can see that the framework is there.

I actually connected it to something called Beeper. I don’t know if anyone in the audience knows about it, but it’s kind of a universal messenger. You can connect Beeper to everything, so it can be your one-stop shop for Telegram, WhatsApp, and iMessage in one place. Then it’s integrated into Grok, which is pretty cool.

I don’t know if Meta has it, but I think Meta will definitely be able to have WhatsApp integration, right? I don’t know if it has Telegram.

No, I don’t think it has that yet.

Why do you think this is kind of a tipping point? Why do you think you’re different from the other crypto bulls who are calling for $250,000 or $300,000 Bitcoin in this cycle?

Honestly, I think I’m just a little more of a short-term trader. I never predict a top or a megabottom. I didn’t predict Anom, but 2 weeks later I posted a tweet saying, “Look, I think we’re going higher.”

Anom was saying around $60,000 or $64,000. I basically said, “Look, yeah, I think we’re going higher, too.” I’m never going to be there. I’m always going to wait for a little more of a clear trend to follow, and I’m always a little more short-term-oriented.

I could get all my positions out tomorrow if I wanted to. Long-term views have never been where I’ve made money, to be honest.

Today, I feel like I’m going to print on a position because I’m shorting the underlying assets. I’m shorting Solana and ETH. I think we’re going back to $81,000. Generally, my risk time frame is 1–4 weeks. That’s where I’ve always made the most money.

So when I come here and say $250,000 Bitcoin, that always gives me trouble.

Someone tweeted me this morning about MicroStrategy and said, “This guy said the price is going to go to zero.” I said, “Well, you actually had a really good idea about MicroStrategy.” I made a lot of money on MicroStrategy on the way down, and then I closed it at the right time.

I think you had an incredible vision for MicroStrategy. You said, “Look, I think the price is going to go much lower, and if it loses enough, if it hits a certain price, it’s going to go to zero.” But the reality is that the disclosure of the sale is going to take much, much longer than people think. It’s a multiyear thing if it happens.

Yeah. I guess my long-term predictions are always pretty crazy.

But I think privacy is a very strong trend in society, and if I bet on that, I could be very optimistic about the things around it. Zcash—I kind of buy into the idea that it can go up 10×.

In fact, it’s the only coin out of all the ones I mentioned where people aren’t saying, “Oh, it can go up 2×.” With NEAR, a lot of people think it can go up to $8 or $10. With BNB, it’s like, “Well, it can go up 3–4×.” With Zcash, people are saying it can go up 20×.

I like this coin. If that’s your biggest position, I think it makes sense as the coin of the cycle, because nobody else is talking about those multiples for any of the other coins.

I like the delusional optimist—the delusional optimist about the coin. You need that hype for HYPE at $5 or something.

Yeah, it was kind of a flip. Their initial HYPE target was to flip Binance’s BNB at $100. BNB had a $100 billion market cap, right?

Yeah. HYPE is my biggest long, and my call is that it can go to $100.

I like that.

No way. I’ve been in HYPE a lot earlier, but even when people talk about HYPE at $200, I’m like, “Yeah.”

You might have to think about that when you sit down and consider the risk-reward of a long-term trade. The only real, legitimate one, if you’re going to be in it for the whole cycle right now, is Zcash.

Yeah. I’ll see you in 2 months and I might say something different, but it’s the only one I’ve seen people sit in delusionally for an entire cycle.

Yeah, I was sitting in Solana most of the time when the price jumped from $30 to about $140. That was pretty good. I remember being about that size. I think I put $1.5 million in on Kraken.

I remember coming back to it and thinking, “That was actually one of my best trades. I literally didn’t do anything with it.” I just put it there. I didn’t even think about it.

There’s something to be said about the fact that simply owning this bag defines you for the entire cycle.

Hmm, yes, I believe that.

Yes, that was the case. I remember I just invested the rest of the money in a bunch of different things. I invested some in JLP and in other coins.

