Summary

ChiefingZa’s central call is that ETH is becoming a major institutional crypto asset alongside Bitcoin, and its thin liquidity plus underweight positioning could produce an “absolute face ripper.” Wall Street has effectively “anointed” BTC and ETH, while market-cap-weighted allocation could plausibly send ETH a meaningful fraction of Bitcoin ETF flows. He expects ETH’s competition with Bitcoin to become clearer over two to five years, though “a lot of things have to go right.”
ChiefingZa says crypto is definitively in a bull market, which changes how investors should interpret extended periods of despair. When conditions look unsalvageable, he expects a positive catalyst because favorable headlines characterize bull regimes. Too many traders instead “lend their conviction to someone else,” waiting for figures such as GCR to authorize a bid. Avi separately described crypto as especially reflexive.
The election-related ideas split among Avi’s ETH “Trump trade,” ChiefingZa’s SOL thesis and potentially Lido on staking policy. ChiefingZa expects a friendlier administration to improve SOL ETF odds, with a potentially attractive top around the March 2025 unlocks and ETF decision; staking permission could make hated Lido a narrative beneficiary. A BlackRock ETH ETF outsourcing staking to Lido would be “the real black pill,” although he treats that as conceivable, not assured.
His longer-term token framework favors movements with a shared belief and enemy over merely useful protocols. Bitcoin represents separating money from the state, Ethereum separating financial services from the state, and decentralized AI potentially separating AGI from the state. DeFi may rally from oversold conditions, but ChiefingZa would rather hold a movement with a much higher valuation ceiling than a steadily growing application token.
The preferred ETH implementation is deliberately simple: a large spot allocation, no leverage and cash reserved for dips and emergencies. ChiefingZa finds active major trading unusually difficult because ETF-supported markets keep mean-reverting without the old vicious drawdowns. Avi’s complementary thesis is that removing regulatory fear could let institutions “light up ETH” using infrastructure they have already spent years building.
L2 tokens are ChiefingZa’s least investable liquid segment, even though L2 usage can strengthen ETH as money. He calls L2s “almost parasitic to themselves”: transaction-fee capture is not what institutions will use to value ETH, while L2 economies could ultimately remit value in ETH. Finding a squeeze would require unlock, OTC-hedging and on-chain distribution forensics; simply owning ETH may capture “a bulk of the return with much less volatility.”
TAO is ChiefingZa’s only other sizable alt position because Bittensor combines a grassroots developer network with crypto’s strongest emerging narrative. Subnets may have grown from roughly four in October 2023 to, as he estimated, 38; his pitch preserves the central uncertainty: the incentive system is “super meta and it honestly probably might not work.” His answer to AI-bubble risk is that Nvidia rose dramatically while crypto-AI tokens fell about 70%, suggesting their price discovery remains driven more by the alt market than by public-equity AI performance.

Deep dive

1. Contrarian research produced three career-defining trades

ChiefingZa entered crypto at university around 2016–17, initially captivated by hash functions and Bitcoin as “sci-fi money.” That curiosity led through ICOs, Ethereum, Telegram and Reddit into active trading rather than passive ownership.
His admitted flaw became part of the method: “I’ve always held the mentality that I’m smarter than others,” an instinct that produced both large losses and a persistent desire to time markets. His best trades paired research with enough conviction to sit through volatility rather than continually scalp.
DeFi summer rewarded practical advantages such as debugging failed MetaMask transactions and interacting quickly with unfamiliar contracts. In Q2 2021, he paired EIP-1559 and rising DeFi/NFT activity with a BTC topping structure around the Coinbase IPO, producing a large ETH and ETH/BTC trade.
SOL was the third defining bet: he sized heavily in the low $20s, then “definitely did sell too early.” Post-Merge ETH had become crowded, while Solana was hated and offered the only meaningful monolithic-chain differentiation among a field of EVM variants, L1s, L2s and L3s.

2. A bull market makes extreme despair a contrarian signal

ChiefingZa’s top-down declaration was categorical: “We’re definitively in a bull market.” Bull markets generally generate positive headlines, so an extended stretch of bad news should increase—not eliminate—the likelihood that something constructive arrives from left field.
The recent drawdown exposed how little independent conviction traders retain. Once BTC fell into the $50,000s and altcoins deteriorated, people began invoking “bear market” and looking to personalities such as GCR; ChiefingZa’s critique was that they wanted “their dad or someone to tell them to step up and bid.”
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump, rising odds of a crypto-friendly Republican administration and discussion of a strategic Bitcoin reserve abruptly reversed the mood. Avi also emphasized that crypto can move through multimonth or multiyear periods of concentrated despair or euphoria because it is more reflexive than some TradFi assets.

