Crypto Struggling, Metals Ripping, Active Trading, Death of Crypto Twitter

Summary

• Bitcoin has gone nowhere in 14 months — “basically unchanged since mid-November 2024 when the election happened” — and both hosts point to likely sellers: OGs. Avi points to statistics showing the percentage of 10-year-old coins moving this year is “sort of unbelievable,” and Jonah supplies the mechanism from direct conversations — billionaire founders of “a multi-billion dollar 2017 vintage vaporware chain” are trying to found a trading firm and must sell BTC to fund it, because selling their own token would zero it. Jonah’s frame: gold is 18 months ahead of Bitcoin, and “it’s over for the impatient people in crypto,” not for crypto.
• Avi’s January calls trade is a clinic in expiry discipline: one-month calls bought ~87k on the tax-selling-abates-plus-new-year-allocations thesis, up ~200% bottom-to-top, sold into 94-95 rather than held (they’d have given back 80%). The rule, per Jonah: “never exercise a call early… you sell the call and buy the delta.” Jonah would “love to be able to buy 80-85 again.”
• The alpha has migrated out of crypto into equities and commodities, says Avi, who has “never felt more disillusioned with the state of trading crypto.” His organizing idea: “we have moved very far away from a free market economy” — the government dictates capital flows in a way not seen “basically since World War II,” so you “sit close to the government spigot” — his best calls were uranium, REMX, and Intel, and his three biggest P&L wins last year were gold (3,000→~4,200), silver (30→62), and RKLB (~40→~80), not crypto.
• Jonah’s asterisk: crypto still has “humongous inefficiency — it’s just to the downside,” and neither host has solved shorting “without getting our balls blown off.” Exhibit A: Hyperliquid, sold at 45, now 20 — “could have seen it a mile away. The team unlocks” — yet shorting it risked a 2x wipe. Avi’s retail shorting rules: a portfolio of 3-4 shorts, never on the lows, capped at 20-25% of cash. Jonah still calls Hyperliquid “probably a dip buy” once the team finishes “yeeting out.”
• Avi thinks revenue-generating coins are “the only altcoins that have any hope” this year, but he flags the trap: annualized revenue is “always a little bit of a trick” — Pump at a $2.5B valuation annualizes ~$300M off a good 30 days, but “crypto falls off a cliff, suddenly you’re at 50 mil.”
• Jonah’s macro cycle trade: Trump’s tariff and Greenland provocations push European pension funds and investors in Asia, Australia, and Europe to divest US assets, and now precious metals offer an exit. Wait for the Greenland flush to resolve, then re-enter; “we’re late to the silver trade,” not gold — “I could see gold hitting 10,000 in the next two years.” Avi agrees it could, “but the risk-reward feels terrible. It could also hit 3,000 before it hits 10,000.”
• The “death of crypto Twitter” is a real market-structure event: Avi calls the new X algorithm “the great flattening” — feeds are now “probably 80% overlap” — crypto content gets no engagement, the community fled to Telegram (which has “no discovery mechanism”), and the memecoin game is dead. Jonah’s hypothesis: crypto is “a community engagement mechanism” and X was its distribution channel — short-term bearish for price, long-term an edge for the convicted.

Deep dive

1. Fourteen months of nothing — and OGs may be selling

• Jonah’s opener sets the mood: Bitcoin is “basically unchanged since mid-November 2024 when the election happened. So realistically, the last 14 months have been a wash.” That tests everyone — new entrants “aren’t taking all this risk for like a 10% return per year… you’re taking the risk for a multiple,” while for OGs the unrealized gains “almost start to look like a stranded asset.”
• Jonah’s mechanism, from talking to actual OGs: new wealth has a 6-18 month honeymoon, a plateau through month 36, then “it becomes about the pursuit again.” His example: founders of “a multi-billion dollar 2017 vintage vaporware chain” — billionaires now — are trying to found a trading firm, “probably seven years too late,” and “you have to sell Bitcoin to fund all those salaries. They can’t sell their shitcoin, otherwise it’ll go to zero.”
• Avi adds that the percentage of 10-year-old coins moving this year is “sort of unbelievable compared to previous years.” His read: “this is going to be a tough one to chew through, but once we’re done, we’re ready to go up. It’s just a matter of time.”
• Jonah’s timeline analogy — worth keeping: “gold is like 18 months ahead of Bitcoin.” Gold bugs endured a very rough sideways consolidation and are now having their moment; Bitcoin will too. “It’s not over for crypto. It’s over for the impatient people in crypto.”

