Summary

Avi calls the selloff a textbook bull-market washout and a “no-brainer point” to buy strong alts before year-end. He does not abandon the bullish thesis: BTC weakness triggered simultaneous P&L protection in an illiquid December, sending some alts down 15%-20% when BTC fell roughly 3% and exhausting willing sellers. He expects buying to return around January 1 and says, “The cycle is not over.” In hindsight, he also says much of BTC’s move above $100,000 came from Michael Saylor buying at an average of $106,000, though he describes BTC’s time above that level ambiguously as “like 30 seconds” and then “24 hours.”
The immediate relative-value trade is ETH and selected alt strength, not indiscriminate exposure to everything. With Michael Saylor potentially sidelined during a blackout period, Avi expects flows to rebalance away from BTC and sees ETH/BTC above 0.04 within weeks. Jonah notes that Doge and “Telegram coin” were still weak, reinforcing Avi’s instruction to buy assets already holding their trends.
Both reject the Fed’s hawkish messaging as a 2022-style regime change. Jonah characterizes it as a warning against “cutting with reckless abandon,” not the beginning of an 8%-9% short-rate cycle; Avi argues that growth, wages, profits, and a more business-friendly Trump administration remain intact. The selloff therefore prices a smaller monetary tailwind rather than a broken bull thesis.
Avi thinks $90,000 materially undervalues BTC’s improved political backdrop, even if a strategic Bitcoin reserve is not immediately enacted. He sketches $50,000-$70,000 as fair value in the prior “bad world,” a new base range around $100,000-$140,000, and a possible euphoric move to $200,000-$250,000 before retracement. “The threat is more powerful than the action”: Avi thinks continued reserve ambiguity preserves hope, while Jonah argues the threat could induce other sovereigns to buy ahead of the US.
The alt playbook is to buy volatility at preselected levels, while BTC is better bought after recovery confirms. Avi uses a 180-period Exponential Hull Moving Average, plus the 20- and 50-day averages, and favors Aave, Ondo, LTC, ETH, Morpho, LINK, AI coins, and strong “dino coins.” His Virtuals bids around $2.20-$2.30—placed while it traded near $3—illustrate the rule: “You cannot chase them.”
Jonah admits he missed Hyperliquid, while both hosts see broader value in on-chain exchange infrastructure. He had dismissed another insufficiently decentralized CLOB, but now highlights no-KYC access, fee-funded HYPE buybacks, user-aligned tokenomics, and an airdrop that could make $1,000 of pre-airdrop notional activity worth more than $1 million at the highs. Avi’s broader call is that DEXs should take centralized-exchange share as usability and on-chain collateral composability improve.
AI agents are the longer-duration thesis, but the transaction token remains disputed. Avi says agents turn AI from a passive tool into an active analyst capable of continuously finding trades, potentially enabling cheaper companies and even an agent-run hedge fund; he expects settlement primarily in USDC. Jonah prefers BTC because he believes it offers the best return per unit of volatility, while both see platforms such as Virtuals—not bespoke “machine currencies”—as the likelier value-capture layer.

Deep dive

1. Year-end liquidation washed out alt sellers

Avi reaffirms the hosts’ prior bullish view while acknowledging that the market did not agree with them immediately. In hindsight, he says much of BTC’s move above $100,000 came from Michael Saylor “just jamming it in” at an average price of $106,000. He first says BTC traded above that level for “like 30 seconds,” then says he thinks it was 24 hours; once Saylor’s bid disappeared, market structure deteriorated.
BTC was hovering near the bottom of Avi’s $90,000-$93,500 range, but ETH/BTC had rebounded almost 4% from its lows and selected alts were improving. His seasonal premise remains that altcoins tend to strengthen after mid-December, particularly while Saylor may be absent for at least a month because of a blackout period.
Jonah admits the selloff “was not in my bingo card”; he had been nibbling even near the highs. His explanation is December illiquidity: institutions protect annual P&L, large traders step aside, and always-on systematic players—particularly CTAs and other algorithmic shops—amplify momentum, making a 10%-15% pullback in majors less extraordinary than it appears.
That observation completes Avi’s washout thesis. When BTC fell roughly 3% in a day, some alts dropped 15%-20% because profitable holders “full stack sold” simultaneously into almost no liquidity; now he struggles to identify the next seller and expects January 1 re-entry. “Now is not the right time to capitulate.”