3. Election trades split between SOL beta and staking policy

ChiefingZa structures the book around a major plus selected themes, rather than making every position an election bet. ETH is his major of choice; decentralized AI is the longer-duration theme he believes remains “unironically very early,” despite few investable assets.
His straightforward Trump-odds trade is SOL because a new administration could sharply improve the probability of an ETF. The “sweeter trade,” however, may be identifying the SOL top around its March 2025 unlocks, which he expects to align with an ETF decision.
Lido offers a narrower staking-policy expression. ChiefingZa cited Hester Peirce’s view that staking need not be excluded from ETF products: clients will want the additional yield, though Coinbase or institution-built offerings may initially capture it rather than Lido.
The maximal scenario is an ETH ETF whose staking is outsourced to Lido—“the real black pill.” He considers it thinkable because BlackRock has already committed capital to on-chain assets, but he explicitly presents Lido as a narrative trade and says he is unsure exactly how the policy would flow through to it.

4. Tokens trade like movements, not miniature equities

ChiefingZa is tactically bullish on oversold DeFi, but its long-term ceiling looks lower than that of an emerging AI ecosystem. DeFi no longer captivates the market as it did during its first wave, so a short-term rotation does not automatically make its tokens attractive one- or two-year holdings.
His friend’s framework supplied the distinction: crypto tokens “aren’t stocks”; they can be vehicles for investing in political or social movements. Buying Bitcoin is both capital allocation and a “badge of honor” declaring that money and state should be separated.
The durable-token checklist therefore looks almost religious: Does the project have a unified goal, committed participants, an objective reason to exist and perhaps a common enemy? ChiefingZa dislikes the word “cult” but accepts the mechanism—capital sticks when holders believe they are advancing something larger than a product roadmap.
Avi’s pushback remains unresolved: useful protocols could reprice dramatically if institutions integrate them, yet the cycle’s best performers were meme coins, contradicting his earlier expectation that investors would demand products that “actually matter.” Usefulness alone has not created demand for utility tokens.

5. Wall Street’s allocation machinery can overpower ETH’s bad narrative

ChiefingZa’s ETH premise is institutional selection: Wall Street has “pretty much anointed two crypto assets” it can present to clients as digital forms of money—Bitcoin and Ethereum. He called Bitcoin’s launch highly successful and said clients were excited, leaving no obvious reason ETH cannot follow in its footsteps.
Traditional allocation is often market-cap-weighted rather than grounded in bespoke fundamental analysis. His provocative question is therefore, “Why would ETH not get 30% of the flows?” He had heard clients were ready for the product and considering moving some IBIT exposure into an ETH vehicle.
The supply-side setup amplifies that possibility. ETH rose roughly 20% in one day on ETF-approval news, while Jonah noted it may be less than 30% as liquid as BTC; even a fraction of Bitcoin’s inflows could therefore have an outsized effect.
Sentiment supplies the fuel: ETH supposedly lost to Solana, L2s are called parasitic, fees are low and ETH/BTC is treated as “down only.” Yet ChiefingZa said the ratio had barely moved for 10–11 months and might even exceed its October 2023 level. “ETH is becoming an institutional asset.”

6. ETH needs a sales pitch, but investors need not wait for it

Asked for Ethereum’s religion, ChiefingZa described an open, decentralized application store and “unstoppable finance” accessible worldwide—roughly, separating financial services from the state. He also cited Jordy’s “community money” meme: ETH is hoarded, traded, spent on NFTs and used across L2s.
His more tradeable answer is that the philosophy matters less than ETF demand. The objection that Bitcoin has a clean message while ETH does not becomes an opportunity: “You want to buy before they come up with the message,” because financial firms are motivated to invent a unified meme that sells the product.
ChiefingZa had initially expected ETH/BTC to break down after BlackRock’s ETH ETF announcement. He changed his mind when the ratio stopped making new lows as the ETF marketing happened and approached launch, despite SOL’s extraordinary run; that resilience turned the long ETH build-up into the next obvious trade.

