BULL RUN IS OVER?
Summary
- Ansem treats the selloff as the first meaningful pullback since the late-June bottom, not the end of the bull run. Bitcoin had recently retested the roughly $87,500 yearly open, a major resistance level, and was near $81,700; his key downside line was $75,000, below which “it might get a little tricky.” Rising rates and war risk are the macro wall of worry, but he still sees the structure as favorable for adding.
- The portfolio prescription is a 70/30 barbell: 70% high-conviction spot holdings and 30% speculative onchain or perpetual-futures trades. Ansem notes that eventual multibillion-dollar winners have historically suffered 75%-80% drawdowns after an initial 100x, but warns against becoming trapped in one meme through “too much intellectual capital.” The objective is to recycle exceptional speculative gains into assets with less downside.
- PUMP, HYPE and STRK were Ansem’s clearest near-term calls. He cited PUMP’s roughly $2.5 million of daily revenue, product execution and strong chart. Banks identified the $0.005-$0.0055 area as a strong spot and expected a return to the approximately $0.01 high “within a few weeks,” with a longer-term $20-$30 billion valuation scenario. HYPE remains Ansem’s preferred platform bet, while his STRK call—around $0.06—was later labeled the “trade of the week” by Banks on privacy, programmability and quantum-resistance narratives.
- His upside targets are intentionally asymmetric but explicitly conditional. Ansem thinks Zcash could reach a $100 billion market cap, roughly $10,000 per coin, and assigned about a 70% chance to Zcash reaching $2,000 by December 31; his lifetime Bitcoin target is $1.5 million, based on matching gold’s stated $30 trillion market cap. Banks also named quantum and inflation risks for Bitcoin; quantum risk is central to Ansem’s Zcash thesis.
- Ansem rejects the idea that a conventional memecoin will flip Bitcoin because “Bitcoin is the original memecoin,” though he later acknowledged that a pure meme doing so is possible. Pure animal memes now face lower ceilings because novelty has faded, capital is fragmented and traders want to buy at $100,000 rather than $100 million. Multibillion-dollar outcomes require attention and capital from outside crypto’s existing onchain bubble, not one viral headline.
- The structural bull case is tokenization plus stablecoins feeding a new “meme-fi” application layer. In Ansem’s model, issuers such as Circle and Tether turn stablecoin adoption into indirect demand for U.S. debt, while more assets and money moving onchain invite developers to build speculative protocols around them. He sees Solana already competing with centralized exchanges on volume and, in some cases, delivering better spreads.
- Turning $1,000 into meaningful capital requires a durable core, early information and disciplined rotation—not indiscriminate leverage or one-click token launches. Ansem would now auto-buy HYPE while using a smaller sleeve to front-run onchain narratives and compound momentum trades; his own first-cycle mistake was round-tripping gains instead of selling. Ansem also said his degen portfolio’s gains had fallen from almost $300,000 to around $90,000 after he redeployed shortly before the crash, including a roughly $80,000 loss in three days.
Deep dive
1. The bull case survives unless Bitcoin loses $75,000
Ansem’s read was constructive but level-dependent: Bitcoin had recently retested the approximately $87,500 yearly open, which he described as a major resistance spot, and traded near $81,700. The line he did not want breached was $75,000: below it, “it might get a little tricky.”
He framed the decline as the first real reset since the late-June bottom, with leveraged participants—not necessarily the broader thesis—taking the damage. “We’re climbing the wall of worry,” he said, citing rising rates and war concerns while maintaining that the market still looked structurally addable.
Banks admitted the emotional reality behind that thesis: large red numbers make buying difficult even when drawdowns are normal. Ansem’s answer was blunt: if buying weakness were easy, “everybody would be a millionaire.”
2. A 70/30 barbell prevents one meme from owning the portfolio
Ansem’s recurring allocation rule is 70% high-conviction spot crypto and 30% “degen” exposure through onchain coins and perpetuals. Salary or other income can replenish the safer sleeve; outsized speculative wins should also be harvested into positions with more limited downside.
The sharp onchain decline did not surprise him because tiny-cap assets bottom earlier, run harder and then retrace harder than majors. Previous eventual multibillion-dollar coins, he argued, endured 75%-80% drawdowns after their first roughly 100x move.