2. The Fed delivered a reset, not a regime reversal

Jonah’s distinction is between hawkish jawboning and a new tightening cycle. The Fed merely warned that it would not cut “with reckless abandon” while inflation remained imperfectly controlled; it did not signal short-term rates rising toward 8%-9%. Selling the entire crypto thesis on that message is, in his phrase, “lettuce handing a pretty important opportunity.”
Avi reserves genuine trend changes for paradigm shifts such as November 2021, when the Fed abandoned “transitory” inflation and rethought its whole strategy. This changed only the speed of easing—“a slight amount of brake applied to the upwards trend”—so the fundamental drivers of the rally were not invalidated.
His causal chain remains growth-led: people are earning more, wages are rising, companies are producing more profit, and he expects the Trump administration to be more business-friendly, including many regulations being repealed around January 20. The Nasdaq correction—roughly 5%, perhaps almost 10% high-to-low by his recollection—repriced less Fed support, after which the market can resume from a lower base.

3. Bitcoin’s reserve threat matters before any reserve exists

BTC carries two additional complications for Avi: Saylor’s temporary absence and positioning around the January 20 inauguration. Traders who bought the post-election “Trump trade” planning to sell into inauguration likely used the recent weakness to exit; unless BTC returns to roughly $110,000 by then, he sees little remaining event-driven supply near $90,000.
Avi takes Nic Carter’s skepticism seriously: the US normally buys its own instruments, Bitcoin is not one, and the political hurdle to outright purchases is high. Avi’s game-theoretic case starts with Trump simply not selling any BTC the government accumulates, and policy ambiguity may last beyond the administration’s first 90 days. “The hope remains” unless officials issue an unlikely categorical rejection.
Jonah disagrees with Carter’s stated logic because governments already hold currencies and commodities such as gold, euros, and oil. He thinks a reserve could begin by transferring existing Silk Road Bitcoin held by the US Marshals to the Treasury. Even without public purchases, the possibility of US accumulation may prompt other sovereigns to buy first, since waiting could mean receiving one-third, one-fifth, or one-tenth as much BTC per unit of fiat. He thinks that threat could put a floor under crypto in 2025.
Avi’s valuation anchor is relative history: BTC reached about $75,000 in 2021 and ranged around $50,000-$74,000 earlier in the year without today’s pro-crypto administration or reserve discussion. He sketches $100,000-$140,000 as a new range and $200,000-$250,000 in euphoria; Jonah says he would “probably sell everything” at $200,000 without an actual reserve.

4. Buy the alts still proving their trend

Avi is less confident about BTC’s immediate direction than about relative performance. He expects ETH/BTC above 0.04 within weeks and builds his Q1 bucket around ETH plus strong ETH-linked assets such as Aave, Morpho, and LINK. A BTC short can hedge market direction for investors who want primarily alt exposure.
His screen begins with the 180-period Exponential Hull Moving Average, or EHMA, then the 20-day average for shorter trades and the 50-day average. He buys assets when they return to those zones and tolerates noisy moves of roughly minus 5% to plus 5%, provided they do not record two daily closes beneath the trend level.
Aave and Ondo are his clean examples; even LTC was holding its daily EHMA and had the additional possibility of an ETF. Beyond ETH beta, he wants strength within AI coins and “dino coins” that could benefit if retail returns. Jonah sharpens the qualification: “You like the strong dino coins,” not the category indiscriminately.
Avi is still not fully allocated because another holiday-liquidity shock could create better entries. Nevertheless, he is emphatic about direction: assets already showing strength should be accumulated or, for traders comfortable with the risk, approached by “pushing your chips in.” “Just don’t be afraid.”

5. Alt volatility rewards patient bids, while BTC rewards confirmation

Avi placed Virtuals bids around $2.24-$2.33 while it traded near $3; the token reached about $2, initially hurting the position, before recovering near $2.78—roughly 35%-40% above the low. The point was not a magical bottom tick but identifying horizontal support where he could say, “Okay, I wanna own it,” then leaving orders waiting.
Jonah prefers a different method for BTC: rather than catching a reflexive falling knife at $100,000 or $93,000, he waits for the bottom and buys a steady recovery. They agree that this is too slow for high-volatility alts, whose entire rebound can occur within days, whereas a BTC breakout can continue for weeks, months, or years.
Hyperliquid supplies the cautionary specimen. After rising from roughly $2 to $25, ubiquitous praise drew buyers near the highs before a 30% decline; Avi’s compromise is to take perhaps 20% of the desired position and leave lower bids. Its uninterrupted $13-to-$24 run was possible, but he treats that move as an outlier, not permission to chase every plus-20% day.