2. The 97k rejection, and how Avi traded the January bounce

• Avi’s tape-read of the rejection: 97k was the prior breakdown point where a crowd entered sub-100k and rode it to 80. When price returns to breakeven, “a lot of people are just going to sort of chuck it out… it’s just classic human psychology.”
• The trade itself: one-month calls entered around 87k, thesis that tax selling abates and new-year allocations arrive — “that all happened within the first 14 days of the year.” Bottom-to-top the calls were up 200%; held to now they’d be down 80%. The self-test at 94: “Would I buy two-week-out 100k calls at 94? The answer is no. So you sell the calls and buy spot.”
• Jonah’s mechanics footnote for listeners: “never exercise a call early because then you sacrifice time value. You sell the call and buy the delta.” Avi has seen early exercise happen exactly once — three-month calls — “somebody got shouted at.”
• Avi bought back only partial delta, got briefly bullish for 125k when 94 held “for about half a second,” then it broke; now at 90 he’s scaled out and waiting. Jonah would love to be able to buy 80-85 again.

3. Avi thinks revenue coins are the only altcoins with hope — and annualized revenue is a trick

• The altcoin call from earlier episodes played out: one bullish week post-January 1, “and then every week since has just been straight down… everything’s down like 40% again” — Pepe, Worldcoin, Shiba, WIF, Fartcoin.
• To a chat question on revenue coins, Avi is selectively constructive: Pump almost doubled off December’s 0.0018 and sits ~50% off the lows — “if I had to look at Pump versus Pepe or Pump versus Worldcoin, I’d be long those pairs. If I cared enough to put that on and weather the insane volatility.”
• Avi’s caveat is the load-bearing analysis: Pump is a $2.5B valuation on ~$300M annualized revenue, but “annualized revenue is always a little bit of a trick” — annualize a good 30 days and you get 300; “crypto falls off a cliff, suddenly you’re at 50 mil.” Syrup he flags as insulated from crypto’s ups and downs, still up year-to-date.
• Avi’s preferred expression: “the best way to trade crypto in my opinion is to express divergences in value between the things that are going to go to zero” — e.g., via Pear Protocol (as heard, “pair protocol” — a pun on pair trades). And on Jonah’s vaporware founders: “my guess is they’re setting up a trading firm to try to get out of their stuff… there’s a lot of supply that’s going to hit the market.”

4. The alpha moved: sit close to the government spigot

• Avi’s confession: “I’ve never felt more disillusioned with the state of trading crypto than I have right now.” The opportunity set has shrunk for three years; “the real alpha is actually in public markets, in equities or in commodities” — and he admits the podcast’s track record “has been almost better” there, because crypto-native origins mean “we tend to have a more bullish view on crypto and that infects our biases” through a 7-8 month bear.
• His organizing macro frame: “we have moved very far away from a free market economy… the government is actively dictating flows of capital in a way that we really haven’t seen basically since World War II.” Hence his best calls: uranium, REMX, Intel — everything close to what the government cares about.
• The receipts: his three biggest P&L contributors last year were gold (bought 3,000, sold ~4,200), silver (bought 30, sold 62 — it’s now 90: “want to blow my brains out”), and RKLB (bought the ~40 pullback, “tossed it at about 80”). For a career crypto trader, all the big trades came from equities.
• The market-structure shift underneath: in 2021 “you had to be online 24 hours a day” or wake up having missed a billion-dollar launch; now “if you spend 5 to 10 hours a week on crypto, you can stay up to date with everything.” The prescription: broaden your time horizon and your product horizon.

5. Crypto’s inefficiency is still huge — it’s just pointed down now

• Jonah’s asterisk to Avi’s migration thesis: “There’s still humongous inefficiency in crypto. It’s just to the downside… and neither of us have figured out how to get short without getting our balls blown off.” The asset class flipped from inefficiency with positive convexity in your favor to “tremendous convexity against you.”
• His specimen: Hyperliquid, with Flood on Twitter calling $1,000 a token. Jonah sold everything at 45 on the Ari Paul logic that if the consensus target (50-100) is reasonable, it’s probably topped — missed the last 20%, and it now trades 20. “Could have seen it a mile away. The team unlocks.” But the short risked a 2x wipe: “it could 2x on you and wipe you.”
• Avi’s rules for shorting without a firm’s balance sheet: never short a single asset — build a portfolio of three to four; “you almost never want to short any crypto on the lows,” wait for the bounce; cap it at 20-25% of cash. And the arithmetic ceiling retail forgets: a long can 10x, but a short at best doubles — “that’s the absolute best case scenario.”
• Jonah’s hot take for this year: this is the year Jump, Jane Street, and Citadel “start really creeping into crypto quietly,” wiring infrastructure into NYSE crypto rails, x-stocks, Kraken, Solana — no Gary Gensler to sue them. Big balance sheets win negatively-convex markets. Avi’s rejoinder: that “makes it harder for the small fish” — pick spots very carefully, because “overtrading is really where a lot of people mess up.”