It’s like I don’t own it anymore. I tried to do crazy things with it, but from a risk-reward perspective, it was much better just to be in it.

The most money you’ll hear about being made in this cycle, I’m telling you, will come from people who won’t take cash. There will be crazy stories about people earning 9 figures.

There are already a few ugly ones. I’ve seen some.

Yes, there are definitely 8-figure stories—stories for an average 8-figure sum.

And the next ones, I tell you, will be—there will be more. I might have to downsize so I can do that.

Or increase the size. Texas Hedge. Yes, why not?

Garrett Bullish. What the hell? Yeah, he cut you off here, didn’t he?

I have a feeling he—what the hell was that?

He was just pissed off about some Twitter action and Doc’s wallet. What the hell was that?

You needed him as a boyfriend too. Something like—you need a person to sell to, you know, and it’s like a sell.

Yeah, that’s right. That was so stupid. I knew for sure at that moment that it would be a short conversation.

It was a local top. But I kind of saw it and couldn’t believe it. I was like, “Should I sell my husband’s fortune now because this guy just tweeted?” It was like I had a moment of panic—not to panic, but I was so upset because I just knew everything was falling apart after that.

It’s like you knew it wouldn’t grow.

And I started to feel doomed. Then I thought, “Okay, this whole 10x target-price thesis is disproven. One person may or may not own a large amount of this coin. If so, then I’m just fucking myself.”

Doesn’t that tell you everything? This is a view from the trenches, not of institutions. Institutions don’t care.

I sat down and thought, “Okay, wait until you find out who owns U.S. bonds, who owns, for example, Meta and how much they own, who owns all these magazines, all these memory stocks, and what percentage they own.”

So I took a little break, but you knew prices were going to fall. It was so annoying that they probably would have fallen anyway, but it was so annoying that they were falling at that very moment.

But don’t you like it now? You actually saw Zcash drop to $1,400, bounce back, and now it’s settling at $1,500 while the rest of the market seems to be falling.

It falls. This is calming.

So I think Zcash looks really good here.

Hmm, yeah.

So I think HYPE looks good too. These two have stayed higher, as have all the trending coins I see.

Hmm. Do you have Bitcoin?

No Bitcoin. No. No one owns this coin. No one in the world owns it.

By the way, that’s the thing regarding the price forecast of $250,000 or something like that. It doesn’t even matter.

Zcash can reach $10,000 or $5,000, like during an all-time high. HYPE could be $150, and Bitcoin could be at $100,000.

I just think the Bitcoin story has gotten a little more complicated. Not that I don’t like it in the long run, but with what’s driving cryptocurrency right now, I don’t think global liquidity is increasing. In fact, you just saw the Fed raise rates.

It seems to be more about utility, or at least people believe that utility can become a little greater.

That’s why I prefer privacy. I actually prefer stories about altcoins.

There were other times, too. Bitcoin during a bull market is great to own. But now, at the beginning of a bullish trend, one has to think that people believe in something more than just the growth of the world’s money supply, which is a good thing, by the way.

Yeah. I don’t think I dislike it. I just don’t think it’s going to be the coin that’s mine now.

Hey, what do you think of CryptoPunks now? Do you see that?

Yeah. I mean, Cyrus just has an incredible ability to move the entire market forward. I think it was just a tweet from Cyrus that I read, but I feel like it’s kind of a change in the plumbing and the vibe that people are crazy about Punks right now. You can feel it when it happens. You felt it with Zach. You felt it with Pump. You felt it with the Punks.

It’s just a weird thing to buy. They are expensive. They are super liquid. You need to spend $90,000. It’s brutal to buy a Punk.

This is brutal.

What’s your opinion on ETH?

I think that’s at the root of some of these things, right? I think you must have some opinion on ETH. I know that Tulip King likes to fight people. He likes ETH at $100, but I don’t think he’s wrong that ETH is not an asset I would want to own in this cycle.

