Summary

The hosts take a victory lap on the ETH buy they “literally yoloed on the podcast” 14 days ago at ~0.03 ETH/BTC — up 20% since — and turn it into the episode’s core trading lesson: “the hardest thing you can do is buy something at a higher price than when you first started looking at it.” They admit they stayed bear-pilled two to three weeks too long after treasury buying and technicals turned, but reject the hater critique that buying after the move was a mistake — missing the pico bottom is the norm, because bottoms form when almost nobody is buying.
Avi’s next 6-12 months: an institutional cycle where TradFi money flows to Bitcoin, ETH, Ripple, Ethena and Aave, everything rips into a “stupid” rally around October-November, then everything ex-Bitcoin collapses aggressively while BTC takes a 25-35% drawdown and “just continues trucking” on 401(k)/IRA flows. Aave is his live setup: TVL from $25bn to $38bn since June 26 with no substantial price run yet.
Jonah’s call: an ETH-led alt season is now readable in the tea leaves — ETH rallies widen basis, USDe yields rise, TVL charts go up, token buyers pile in (“that’s another flywheel”) — and on Bitcoin, “my gut is tingling… straight to 150K. Do not stop. Do not pass go.” He’s long ETH with leverage “like a DGEN” but would rotate back to BTC if ETH’s market cap breaches $1 trillion.
Avi’s highest-conviction alt: Aerodrome flips Uniswap. Buybacks, fees shared with stakers, locked team tokens paid only through emissions, no VC overhang — versus Uniswap where Paradigm, Hayden Adams and a16z hold “gigantic bags to puke on people.” Coinbase integrating Base natively supercharges it; Avi thinks standalone wallets like MetaMask become “the terminal on your computer” — obsolete in 2-3 years. Jonah: maybe “a three-bagger or a five-bagger.”
The gambling is back — just not where crypto Twitter is looking. Avi’s dormant shitcoin chats are pumping names like Keeta (KTA, ~$1.5bn FDV, tripled in two months, Eric Schmidt an investor) and REI Network ($16M to $200M since April) — coins he calls outright scams and won’t touch, but treats as proof the speculative window has opened. Both agree it’s a “two to three week period where everything goes 10 to 50x,” likely over in 3-5 weeks.
The exit signal to watch: ETH, not Bitcoin, is “the benchmark of online degeneracy.” Stay in risk while ETH/BTC holds a short-term (4/8/16-day) moving average, or while ETH treasury companies keep buying — as long as that flow lifts, everything weird rallies (Punks +32%, Pudgy Penguins +34%, Chromie Squiggles +50% vs ETH in 30 days). When ETH gets less frothy, “get out the way.”
Tail risks shrugged off: Jonah puts 20-25% odds on courts voiding Trump’s tariffs, but Avi says the market’s path is “predetermined… up and to the right” — “if massive tariffs couldn’t nuke the market, what truly is going to nuke the market unless it’s a war.” One political punt they discuss: cannabis rescheduling (38% on Polymarket), with a cannabis ETF already +52% in a month.

Deep dive

1. Buying back higher is the hardest trade — and the haters flunked it

Avi’s confession, kept intact: they hated ETH from ~0.06 ETH/BTC, watched it draw down 70%, stayed out too long, then bought ~0.03 fourteen days ago when treasury companies were buying in size, technicals turned, and there was no leverage in the system — “we literally yoloed it on the podcast while we were sitting talking to each other.” Up 20% since. He concedes the green shoots were visible “two to three weeks before we bought” — they were bear-pilled.
The lesson he wants drilled: “The hardest thing that you can do is buy something at a higher price than when you first started looking at it” — the same error as skipping Bitcoin at $75K because you missed 50K→72K, right before it hit $107,000. “You’re allowed to be a trader” — a 20-25% swing trade doesn’t require a three-year thesis.
Jonah’s version: he rotated all his ETH to BTC at 0.055 ETH/BTC and rotated back at 0.03, not the 0.02 low — “that’s called buying low and selling high. That’s not called making a mistake.” The accounts he scorns are the perma-bulls who posted ETH from the 2021 pico top to the April 2025 bottom: “even a broken clock is right twice a day… right once every four years, and that’s not good enough in trading.” Same with Hype: he bear-posted it at $35 and bought at $12 — “the price sold off by 65%. That’s what changed.”