6. Hyperliquid made user-aligned tokenomics investable

Jonah links alt volatility partly to on-chain execution. Users buying through Jupiter, Aerodrome, Phantom, MetaMask, or Rabby often submit market orders because limit orders are less intuitive: without newer execution tooling, “you are the limit order,” staring at the screen to buy dips or panic-selling lows. That retail behavior creates opportunity for patient traders.
Avi expects decentralized exchanges to take centralized-exchange market share over the next two years as regulation clarifies and usability improves. His strongest argument is composability: profitable on-chain positions could eventually become collateral on Aave or another protocol, allowing users to borrow against P&L without cashing out—something much harder when capital is held inside Binance.
Jonah’s pushback is that Hyperliquid’s success may owe more to not requiring KYC than to solving a missing exchange problem, and he doubts that exemption survives unlimited growth. He accepts AMMs as superior price discovery for new or illiquid assets, but says “the jury’s out” on decentralized CLOBs; Avi still thinks on-chain capital utility survives even if KYC arrives.
Jonah’s mea culpa is explicit: he studied Hyperliquid six or seven months earlier, disliked that it did not have enough validators to be considered more than a centralized exchange, and concluded the world did not need a 101st CLOB. He missed the value of no-KYC access and trading-fee-funded HYPE buybacks. Avi adds the “casino chips” flywheel: distribute wealth to active gamblers, and much of it predictably returns as more trading.

7. Hyperliquid’s airdrop reset the tokenomics standard

The user alignment was unusually large. Jonah says someone trading $1,000 of notional before the airdrop could have received tokens worth more than $1 million at HYPE’s highs; Jonah’s own blunt response is that he does not know how long that money lasts for a degen, though much of it likely stayed on Hyperliquid.
Avi thinks the hosts missed the asset because prior decentralized exchanges such as GMX and Serum had repeatedly come and gone. Hyperliquid arrived at the right time, attracted people he knew who had traded on Bybit, listened closely to users, and was “willing to give away so much of their wealth”—a service orientation he expects other crypto projects to copy.
Jonah connects the lesson to Aerodrome taking share from Uniswap by “extracting less and sharing more with the community.” Unlike 2021, when broad leverage overwhelmed project details, he believes crypto has entered an era in which investors must ask whether tokenomics are extractive or accretive. His practical response to missing HYPE is not FOMO, but perhaps bids 30%-50% lower.

8. AI agents shift value from prompting to continuous action

Jonah introduces the reportedly forthcoming “ChatGPT 403,” described as scoring orders of magnitude better on coding and mathematics tests, but Avi’s investable insight is broader. Existing AI is passive: users must supply the question, subject, and analytical framework. Agents can instead monitor markets continuously, originate ideas, and “actively give you ideas consistently every moment of every single day.”
Avi believes that transition could support agent-run hedge funds and substantial corporate cost-cutting over the next two years. Their own 1000X agent remains early—“This thing was dumb last week, and now it’s just dumb”—but examples, JSON instructions, and help from the Virtuals team are making it incrementally less dumb.
Jonah imagines a proactive trading sidekick that sees a user’s positions, ingests prices and news, and offers context without waiting for the perfect question. After 20 years around traders, analysts, and PMs, he sees the possibility of putting “Soros-level markets intellect” into the hands of people without institutional mentors; Avi’s ambition is to make their agent “the best damn analyst in the world.”
Their value-capture debate separates rails from currency. Avi expects agents to transact mainly in USDC because it is liquid and stable, citing his mistaken 2017 IOTA thesis as evidence that machines do not need a bespoke currency; Jonah favors BTC for what he calls its superior Sharpe ratio. Both see Virtuals-like creation platforms—and perhaps “Mad Men 2.0” agencies building branded agents—as more defensible, while predicting a virtual 1000X co-host within six months.

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