Well, it’s just how you express your opinion. You’ve probably thought about this more, but if we’re going to use revenue and people using memes as what makes alt-protocols grow, then everyone uses HYPE, and the revenue is cool. People use Venice, and the revenue is not bad.

For example, ETH and Solana have found themselves in a very strange position. If Solana owned one of those social-commerce apps, I’d be like, “Yeah, hell with it.” But Pump makes a lot more money than Solana. It’s hard for me to have such crazy price targets for Ether in this cycle. I don’t know why I would buy it instead of something else.

I’m a trader again, so I would just pay attention to whether it will reach an all-time high.

No. People are now optimistic that it can return to its all-time high, which is less than 2x. Although it’s been moving quite well lately.

It was strong. The point is that I would always like to keep my funds in assets that are reaching an all-time high or are a new meta target for the cycle. With CryptoPunks, it’s not that I don’t think they will grow, but do I want to invest my money in them?

I agree. At this point in the cycle, the opportunity cost of capital is so high that you can either bet safely and win small prizes, or simply take risks. I’m sitting here thinking that Zcash could increase 10x. I’m here to take risks.

No one is talking about CryptoPunks. They’re talking about them going up from $30,000 to $50,000, and that would be a good deal, which it could be. But I just think that at this point, it’s the beginning of a cycle, and I think it’s going to be a changed cycle. Just live a little. Get on the stuff that can really, really move.

In the short term, I think we might have a little bit of a recovery, but I would still own those bags that people have ridiculous price targets on rather than the ones that are already up.

You changed my life as a trader forever when you told me that you might just be in the best coin all the time.

That’s right. I come here and say the same thing every time: “Yeah, you could make this trade, but you know you could be in the best one every time.” It kind of changed my life.

I feel like I’m usually just in my best position. That’s why that meta thing was driving me so crazy yesterday.

Yeah. You bought Monero. You were trading Monero. Are you still in it? By the way, you wrote to me in a private message that you bought Monero and made about 20% in an hour. That was pretty good.

Monero is one of those very disappointing coins. It seems like it should be endless, but it’s not.

Well, it’s clearly very manipulated. What is happening?

Any—Monero reminds me that these coins are privacy coins. You don’t really know who owns them, but we do know that Monero had very centralized mining in the beginning. In fact, there was something like a chain reorganization.

Didn’t they try to do something about it, or did they create it?

Two years ago, there was an attack involving a chain reorganization. So, as you know, there’s a lot of centralization there. I think Monero is mostly controlled by a very small group of people, and they just want to see it suffer. It’s like winter silence, you know—you’re always playing someone else’s game with Monero, and you have to understand that. Maybe they want there to be 1,000 of them. Maybe they don’t want to.

People always ask me, “Why are you buying Zcash and Monero? This is such a meme now. Monero has better privacy, and people who use it are criminals.”

And I’m like, “Dude, I’m just trading on a chart. I’ll be honest. I have Zcash on Hyperliquid with leverage.”

The answer is, “Have you ever owned Monero for five minutes?”

It’s one of the most annoying fucking coins in the world. You own it, and then you see what usually happens: all of a sudden, you see a huge surge in funding and a huge surge in ROI. It increases by about 15%, and then literally on the next hourly candle it drops 10–15%, wiping everyone out. It goes up and to the right, but you sit there and think, “What the hell is going on here?” Unbearable. It’s just weird, this damn thing.

So you wouldn’t say it’s a bag that you can fully trust?

I wouldn’t say it’s a bag that I can fully trust. In fact, I’ve felt the same way for a long time. I never fully trusted it. A lot of times I’ve played close to a breakout, and it would hit 3 or 2.5, and then I’d think, “Fuck me.” Even on that move, when it went down, one of the reasons I sold it at 3.5 was because I didn’t fully trust it.

I was so caught up in trading this coin that I just thought, “Fuck my life.” I was trading the chart without any confidence, and I held on to the last little mini-run and got hacked to hell.