2. The institutional-cycle portfolio — and the blow-off timeline

Avi’s frame: this cycle is institutional — the question is where Wall Street money can actually flow. His portfolio for the next few months: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, maybe a little Ethena, plus Aave. Ethena’s USDe went from $5bn to $10bn in a month with the token tracking it; Aave’s TVL exploded from $25bn on June 26 to $38bn today without a substantial price run yet — the breakout he’d buy.
His 6-12 month map, hedges preserved: a crazy rally through October-November or year-end where “money starts to get stupid,” then collapses across the board — “basically everything ex-Bitcoin starts to collapse pretty aggressively” — while BTC takes a 25-35% drawdown and “just continues trucking along,” because it’s in 401(k)s and IRAs and “almost everybody can buy this thing that wants to buy this thing.” “We’re setting up for something stupid ex-BTC and you want to be positioned in the names where money can flow.”

3. ETH alt season, the Ethena flywheel, and Bitcoin straight to 150K

Jonah’s mechanism for why “the tea leaves are readable now”: ETH rallies → participants lever up via derivatives → basis widens → USDe yields on Ethena rise → capital flows in → TVL chart goes up → people buy the ENA token — “that’s another flywheel.” Same setup brewing at Aave. “As ETH starts to bounce off the lows of this crazy bear cycle, ETH-related altcoins are going to full send.”
On Bitcoin he abandons charts entirely: “I’m not a technical guy… my gut is tingling. It feels like Bitcoin is going straight to 150K. Do not stop. Do not pass go.” He’s long ETH with leverage “like a DGEN” despite being “accustomed to hating ETH,” and thinks it’s time to roll risk out the curve — possibly too late for Ethena, Aave a breakout buy. His pre-committed exit: ETH “could probably double, maybe triple from here,” but he rotates back to Bitcoin if ETH’s market cap breaches $1 trillion, which he thinks demands “pretty stratospheric expectations at the societal level.” “I could be wrong, willing to re-evaluate.”

4. Aerodrome flips Uniswap — the likely Vitol argument

Avi’s thesis: buybacks, fees shared with stakers, and team tokens that are locked — the team only gets paid through emissions, i.e., “if the product exhibits utility.” No VCs waiting to dump. Uniswap is the mirror image: “every VC from Paradigm on down, Hayden Adams, A16Z — they all have gigantic bags to puke on people,” while Aerodrome dominates Base liquidity because “it’s just cheaper to trade there.” Stock and flow: “less selling, better product, higher token price.”
His analogy, as told: the founder of likely Vitol capped his stake at 5% — “I can own 90% of a billion-dollar company or 5% of a company worth 20 plus” — and built something worth 50 to 100 by “being generous when it was difficult to be generous,” while 90%-kleptocrat-owned Gunvor stayed “a pittling little afterthought” compared to likely Vitol. “It’s hard to be generous when you create equity agreements or tokenomics” — Aerodrome is taking the likely Vitol approach.
Avi’s accelerant: Coinbase integrating Base natively — not Solana, not L1 ETH — is “ridiculously bullish for everything on Base,” with Robinhood and eventually a Fidelity to follow. His frame: “MetaMask is going to be the equivalent of using the terminal on your computer” — more functionality, but everyone right-clicks “new folder” instead. Standalone wallets “obsolete in the next two to three years.”
Jonah’s sizing, hedged as spoken: Coinbase’s ~100 million users routing flow into the DEX ecosystem Aerodrome dominates — “they don’t have a monopoly on the funnel… they just earned pole position” — “maybe you can land a three-bagger or a five-bagger. Not that that would be financial advice. You could also lose all your money.”