His warning was behavioral as much as financial: an investor can become unwilling to sell after committing “too much intellectual capital” to one meme, then miss a 3x in Bitcoin, ETH or SOL and a potential 5x-10x in PUMP or HYPE. Concentration occasionally works spectacularly, but can leave the portfolio stranded.
3. Singapore reinforced the institutional adoption thesis
From Token2049 in Singapore, Ansem described a conference weighted toward technical builders and institutions rather than “moon boys” selling vapor. His takeaway was that many sophisticated people who remained through the bear market were now visibly bullish.
The long-term evidence, in his telling, spans tokenization, stablecoins, stores of value and perpetual futures. Several applications are already working, while others have “flown under the radar” and may emerge during the current cycle.
Solana was his clearest infrastructure example: low transaction costs let developers build trading interfaces that compete with centralized exchanges across crypto, stocks and other assets, sometimes with better spreads. He also flagged Wormhole’s role in Sunrise’s cross-chain tokenized assets, though he had not bought any and stressed its deeply beaten-down chart.
They also discussed Robinhood adding $25 million of Bitcoin to its balance sheet. Banks read the move as evidence of crypto alignment, Bitcoin bullishness and broader institutional normalization.
4. A one-hour trading contest exposed real skill—and distorted incentives
In Coinbase’s ten-trader competition, each participant started with $10,000 and could trade any perpetual on Coinbase Pro, the new or relaunched product. Ansem first went long Bitcoin and Zcash, then closed those positions and shorted ETH at maximum leverage, briefly reaching first place before finishing fourth.
The winner’s decisive move was strategic rather than random. After the field had been short, Intern recognized that staying short could not beat Ansem’s larger short; by going long Bitcoin at roughly 50x, he gained while the leaders simultaneously lost. Ansem called it effectively “2x gain immediately” when price reversed.
Banks’s pushback—worth keeping—was that one hourly candle and extreme leverage overrepresent degeneracy, even if low-time-frame trading has a genuine skill curve. He wanted viewers to hear the thesis, risk logic and relationship between a position and the trader’s worldview, not merely watch charts.
Ansem conceded that longer-term spot holdings will probably make the most money for most people, but defended perps as learnable and potentially superior for elite operators. He had built much of his own wealth trading them; in the contest, $10,000 controlled approximately $500,000-$600,000, illustrating both their appeal and danger.
5. Trading media needs personalities and story arcs, not sterile esports
Banks compared current trading contests with esports’ mistake of overprofessionalizing itself. Call of Duty was most culturally alive when competitors argued, threw controllers and built rivalries; sanitizing that behavior made the format less representative of gaming culture. His broader premise was that attention and distribution become the moat as AI makes products easier to copy.
His proposed format was closer to Big Brother: traders living together for a month, developing ideas on camera, recording confessionals and carrying viewers through a position that could end seven figures higher. The thesis formation, disagreement and social dynamics would become the entertainment.
Ansem’s distinction was that esports audiences watch people perform, while trading audiences watch people make money and immediately ask, “How do I do what they’re doing?” Both agreed that this gives trading media enormous potential, but Banks argued the existing format has not approached a mass audience.
6. Bitcoin remains the original memecoin, while Zcash is the quantum-related comparison
Responding to Morad’s thesis that a memecoin such as SPX could reach trillions or flip broader markets, Ansem said the direction was right: collective belief and social consensus should command a growing premium if AI commoditizes intellect and creates “a trillion AI agents.”
His categorical objection was that “Bitcoin is the original memecoin”—the first digital asset whose value emerged from collective belief that it could reach a multitrillion-dollar valuation, starting from zero. Its “immaculate conception” is unlikely to recur in the same way. He later acknowledged that a pure meme flipping Bitcoin was possible.
Zcash is the asset he can imagine approaching a Bitcoin-like valuation if quantum computing threatens existing cryptography. He owns Zcash spot rather than a leveraged perp and argues that it combines collective store-of-value belief with privacy and other properties he considers better than Bitcoin’s.
7. One viral event cannot manufacture a multibillion-dollar meme
Banks’s Super Inu trade captured the puzzle: he and his group bought around a $23 million market cap, made about $20,000 and exited before it peaked near $55 million. Four days later, the pair discussed Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Jensen Huang being shown together in what Ansem described as a rebranding of AI to “SI” or superintelligence, yet the token still failed to explode.