Right. So there are these coins that you just don’t fully trust, and Monero is not a coin that you fully trust.

Even if it probably has a better technological foundation, I can understand why people who really want privacy would want to use Monero over Zcash. But I think you have to understand why, if you’re Monero Maxi, you hate TCash. I get that. It makes sense to me.

That’s also one of the reasons why I sleep soundly on HYPE, because I don’t think it is—well, I sleep soundly on Zcash because I don’t think it is either. By the way, at least if it is, it’s fucking on the upside. Positive. You want to know it’s cool, and I don’t know either way.

Tiki posted a video the other day saying Zcash could hit $20,000.

The video he took the target from was comparing Litecoin versus Bitcoin at its all-time high, and then Bitcoin Cash versus Bitcoin at its all-time high. Litecoin was about 8% of Bitcoin’s market cap for a while, for a few months, and Bitcoin Cash was about 20% of Bitcoin’s market cap for a few months.

Yeah, it’s weird.

Some crypto OGs generally believe that there will still be a correlation between the movements of Zcash, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash.

As listed. Yeah, that’s a lot. What was that? There’s something about Tiki that I like. I don’t care what his philosophy is, but the fact that he has a serious price target of 20K—you know what I’m saying? I don’t mind it.

Yeah, cool. It is, but I don’t see that from anyone else for any other coin whatsoever. That’s my thing. I love the biggest bulls who say it’s going to be 200, or maybe it’s going to be 1,000 in 10–15 years, but they’re usually looking for something cheaper than 2×.

By the way, that’s my problem with on-chain right now. They’re like, “Stone versus 500.” I’m like, “Okay, bro, what do I do with this?” I was watching this old clip where you and I were playing on stream, and we were talking about hitting 10 billion guaranteed.

Yeah. So that’s how you blow up the bid: it’s 10 billion guaranteed. You’re not going to blow up the bid because it’s going to be 1.5.

It’s like, bro, I’m just going to buy the damn treasuries.

I would agree with that.

When people say, “I hope the market cap drops to the rate,” I’m like, “What?” I’m out of here. I’m out of here, guys. I’m totally out. You have to think it’s going to be 10 billion so you can sell it for three.

So maybe that’s why I prefer Zcash over the stock-ish level, because at least if Zcash reaches some kind of delusional level, people can go crazy for Zcash. But, again, that’s maybe a separate story. Always pay attention to that. Always look for the delusional. See who the biggest bull is and what target price they’re giving it. If it’s less than 2×, maybe find another coin. What the hell am I supposed to do with 2×? It’s disgusting. It makes me sick.

Okay. You’re also telling me some worldview stuff. By the way, you were one of the first people to bring up Cosby here, before I even realized it was like this. I think you were the first to tell me about Cosby. We have these IPOs coming up, but then Trump comes out and says, “Fuck off. We’re going to gas up AI trading.” You know, higher intelligence.

Combined with the meta-consumer stuff, people think, “Okay, that’s pretty cool. MicroStrategy back above 1,000, green dildos. It looks like AI trading might be starting again.” What do you think is going to happen with the neoclouds? Nebius? What do you think?

My biggest stock position is still Eli Lilly. I got back into that recently, at a good level, as I wrote to you. And Tulip King—maybe just Tulip King, because I know he was very bullish on it. I didn’t buy into that bullshit. I just think that’s the most bullish story I see in the AI space.

I think the whole data-center deployment process is actually very unreliable. I still think CoreWeave is kind of a short here. If you’re going to pick any stock with more leverage to the need for AI data centers, it’s CoreWeave.

Sure, they have a huge amount of debt. They’re spending, I think, about 20 billion of free cash flow a year building AI data centers, and the debt they’re financing is at 10–14%. They have very optimistic models for all of that that are working for them.

They haven’t really gone into the stock markets, but that’s the type of stock that I, as a high-yield trader and a stressed trader, would imagine shorting at a certain point. This is a company where, if there’s one misstep in the data-center buildout, CoreWeave is going to be in trouble.

