Bitcoin Reclaims $90k: Have We Bottomed?
Bitcoin Reclaims $90k: Have We Bottomed?
Summary
- The bottom call: Avi’s core frame — “you tend to bottom when the selling stops, not when the buying begins” — and the selling looks exhausted: gargantuan capitulation volume on the Nov 21 wick to $80k, a low-volume breakeven-seller flush at the 92-93k demand zone, and no new low off 84k. The trade: buy 90-91k, stop at 84, target 100k, with all-time highs possible in ~two months.
- Jonah’s flow confirmation: funding flipped negative around Thanksgiving, and the OG whale selling that drove the whole decline slowed below 90k — whale wallets actually accumulated over the weekend. 90k is “equilibrium price… buy with both hands price”; expect a choppy, institution-free December driven by retail and CTAs, then big inflows in the first weeks of January.
- Kevin Hasset as Fed chair (Polymarket jumped to 70% after Trump said the decision is made) is the macro green light: he owns $1-5M of Coinbase stock, worked for One River Digital, and is “cartoonishly stupidly dovish… Mr. Pump Your Bags” — Trump’s “wink wink nudge nudge” that there will be no bear market into the midterms, with shadow-chair pressure on Powell from December.
- The MSTR disagreement: it trades below its ~$55B of Bitcoin minus $9-10B of debt and Jonah wanted to buy it “for the very first time in my life” — but Avi talked him out live: the DAT era is over and Saylor’s only survival path is selling stock into every rebound. “Why would I own something that needs to be diluted in order to exist?” Avi’s alternative: HYPE to $50 in ~six weeks — vesting-supply fears “massively overrated.”
- Aster is reported at 110% of Hyperliquid’s volume, with Jonah also saying it is 38% of Hyperliquid’s fees before saying both generate $1.9M/day; HYPE is valued 4.5x as much. Jonah is long perps at 2x calling it a possible five-bagger — explicitly “a great bet on crime and corruption.” Avi says CZ controls 95% of supply, is in with World Liberty Financial, and “it’s not going to win fair by fighting fair.”
- The AI trade: Avi says Gemini is “out of control good” and has replaced ChatGPT for him; Jonah says Gemini is better — if ChatGPT’s ~$1T value shifts to Google, that’s “a wealth transfer from Thrive Capital to Jonah and Avi because we hold SPY and Google.” Jonah thinks Meta has the most unrealized AI upside; Avi is 95% invested with “no fear for the equity market” and is debating leverage.
- The one risk on the horizon: like dotcom 2000 and shale-era oil in 2013-15, AI’s reality-check could precipitously crash some subsector — but not before late 2026/early 2027 at the absolute earliest. Until then, Trump pours gasoline on the macro fire and the AGI race pours it on the AI fire; Avi: “bubbles pop when there’s no more gasoline to pour on the fire” — and the government is still pouring.
Deep dive
1. Bottoms form when the selling stops, not when the buying begins
- Avi’s read of the chart: Bitcoin bounced off 84k by Monday evening, and the structure since is “a classic bottoming pattern” — the massive volume spike on Friday, Nov 21 at the wick down to $80k (call it 3-4x average daily volume) was the capitulatory moment, and the recent selloff was “just the last stragglers.” His trader’s axiom, worth the whole episode: “you tend to bottom when the selling stops, not when the buying begins.”
- The mechanics of the retest: 92-93k was a demand zone where lots of people averaged in (the Nov 18 hammer); when price got back there from 80, they offloaded at flat — “break even is a very psychologically powerful thing.” But that low-volume profit-taking is far less scary than the panicked de-risking that started “once 100k broke.” Expect the same shakeout again near 100k before it resolves higher.
- One refinement: the Oct 10 volume spike was not comparable because it was not 30% off the highs and involved forced liquidations. Avi’s distinction was that derivative liquidations come first, while panic spot selling is the final step to watch. The setup now: no new low means buy 90-91, stop out at 84 (~8% risk) against a move to 100k (~10%), with all-time highs possible in two months. “Once we start going back up, you kind of got to get in.”
2. Jonah’s flow check: selling appears to have slowed
- Funding flipped from solidly positive to wrapped-around-zero negative right around Thanksgiving, and the OG whale selling the pair had flagged as the main driver of the decline “slowed below 90-ish k” — Jonah tracked it by prompting Grok against Glassnode-subscriber tweets, which stitched together that whale wallets stopped sending coin to exchanges and accumulated over the weekend. The wall of OG supply above 100k “is finite, and that supply is getting gobbled up.”