5. The gambling is back — just not where crypto Twitter is looking

Avi’s tell: his dormant shitcoin group chats “are popping off again” with names nowhere on CT. Keeta (KTA — likely “Keeta Network”): a website “straight out of 2017,” tagline “where networks connect,” “fugazi woozy wazy [stuff]” — yet “somehow they got Eric Schmidt to invest,” it’s “been up only,” tripled in two months to a $1.5bn FDV. REI Network: $16M to $200M market cap “in kind of a straight line” since April 1. He’s emphatic he owns neither and calls them scams — the point is “the gambling is back. It’s just in an area that you might not be paying attention to. If you want to play that shitcoin game, maybe you have to change your sources of information.”
His extraction method: he tweeted “tell me about KTA and REI — what are these complete scams?” as deliberate rage bait, because asking nicely gets “f* off, that’s my information,” while calling their bags a scam gets “take all of my information.” “People fall for it every time.”
The shared timing discipline: these windows come “once every few years… a two to three week period where everything goes 10 to 50x, and if you’re not already in it, you’re probably not gonna catch it.” Their read: the game is just starting and probably over “in the next three to five weeks” — and the hardest skill is the switch from “this is when I play” to “this is when I leave the table.”

6. Murad and the memecoin thesis — Avi doesn’t buy it

Jonah’s setup, as told: Murad (the SPX6900 evangelist) looks and talks exactly like Tom Cruise’s infomercial guru in Magnolia — “you are joining a cult movement… the market cap of SPX6900 is going to $100 trillion” — so is this froth the ultimate top signal or just the start? Jonah: “I think it means things are just getting started,” but selectively — “there are too many coins for all of it to go up.”
Avi’s history with him, generosity intact: “a brilliant trader” who blew up Adaptive Capital in the COVID crash — “I don’t hold that against him… most people blew up, they just didn’t do it in the ballsy spectacular way” — now running what Avi reads as a partly performative act with “some kernel of belief.” His rebuttal to the attention thesis: “I just consistently see these memecoin communities fracture” — dogwifhat had the strongest culture and then fractured; it was at 95 cents and not doing well — and Dogecoin only persists “because the richest man in the entire world took it under his wing”; without that, “probably 90% lower.”

7. The exit signal: watch ETH, not Bitcoin

Jonah’s realization mid-conversation: “ETH is really the benchmark of online degeneracy.” Bitcoin ran 20K to 120K “in a straight line” and woke nobody up — its holders are “too tinfoil-hat weird, maximalist, or institutional” — but “once ETH started pumping, that’s when all the little random woodland creatures came out of their holes.” His rule for listeners: take BTC off the board; stay in risk while ETH/BTC holds a short-term moving average (4, 8, or 16 days); when it tanks, “some of this could unwind.”
The alternative dashboard: list every ETH treasury company, its remaining buying capacity, and monitor daily — “as long as that flow is coming in, all of the weird stuff is going to keep rallying.” The weird stuff is already moving: CryptoPunks blasted through the established floor with OTC sweeps, and over 30 days Punks are +32% against ETH, Bored Apes +20%, Pudgy Penguins +34%, Chromie Squiggles +50%. Solana, by contrast, “feels like a ghost town” — it’s all ETH-based and ETH-related.
The reflexive punchline on when treasuries stop: they buy until people start giving them money, “and people will keep giving the money as long as it works. Reflexivity again. This is nuts. I love crypto.”

8. Tail risks: the tariff ruling shrugged off, and a weed punt

Jonah’s black swan: he puts a “20, maybe 25% chance” the Supreme Court rules Trump’s emergency-powers tariffs illegal — the legal basis is “borderline and possibly spurious.” Avi’s answer: whichever way it breaks is short-lived, because “the market has a predetermined path at this point — up and to the right.” His clincher: “if massive tariffs on countries couldn’t nuke the market… what truly is going to nuke the market unless it’s a war?”
Avi’s political punt: Trump reclassifying marijuana — a cannabis ETF is already +52% over the last month and “if he genuinely follows through, it’s going to be a lot higher.” Avi checks Polymarket: 38% on weed rescheduled in 2025. “Could be a good punt. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Episode 151 - August 8, 2025 Episode 150 - August 1, 2025