It’s one of Nvidia’s biggest partners, and Nvidia needs these guys to succeed, so they probably have the backing. But their capital structure is very unstable, I think. There are a couple of other companies like that where I think the data-center buildout probably won’t be as strong.

I know Meta, or Zuck, was on some podcast recently and was very bullish about it, but I’m still wary of this data-center utopia that these guys are talking about. I think the memory trade is going to be strong, but it’s not going to be the strongest trade right now.

I think Micron is looking good. It’s probably going to be looking to go to an all-time high in the near term.

Hmm, but it’s not going to be something like 5×.

Yeah. People are still wary of that. Every day there was a rumor that memory prices were going to go down next year. Now we have a story about 2030, and that story isn’t as strong as it used to be.

I think these things are moving to an all-time high, which is about 20–30% over the next few months, but it’s not going to be a 2× move.

Yeah, but your strongest position would still be Lilly?

My strongest position would still be Lilly. I think Lilly can do something like 4–5× growth over the next 2 years.

Wow. I think that’s a really strong trade. 4–5× on a trillion and a half?

Yeah. I think this could be one of the most valuable companies in the world if they do it right.

Wow. You have a spot position on Lilly, right?

The leverage here is pretty complicated. I use leverage because you can do it through grid bots, but this is one of my long-term trades. I’ll say it: I’m in and out.

But if I ever get really optimistic about AI applications, it’s always something like health. It just seems like such a big deal. They have such a dominant position, and I think they’re just—

Then you have this whole GLP-1 trade. Half of my goddamn group chats are on Reta.

Half of your group chats are on Reta?

Yeah. Out of the 4 co-founders, 3 of them are on Reta now.

And you’re the one who’s not.

And in some of the group chats I’m in, it’s like 40–50%—all on Reta.

Isn’t that the same for you?

Well, I guess I’m in my 30s, where everyone’s probably the only person I know who’s busy is Rasmer[?]. I think girls are crazy about this. A lot of girls in my group chats are taking it.

Yeah, I think it’s going to be like that. If you look at the actual number of people who are taking it right now, it’s hundreds of thousands. It’s incredibly small.

It’s happening. That’s it. And it’s not even like, “No, no.” Do they like it? Your friends and the people who are taking it?

Yeah, they’re like, “This is the only thing.” These people were once on GLP-1s for a long time, or tested them, and it never really worked.

So I think this trade is also going to be an incredible trade. It’s also like AI meets farming, which I think they’re going to dominate. That’s my favorite AI story, and I keep going back to it and thinking, “Buy all these damn dips.”

The graph looks incredible. There was just a slump. It basically went down, and it felt like you had to buy the slump.

Wow. I didn’t know how many people were taking it. Maybe I’m just young and a little angry, but they’re taking it and they’re incredibly optimistic. There’s no such thing as, “Oh, this is causing this.” It’s like, “This is the best thing that could happen.”

Wow. God, that’s pretty intense, right? You need a needle and you have to stick it in. I can’t sign up for Reddit just to look good for an interview tomorrow.

No. The results are pretty fast. I know someone who started taking it a couple of weeks ago and lost a lot of weight.

So you’re worried that these GLP-1s—appetite suppressants, and also risk-taking suppressants—make you a bad trader?

Correlation.

I don’t think it’s obvious. There are people who I think are doing boring things who are also outspoken about it. Lilly has even said that it could potentially be used to combat addiction in other species, so maybe I wouldn’t use it as a trader.

I don’t know. Today there was a story that came out saying there was a lawsuit against Ozempic and Wegovy because they could possibly cause blindness. Maybe that story will get weaker if some case comes out in the future. But overall, I think they’ve done a good job.

I think it’s going to be used for a lot of different drugs. It’s not just a weight-loss drug. It can obviously be used to treat cardiovascular disease, stroke, some forms of cancer, and sleep apnea.