6. The death of crypto Twitter is a market-structure event

• Avi’s coinage for the new X algorithm: “the great flattening.” Six months ago everyone’s feed was different; “now the feed’s probably 80% overlap with 20% unique content” as the algo pushes bangers. He’s posting less crypto because it gets no engagement — “it’s a feedback loop… why not keep the crypto content to the podcast?”
• His sociological read: crypto Twitter “fractured six months ago” and everything moved to Telegram, where you can curate your audience — and “if you’re a KOL on Twitter, it’s almost like a counter-signal” after people got burned. Nikita was “getting destroyed” over the death of the crypto-community bubble.
• Jonah’s bigger hypothesis: crypto is fundamentally “a community engagement mechanism” — a flywheel that grew to envelop the US president and governments — and every such mechanism needs a distribution channel for insiders to bring in outsiders. X was that channel, so the algo change “has been effed with… the raison d’être of crypto.” His call: “Short term, I think it’s bearish. In the long term, it just generates opportunity for people who have enough conviction to hold the right stuff.” Both agree it killed the memecoin game.
• Telegram can’t replace it — “no discovery mechanism”: either a tiny curated chat with groupthink or the Aster firehose at “38 messages per second, most of which come from Asia.” Avi thinks X is still fixable with lists and the following page, but concedes the tell: he used to find “at least five to six trade ideas a week” on the feed; now he has to dig.

7. The Trump divestment cycle: gold 10,000 versus “risk-reward feels terrible”

• Jonah’s actionable framework: every Trump provocation — 100% EU tariff threats, “passes at Greenland” forcing Denmark to send troops — makes allies divest US equities (“suck out more capital”). Historically the panic ends when the world remembers “there’s nowhere else to put our money” — US companies are where innovation compounds. The difference now: “there is an exit, which is gold” — precious metals specifically, after Avi corrects “gold” to precious metals and Jonah agrees: “Precious metals. Big distinction.”
• The trade: when Trump rattles the sabre, expect the pullout effect; “wait for the flush… until the Greenland thing resolves” or looks resolvable, then get back in — the mega-trend of capital leaving the US continues. “We’re late to the silver trade. I don’t think we’re late to the gold trade by any means… I could see gold hitting 10,000 in the next two years.”
• Avi’s pushback — worth keeping: he can see 10,000 too, “but it just the risk-reward feels terrible. It could also hit 3,000 before it hits 10,000.” He stays bullish Bitcoin and equities and won’t buy precious metals on the highs: “it’s not my thing.”

8. “I’m not your dad” — process, not served-up trades

• Avi’s rant at a commenter angry about the earlier bullish call: the trade was stated precisely — buy the end-of-year tax-selling abatement, catch the bounce — and Bitcoin rose 12% before Trump threatened EU tariffs and Greenland. “Things change, buddy… I can give you ideas… but I can’t click the buttons for you. I can’t think critically for you.” Jonah’s tag: “You’re the angry uncle now.”
• Jonah reframes the show’s name: 1000x was never “we’ll tell you what shitcoin to buy and you’ll live on a yacht” — it’s aspirational, about thousandx-ing net worth over a career: “it’s about process, not about winning the lottery.”
• The Wildflower Farms tangent doubles as a process lesson: pitched to Jonah in 2017 at $800/night breakeven — he passed as too rich for the Catskills — and now the cheapest cabin runs $800 with suites at $2,100. Jonah says the lesson is to lock in fixed-rate debt, pencil a conservative model, and set yourself up with optionality into the post-COVID spending “orgasm”: “a big swing and they knocked it out of the park.”
• The close, Avi quoting GCR: “You have to expunge your brain of your peak net worth. If I thought about my peak net worth, I’d probably jump out a window… you have to have a short memory when it comes to trading, otherwise you’re going to go nuts.”