- His level map: 90k is “equilibrium price… buy with both hands price” — the no-coiner friends who laughed in 2021 are calling to ask about buying the 80s. The playbook: buy below 90k, do nothing above 95-100k, endure “a super choppy December” (institutions don’t commit risk in December; it’s retail and CTAs), then expect big inflows in the first couple weeks of January.
3. The 30% rule — and who actually sets Bitcoin’s price now
- Across the last three major pullbacks: ~32%, ~33%, and now 35% top-to-bottom, versus 18-20% dips in uptrends. Jonah’s explanation for why ~30% keeps being respected: “30% down is about 50% up” back to highs — exactly the risk/reward that slow-moving, large-ticket investors wait patiently for. “Apes like me and you… are not driving the price as much as your big boys allocating, like the Texas pension.”
- The access story keeps widening: Vanguard now allowing crypto (as Jonah relayed) and Bank of America letting RIAs recommend up to 4% of portfolios in IBIT. The 33% “magic number” shows up in Robinhood’s pullback too — Jonah bought it at 112-113, “people clowned me, but I’m up 14%” — and Avi calls HOOD “a secular bet… the best way to bet on the boomers transferring wealth to younger generations.” Solana fell further because it’s “next-level speculative,” but the 126 retest held and it “is probably going to do very well too.”
4. Hasset is Trump’s wink-wink to buy everything
- Powell’s term ends on May 26th, Trump says the decision is made, and Polymarket moved instantly: “no announcement by Dec 31” collapsed to 20% and Kevin Hasset jumped to 70%. Jonah’s cynical read: administration insiders trade Polymarket on what the market doesn’t know, so “Polymarket basically tells you what’s going to happen” — he bets the announcement comes this week.
- The resume, per Jonah: an economist, so qualified on paper — but also owner of $1-5M of Coinbase stock, a paid adviser to the company, and someone who worked for One River Digital Asset Management. “Cartoonishly stupidly dovish, cartoonishly… bullish crypto… he is basically Mr. Pump Your Bags — this guy should be on the cover of the 2026 edition of Monopoly.” The message: no bear market in the middle of the midterms, plus a shadow Fed chair pressuring Powell from December. “The only thing more bullish would be if Trump had appointed Don Jr.”
5. Avi talks Jonah out of MicroStrategy, live
- Jonah’s temptation: MSTR’s market cap sits below its ~$55B of Bitcoin even after subtracting $9-10B of debt, with a huge volume bar on the lows amid maximum FUD — and since “the second derivative of the news is more important than the current state,” it’s hard for the narrative to get worse unless liquidation starts. “For the very first time in my life I actually want to buy MicroStrategy.”
- Avi’s rebuttal — the exchange of the episode: the DAT game is over, retail no longer needs holding vehicles, and the company’s admission it could sell Bitcoin derivatives to service debt is what spooked the market. Saylor’s only survival path is “when MicroStrategy rebounds, sell as much stock as he possibly can — why would I own something that needs to be diluted in order to exist?” Jonah folds on the spot: “Okay, you just talked me out of MicroStrategy… knowing my luck now it’s going to rip 50%.”
- Avi’s preferred expression: HYPE — it held up “remarkably well for an altcoin,” the team-vesting supply fears are “massively overrated,” the 29-31 zone keeps getting bought when a break should have caused panic, and it “continues to print money like nobody’s business.” His guess: $50 hype in the next ~six weeks. Both also like Galaxy here — “a place to deploy some Skril” — as another bottomed, high-volume-flush chart.
6. Aster: “a great bet on crime and corruption”
- Jonah’s stats (75 days live): Aster is reported at $10.3B versus Hyperliquid’s $9.3B in volume, and he also says it is 38% of Hyperliquid’s fees before saying both generate identical fees at $1.9M/day. OI is 46% ($2.5B vs $5.5B), buybacks oscillate at 60-90% of Hyperliquid’s — yet HYPE is valued 4.5x ASTER. Flipping Hyperliquid implies $420 against $1.01 today; he’s long perps at 2x leverage and thinks “it might be a good five-bagger in a best-case scenario.”
- Avi’s thesis is explicitly not product quality: “It’s not even really decentralized… a centralized exchange with a Web3 login. It’s not going to win fair by fighting fair.” Avi says CZ controls 95% of the supply, is in with the World Liberty Financial crowd, and “it’s not going to win fair by fighting fair” — while Jonah says it will be “faked until it is made.” Jonah’s summary: “a great bet on crime and corruption. And I like those bets.”