The thing is, it’s a trillion-dollar drug. It’s a Tulip King thing, and obesity actually causes most of the health problems. That problem can be solved by not being fat. It’s pretty similar to that problem. You have a cardiovascular problem because you’re about 75 pounds overweight. That could solve it—your blood pressure, too.

What do you think about the Robinhood situation?

I actually own HOOD. That’s my second-largest stock position. Honestly, I didn’t pay attention to it until Ansem and a16z noticed it.

I think they’re going to have a very strong third quarter. The results are coming in a month and a half, and everyone’s going to see the commission volume they’ve done in the last month or so.

But as a network, it seems to be slowing down a little bit. You know how these things can evolve, and I think they’re moving in the right direction. It’s a high forward-earnings multiple, something like 40 or 50 times, so you’re not buying it cheap. But I like the story.

The push for tokenization is going to be insanely massive. They seem to be fully on board with this, and they just got the exemption. I think they’re going to start putting a bunch of different things on the blockchain and try to push institutions to trade them.

I don’t know if that exemption is enough for hedge funds and asset managers to start trading them on the blockchain. Maybe. I know a guy who’s going to join Coinbase’s institutional sales team, and that could potentially be enough to get different institutions involved.

But, yeah, I think that’s HOOD. That’s the best way for me.

That’s the most obvious way. I was less of a believer in some of the individual stories about onchain.

I know. I have a little bit of a problem with that. I wasn’t very good at trading blockchain. I really wasn’t. I’m like a privileged salesperson now.

I don’t think it was bad. It was really good. I feel like these deals have become a little bit clearer.

Yeah. You really start talking like a plumber, you know? I like that. You know what the problem is? Tell me what you think about it: kids these days. I know these damn Axiom traders. That’s my real problem.

I actually think that’s the problem with onchain right now. That’s my biggest problem: I feel like it’s coming back to our target price, and everyone agrees at the same time that this whole onchain thing is worthless.

Well, there’s something there. I saw it after the first round with equity tokens like Gam, Chain, all these guys that were like creepy shitcoins. They’re so quick to go on Twitter and say, “Wow, look at you guys. You’re crazy in an industry where every onchain coin goes to zero, and then another one goes to zero.”

I just thought that’s not always the case when there’s a blockchain mania. People really believe that you have a lot more crazies than realists. I don’t know. We’ve talked about this before, but it seems like there are a lot of people who believe that if this coin goes crazy, it could go to $100 million, or maybe double its valuation to $200 million.

I just had a little bit of a hard time in that environment. It was total death in the middle of it all.

So, yeah, maybe I’m just a failed plumber. But the perps look pretty good.

But I don’t know. I just watched it. I mean, you’re a little bit over the top, a little bit too much. You’re playing with 7 figures this cycle, and last time you were playing with less.

Sometimes, when you have to do the math, you have to bet on size to make it make sense. Think about getting 6 figures on some of these coins. There’s an incredibly unrealistic unrealized gain and loss in FOMO. When we start to realize them, it’ll be a bloody bloodbath for some of them, right?

Or hopefully you get a piece and can hit them lower, but getting out of these coins in size is not easy. So if you’re actually trying to put in 6 figures and then try to do a 5x, we need to get out of $500,000 of this thing. That’ll probably increase it by 20%.

Let’s hope there’s not an exit tax like Stone’s stuff, and if they’re less clean. I realized that in the last cycle, you just had to make these trades the right size. You had to take a huge discount on entry and exit. You had to take a huge discount on profit and loss—huge, huge, like 30–40%.

So I don’t know if you’re in 7 figures, maybe even more. Maybe that’s a question outside of the thread, but that’s kind of the standard: that you have 3% of a $300 million coin that’s listed on perps, and you go short and sell size.

Wasn’t there Hyperliquid JELLY, and that was a whole legal situation? Is that what Wintermute does all day?