7. Regulatory permission could activate infrastructure already built for ETH

ChiefingZa expresses the view through spot ETH, “no leverage,” held as a fairly high portfolio percentage, with cash for dips and emergencies. He retains mental stops but sees little downside from the discussed levels and dislikes the “mental anguish” of holding leveraged ETH.
Avi framed ETH as his Trump trade: traditional institutions can take most of a decade to onboard an asset class, and he said large firms have already built rails to settle, store and move value on Ethereum. What blocks deployment is fear of another 2022-style failure and, above all, being sued by the SEC.
Replace that regulatory regime with clear, crypto-friendly rules and Wall Street could “light up ETH,” potentially including payments. ChiefingZa agreed that Base had shown corporations could spin up their own L2s and that sequencer fees could be attractive revenue; ETH and SOL would likely receive the first institutional exploration.

8. L2 and utility-token alpha is buried beneath supply mechanics

ChiefingZa calls L2s “the most uninvestable segment” of liquid crypto, while distinguishing that from staggering venture returns that may not yet be unlocked. He believes L2s are “almost parasitic to themselves” and that most ecosystem value ultimately flows back to ETH.
The rebuttal to the parasitic-L2 thesis is not a P/E model; ChiefingZa rejects the idea that institutions will value ETH on that basis. More L2 activity can instead deepen ETH’s monetary role, and decentralized sequencers could eventually turn L2s into small economies passing gas-derived value back to stakers and holders in ETH.
A tactical L2 trade would demand positioning data, unlock schedules, investor-wallet tracking, OTC hedging analysis and the dates investors typically distribute and sell tokens. Even heavily funded shorts no longer guarantee explosive squeezes, so that labor may only reproduce returns obtainable from lower-volatility spot ETH.
Jonah described utility-token liquidity as “market maker on market maker violence,” with correlation models making assets resemble leveraged BTC or ETH absent organic participation. Worldcoin captured the disagreement: Jonah called the eyeball-scanning orb absurd, while ChiefingZa steelmanned it as an attempt to prove users are human amid AI bots. Avi compared it with CLEAR, and Jonah objected that worldwide enrollment is an enormous “if.”

9. TAO turns decentralized AI into an investable movement

ChiefingZa’s thesis begins with a rallying cry: Bitcoin separates money from the state, Ethereum separates finance from the state, and decentralized AI could “separate AGI from the state.” AGI might be life-altering, making its concentration under any single state actor an intuitively powerful common enemy.
TAO is his only sizable alt holding because Bittensor appears to be a grassroots developer community rather than a manufactured narrative. He estimated that the network had grown from roughly four subnets in October 2023 to about 38; Discord’s engineering questions, rather than “please sir, price target my family,” reinforced that impression.
Subnet 8 supplied the concrete product example: miners develop trading algorithms whose best strategies can be copied on Bybit. ChiefingZa had not backtested the claim, but believed the system had lost only two or three trades out of roughly 50–60, mostly by buying large dips and selling rips.
The architecture does not put AI computation itself on a blockchain; it builds an incentive game around model creation. That makes it “super meta” and something that “honestly probably might not work,” yet if it works it could become large—and it could also support an “insane hype-driven move” as investors search for scarce direct AI exposure.

10. The TAO trade mixes patient belief with opportunistic dislocations

ChiefingZa first bought near $216 in Q4 after a roughly 50% correction, having resisted intense FOMO during the initial run. Monetary policy mirroring Bitcoin, organic subnet growth, Barry Silbert’s backing and a founder who has taken on an almost “AI Jesus” role all fit his movement-based framework.
He also described a tactical entry around $212–$220 when a small vulnerability halted the chain. Wrapped TAO holders were the only ones able to off-board, creating a 10–15% discount to centralized venues even though Discord updates indicated the bridge was returning; he said prices were up around 40% since then.
Jonah’s sharpest objection was AI-cycle risk: what happens to TAO if Nvidia falls 50%? ChiefingZa conceded such a move would hurt, but Nvidia had surged while crypto-AI coins fell roughly 70%, evidence that the two markets were only loosely connected and that alt-market dynamics still dominated price discovery.
His practical discovery process allocates only 5–10% to active trades: monitor headlines, upgrades, volume, liquidity, positioning and influential accounts, then use intuition to judge the zeitgeist. He calls himself a “vibes investor,” says no to most opportunities, and uses engineering Discords to inspect documentation quality, support needs and whether a project is well run.

Trading Crypto's Election Year | 1000x Crypto's Next Layer 1 With Smokey The Bera | 1000x