- Avi’s position: “I’m a hater of this asset… I think all of the data you’re spewing is probably fake” — but “I’m probably mid-curving it.” His two concessions: the weekly chart hasn’t broken 90 cents since Nov 1 despite a $9B FDV nobody’s selling into, and the Binance precedent (“everyone said wash trading, Chinese scammery — and it won”). Jonah offers the parallel-growth angle: Hyperliquid is Western-focused while Aster could become an Eastern-focused venue, including the no-KYC capital-control-evasion angle Avi mentions.
7. Gemini and the trillion-dollar wealth transfer
- Avi’s conversion: “Google Gemini is out of control good… it’s taken away my desire to use ChatGPT” the way ChatGPT killed his Googling. The investable point: everyone screaming “AI makes no money” is anchored on OpenAI — but Google has the infrastructure to make AI profitable and OpenAI seemingly doesn’t, so an OpenAI failure only matters “if they’re the only game in town.” He bought Google on his tweet and may add; “I have no fear for the equity market. I’m still 95% invested” — now debating whether to get levered.
- Jonah’s extension: he says ChatGPT is worth about $1T and describes the privately held company as being held by Thrive Capital, other VCs, and angels — if that market cap migrates to Google, it’s “a wealth transfer from Thrive Capital to Jonah and Avi, because we hold SPY and Google.” Google runs on its own TPUs, so the “self-licking ice cream cone” of recursive OpenAI-Nvidia-Microsoft commitments — “a bit reminiscent of the DATs in crypto” — bleeds Nvidia market cap toward Google. And “Meta has the most room to run and the most value to extract from AI out of everybody — the stock market doesn’t realize it yet.”
8. Gasoline on both fires — the reckoning is a 2026-27 problem
- Jonah’s two analogies: dotcom 1999-2000 (euphoria → “it’s a game-changer but will take longer than expected” → crash) and crude oil 2013-15 (peak-supply theory plus the Arab Spring mooned prices → shale reality crushed OPEC). AI’s “L1s” — Nvidia, OpenAI, the hyperscalers — are in the mooning phase; Jonah expects reality setting in could produce “a precipitous collapse” in some hard-to-name subsector in ‘26-‘27. “That dip is probably a buy after it’s cratered… but you don’t want to stand in front of that freight train.” Until then, underwrite no war and no trad credit crisis: “we’re in the clear until late 2026, early 2027 at the absolute earliest.”
- Avi won’t prognosticate that far but rejects the premise for now: “bubbles pop when there’s no more gasoline to pour on the fire” — growth “is still going nuts” and, crucially, it’s the government pushing money into the market. “Until that stops, I think we’re good.”
- The Sam Altman thought experiment: asked whether OpenAI should capitulate the AGI race to chase profitability, Avi says never — it’s a video game where “you can collect as many coins as you want along the way, but you only win when you get to the end and you beat Bowser,” and OpenAI “might still be closest” to AGI. Jonah’s synthesis: Trump pours gasoline on the macro fire, the incentive structure pours it on AI — “how could anyone be bearish in this environment in the short to medium term?” Avi’s only bear case is skittishness itself: the market has low conviction, and “you can be smarter than everybody else, or you can be first — everyone wants to be first.”
9. In the era of AI, all that’s left is rizz
- On the crowded DEX field, Jonah handicaps Lighter by founder charisma: “he ain’t no Jeff… a little weirdo, but he’s really, really damn smart” — the classic Chad-versus-nerd debate. Jonah’s half-joking law: “In the era of AI, everyone is smart, so all that’s left is rizz.”
- His serious version, framed as how he’s educating his kids: the value of top-1% intelligence — “Jeff from Hyperliquid smart, Citadel HFT smart” — “is only going to multiply,” while for the 99th percentile and below intelligence gets commoditized and what’s left is charisma, sales skills, “maybe morals and ethics,” and knowing how to interpret AI output.
10. Edge is time preference — and the fastest coins off a bottom are the worst ones
- Jonah’s honest edge audit: he won’t beat Citadel, Renaissance, D.E. Shaw, or Two Sigma at picking short-term tops — his edge is conviction, commodities experience, and riding megatrends without reporting daily P&L to a risk manager. Avi, who managed billions before podcasting, agrees for the audience: “your biggest edge is your time preference” — professionals rationally chase three-to-six-month winners even when it underperforms over time (though “we made a ton of money and beat Bitcoin for eight quarters straight”).
- The bottom-fishing psychology Avi leaves as his closer: after big drawdowns, people desperate to reclaim their high-water mark “shove money into the highest-risk” assets — “your likely Fartcoin and your SPX900… absolute dog[–] that probably isn’t going to exist in three years, but in the next 10 days might be the best performer.” Jonah’s version of the question: does Fartcoin double from here “before it dies”?