That’s what Wintermute does all day. They sell them. For example, if they own extra tokens and people are always like, “Oh, they’re stockpiling for the listing,” no. What happens is either part of the team or one big owner sells them 2–3% of the coin.

Then they take a position at the expense of everyone else, spending all day pushing people up and then breaking them down, pushing people up and breaking them down. For example, if you see Wintermute owns a coin that you’re involved in, just remember that they’re delta-neutral. But delta neutrality means they can also move the market.

So if you have 2–3% of any coin, you can kind of—

It’s an interesting job. It’s just destroying people onchain.

Yeah. I think Wintermute makes a lot of money. They give you a price for anything. I think that’s their job. They never try to be the cheapest, but they always give you a price.

If you want to get out of something, they’ll give you a price.

They’ll give you a price. I like that. I like that thing.

Yeah. So if you wanted to, they make a lot of money, basically, by playing on that. Usually they look at things at 3% of the memecoin. If you want to get 3% of it and you’re part of the team, or 5%, I don’t know how much Fartcoin they sold to the developers—obscene amounts.

The same goes for GOAT. The same goes for pretty much all these other damn coins. I think they’re making a bunch. So, yeah, if you’re new to this cycle, don’t think Wintermute or a market maker owning your coin is a good thing.

Especially if it has VCs, you talk about it like it’s a good thing. I think we talked about it once.

Yeah, probably naively, because a lot of market makers were reaching out to you in the early stages. But it didn’t happen. They kept buying more and more packages, and there was this vague idea that they were somehow leading the listing—leading the listing.

Yeah, like, “Wintermute, they’re going to get us listed on Binance,” but it just doesn’t work. Get a Binance listing so we can die. That’s what happens.

No. Obviously, I’m part of the coins. This transaction doesn’t happen that way. The exchange itself is asking for coins that are usually given through an airdrop program or deposited directly on the exchange. So that’s not how it works. That’s not how it works.

Be very, very careful if they’re involved in your coins. I can already understand that when some coins are coming out right now, people have a completely wrong idea about what we had last cycle.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s easier to be a plumber, you know? Believe in Zcash. Plumbers win, man.

That’s the last thing I want to ask you: who do you think is really good at trading right now? Who’s really good right now? What do you like?

I like Tiki. I think he’s kind of the king of plumbers, isn’t he? He really has a lot of similar views on VC.

One element of alpha is that I’ve been watching the Delphi podcast, because I think they’re right about a lot of things. Generally, I tend to learn the coins that everyone thinks these investors are watching from that podcast. At this point in the cycle, I think that’s a good option.

There are about 4 or 5 guys on that podcast. They’ve got about 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers each. Some of the bigger guys have a little bit more, but there’s no one guy from the deli that’s really good.

I’ll give you a name right now. He’s got Jonah Gills as the PFP from the damn—

Yeah.

These guys basically called everything, and they usually talk to the institutions. So if you look at what the institutions want to own, these guys called this cycle well. I don’t know if they do huge size, but they definitely called it.

Yeah. Who’s Delphi? God, what year is it, man?

I think it used to be a much more public research firm, and they had a venture capital department. Now the podcast is just the partners of that, getting together and discussing what venture funds and what venture capital tokens everyone wants to own. That’s good.

Man, you’re the boss. Any ultimate dark horse idea for an exchange?

No. I think I gave you all my exchange ideas. They’re kind of generic. They’re just going to be the size of a plumber.

Man, you’ve been playing pretty well lately. I guess you’re always good. But something about your style—I think you trade pretty much like a16z. That’s my favorite thing. You just don’t miss a lot, or when you miss, it’s pretty—

You don’t like to miss these huge 50% drawdown deals. If you miss, you’re wrong, you’re out, and you get in the game pretty quickly. Let’s move on to the next one. It’s pretty impressive.

I think, like I said, I didn’t trade this in August. I caught some of the wrong moves.

Did you have big losses, or did you just miss?

I missed. I think I lost about $500,000. I wrote about it.