Ansem rejected that muted response as proof that onchain memes were dead. A viral event merely redirects the finite capital already onchain; a token reaches billions when attention spreads outside “our little CT bubble” and brings in people who previously had no crypto exposure.
Accumulation matters because months of two-way trading create a durable holder base. A one-hour spike is exciting, but Ansem argued it cannot substitute for aggressive buyers absorbing sellers in a range before price finally expands.
Banks countered with the earlier Peanut example, which reached billions after Trump discussed it; Ansem conceded that present ceilings do look lower. His explanation was saturation: animal memes are no longer novel, choices have multiplied, and “everybody wants to buy something at 100K market cap” while few want to bid at $100 million.
8. Tokenization turns the next speculative cycle into “meme-fi”
Ansem’s “meme-fi” label joins two forces: memes create crypto-native objects for speculation, while finance supplies the exchanges, games and protocols built around them. The likely winners combine culture with utility or mechanics that did not exist in earlier cycles.
The monetary plumbing is stablecoins. His thesis is that the U.S. government benefits when dollar stablecoins expand because issuers such as Circle and Tether hold U.S. debt; every new user therefore becomes, indirectly and perhaps unknowingly, part of a larger Treasury buyer base.
More real-world assets and stablecoins onchain should attract more capital, which attracts developers, which creates additional venues for speculation. Banks’s practical endorsement was simpler: moving large sums through USDC feels “leagues better” than banks in convenience and, when operated correctly, safety.
9. PUMP, HYPE and STRK led a broader but selective trade list
STRK was Ansem’s under-discussed call for the coming week, trading near $0.06. He tied the project to a technically respected team, Zcash lineage and a rare combination of privacy, quantum-resistance and programmability; the wreckage across Ethereum L2 tokens is what made the chart interesting. Banks later labeled it the “trade of the week.”
PUMP remained one of Ansem’s least worrying bags. He cited roughly $2.5 million in daily revenue, competition from Bonk, STOMP and FOMO, rapid feature shipping and vertical integration from launchpad to PumpSwap DEX to mobile app. Banks identified the $0.005-$0.0055 area as a strong spot and expected a return to the approximately $0.01 high within weeks.
HYPE was the easiest conviction call: Ansem described Hyperliquid as crypto’s best perpetuals platform and highlighted its U.S. partnership with Kraken. Asked for a target, he refused—if it can “consume all of finance,” a fixed number risks forcing either a premature sale or stubbornness when conditions change.
The unowned watchlist included Grass and LayerZero. Grass’s case is access to web data through individual devices for AI labs that need training and inference data, while its marketing is constrained by NDAs; LayerZero’s Atlas launch also interested him. Ansem also spoke positively about Ethena, but did not say he held any of these positions.
10. Huge targets require flexible exits and a repeatable compounding system
Ansem’s explicit scenarios were $100 billion for Zcash—roughly $10,000 per coin—and a 70% subjective probability of Zcash reaching $2,000 by December 31, versus the market’s displayed roughly 30%-33%. For Bitcoin, his lifetime target was $1.5 million, matching gold’s stated $30 trillion market cap. Banks named quantum and inflation as the principal risks to that thesis.
Banks put PUMP’s longer-term valuation in the $20-$30 billion range from about $2.5 billion. Ansem tied that case to tokenization expanding coin creation, social trading and mobile distribution expanding participation, and the team monetizing adjacent products. He compared the opportunity to 2021’s L1 trade shifting into today’s application layer.
Starting over, Ansem would auto-buy HYPE as his core and use the remaining capital to catch early alts and onchain narratives. He began trading with $100 and entered crypto with roughly $3,000, regularly bought Bitcoin from paychecks, then compounded rotations across assets such as SOL, Luna and AVAX; his first-cycle error was failing to sell and round-tripping gains.
Banks’s counterpoint was that trading is a high-risk PVP game—he cited the “90-90-90” rule—and that people can create value without trading. They also discussed how creator fees shifted incentives toward launching coins, though Banks stressed that profitable creators rely on fast infrastructure, bundling and distribution rather than simply clicking a button.
Ansem said his degen portfolio had been up almost $300,000 before its gains fell to around $90,000. He had stabled up, then redeployed two days before the crash into two or three positions, including Zcash and meme coins, and said he was down roughly $80,000 over three days.