Oh, no.

No, no, no. I was flat. I was flat all the way through by a big margin, man. Maybe it’s the house. But this month was really good, based on the fact that I was trying to talk a little more.

He says he doesn’t have Telegram, so I’m worried I’ll have to talk to him on X. We’re finding that he’s actually pretty good. In fact, every time he posts a deal, I’m like, accepting it.

The whole Bitcoin thing was crazy. What you see is that Bitcoin is going to pump 20% for no reason, and he just breaks through. It was madness.

Also, if he does it between his tweets, you usually get a deal before the deal. I don’t know how to describe it.

Yeah, like me.

I caught VVV when he was writing about it. I knew exactly what he was talking about when he talked about private inference with OpenAI. I think he pumped, to be honest, but why do you think it’s normal?

Come on. He is good. I don’t care.

What do you think is so special about his timing that makes it so accurate?

Well, he just had some good exchanges. He’s like a new pigeon. He makes the trade and everyone says, “Okay, let’s go out and do this.”

Come on.

He has such a touch now. If he calls something, it’s his hobby.

Yes. It’s like he called HOOD 24 hours before Ansem did. I kind of caught it at the right time, and then his tweets gave BBV away.

I didn’t catch Meta, even though I know he did. But do you know what he called?

He was aiming for Meta, but he’s selling Expedia, which I liked to some extent. It didn’t really play out because the Meta story was, “Oh my God, she’s booking all these hotels and flights and all this other stuff for me.”

Selling Expedia was pretty cool.

This is something like a $50 billion company. I liked it, but it didn’t work.

Yeah, I mean, he’s very smart. He always thinks two or three steps ahead, so I like traders like that. Of course, I have my own ideas, but I’m looking for traders who think one or two steps ahead, not just something that looks good on the chart. He’s also currently on DraftKings in a Kentucky drama. What do you think about this?

I didn’t even see it. I saw he posted something about—who’s the guy that Cramer didn’t like on DraftKings? I couldn’t even put two and two together. So he likes the DraftKings trade. I don’t know. I am optimistic about gambling and the growth of gambling. I know you are too.

It is worse with a soft shill. I hate this.

Yeah, I think he’s been a soft shill all last year.

Right. He felt like a lightweight Cephus[?]. It was like you knew the trade, but only if you knew him, you knew the trade. He was a little more frank now. This is much better.

I hate this.

He actually says that this is the trade. I like it. I think this is better. This is much better, for better or worse.

I think the app needs more than that. It needs more original ideas from traders. Even today, I expressed the opinion that the market is falling. Who the hell cares if I’m wrong? At least people—I just like it for the flow. I just want to take. Trinity is brothers. I want to see what people think. So I think we need more than that.

So, what is your conclusion about the market decline?

Again, $87K, $88K. I think $88K is a key level. I thought we were going to have another breakout of $88K today, but we wouldn’t break through the $88K level. Then I just thought we’d have a retest, like $80K–$82K. The way this positioning was set up, it was set up in altcoins. The way the market felt yesterday, everyone was like me. I had random messages written to me, like, “Should I buy a beauty salon?” People also bought garbage yesterday.

Let’s say it was the biggest increase, and it’s just—yes, that’s right. All the memecoins went up. PEPE pumped a 30% candle, and all of a sudden this tourist capital came in. It was like a huge influx of ETFs. Suddenly, it just became very volatile.

If the price of Bitcoin drops from $88K or $87K to $80K, it’ll flush out the people who just came in. That’s all there was. It’s not like we’re in a bullish cycle. If you’re happy to just walk away and you’re thinking, “You’re a plumber who owns Zcash, which looks really strong,” oh, okay. I’m just telling you that we seem to have a little flush that’s starting to leak.

Man, you’re one of the best guys. You really are.

Yeah, I like to give it a couple of weeks, three weeks.

See you on our quarterly stream, bro. It’s okay. Love you so much. What a beggar. He’s the best.