MARKET UPDATE: Hot Payrolls, Hotter Memecoins, And Se From FOMO Talks The Future Of Trading

Summary

• Avi opens with a hot jobs report (unemployment 4.1%) that has traders selling gold and sweating a September Fed hike — but argues the macro noise “kind of means nothing” because genuinely new money is flowing into crypto for multiple distinct reasons at once. Bitcoin and Zcash are riding the debasement trade after Bessent’s pledge to spend up to a trillion dollars protecting the long end “damaged the credibility of the Fed”; meme coins are riding the rise of social trading; RWAs are exploding via Robinhood chain, with Vlad publicly brawling with AMC’s CEO over tokenized stocks.
• Guest Se, FOMO co-founder, lays out his core thesis: “everything is trading attention whether it’s on a micro or macro scale.” His own example: going all-in on HOOD because on-chain data gave him an edge on Robinhood chain revenue before the market’s attention caught up — the stock ripped ~18% the day before. Right now Robinhood chain memes are “a pretty free market” because bundling, wallet-sybil and supply-hiding tooling hasn’t arrived yet.
• FOMO’s endgame is not meme coins but “the highest intent social graph that will ever exist” — a social platform at Google or Facebook scale where the top accounts “are not producing content, but they’re producing trades.” As AI (roughly doubling in capability every quarter, per Se) commoditizes content, the scarce resource stops being attention and becomes capital at risk: “who is right publicly, who is staking dollars.” Creator rewards already paid out $4 million in two weeks, with the top earner making $300,000 — versus finance YouTube or the eight figures Se estimates Michael Burry or Citrini make on newsletters.
• Se’s growth data suggests the rally has legs: unlike the November and January spikes (10x in two days, then collapse), the last 60–90 days show gradual 5–10% daily growth, and referred users have fallen from ~60% to ~25% — signs of an organic, healthy graph. With Bitcoin around 80k, he thinks “most retail” won’t shift attention until all-time highs break, which could take six months to a year — meaning it’s still early.
• Avi’s post-interview caution: 94.4% of FOMO users have lost money, “an indication of what meme coins are” — gambling and lottery tickets — even as an AMC-linked coin ran from $100K to $100M market cap in five hours, something only crypto can do. MemeFi, where a stated mechanism directs 20% of volume or fees toward buying the underlying stock, is “way more real” than past memes but is still “the meme coin version of a DAT”; Avi says all such DATs except MicroStrategy — and even MicroStrategy — have failed pretty miserably.
• The tradeable structure call: buy leaders, not laggards — “don’t buy the laggards in this bull rally. Don’t worry about them. Don’t even think about them.” Beta trades like Trader Joe-off-Uniswap matter less because chains are abstracted away and usage of the underlying product is what matters; if your thesis is perps eating the world, buy Hyperliquid and Lighter, not a third derivative asset. Avi says Lighter is almost $5, while Se entered in the low ones and sold around $3-something. Think dot-com aftermath: Uber, not Lyft.
• GPT-6.0’s benchmark-crushing release (SanDisk +10%, Intel +4%) makes Avi nervous about the AI trade returning — a concentrated AI rally can coexist with crypto, but a broad-based melt-up “would be worse for crypto.” He’s long Intel (sees $140 by year-end) and back in Nvidia since Wednesday; if Bitcoin can “beat the Bart” through 80K, he sees 100K and possible all-time highs by year-end.
• Portfolio and the meta-lesson: Bitcoin, Zcash, biotech (ARKG, XBI), Intel, Nvidia — a book he thinks can do 50–100% in six months — while Robinhood (bought at 92, now 123) remains his “multi-bagger” as “the only financial institution that is taking crypto seriously.” Watch perception over data: Pew shows Americans souring on a “rip-roaring” economy, which makes him nervous about a short-lived dip into the midterms.

Deep dive

1. Hot payrolls, a Fed–Treasury standoff — and why Avi thinks the hike odds “mean nothing”

• Avi’s macro open: a “super hot jobs report” with unemployment at 4.1% has traders selling gold and getting nervous the Fed will actually hike in September, after Bessent said he could spend up to a trillion dollars to protect the long end — “putting the Treasury at odds with the Federal Reserve,” something with little historical precedent, and something that “really damaged the credibility of the Fed.”
• His punchline: the higher hike probability “honestly kind of means nothing, because what’s happening right now is that meme coins are going absolutely ballistic” — the driver is genuinely new money entering crypto, not rates.

2. For the first time, crypto is rallying on several independent theses at once

• Avi’s map: Bitcoin and Zcash (finally at $1,000, and “absolutely ripping”) are pure monetary assets rising on the debasement trade and “monetary irresponsibility”; meme coins are rising on the rise of social trading via platforms like FOMO; and RWAs are exploding via Robinhood chain. Past cycles were “crypto companies serving crypto users” — Robinhood is a genuine institution reaching a new set of participants.
• The Vlad-vs-AMC spat as evidence: AMC CEO Adam Aron argued tokenized securities take away control of his stock and run afoul of securities laws; Vlad’s response amounted to “seriously, what is your issue?” and now “their lawyers are publicly going at it.” Avi’s read: Robinhood views crypto as the next stage of finance and is willing to step up to bat and defend it.

3. Se’s frame: “in a lot of ways, I’m trading attention”

• Se’s HOOD trade is the thesis in miniature: he went all-in on Robinhood, posting in his company Slack from the first day Robinhood launched that if it became “another hundred million dollar business line,” on-chain data would give crypto natives an edge — “people are not looking at on-chain data to understand what is Robinhood’s revenue.” The attention caught up and HOOD ripped ~18%. “Everything is trading attention whether it’s on a micro or macro scale.”
• On Robinhood chain’s meme scene: memes pairing with stock tokens, throwbacks to “old GME, AMC days,” Cash Cat as “just a plain meme,” Ponz as a launchpad — and crucially “there’s not a lot of overhang”: nobody’s yet built tools to hide wallet sybils, bundle discreetly, or create other underlying advantages, so “right now it feels like a pretty free market.” The Robinhood team, despite not being crypto native, is doing “a masterclass” by staying out of the way and being tactical about follows and listings.

4. FOMO’s genesis: dYdX alumni, chain friction, and infrastructure that didn’t exist two years ago

• Se’s personal itch: trading on-chain since 2021 across ETH mainnet, Arbitrum, Tron, Sui, Sei, Solana — and missing a trade he transcribes as “Keto [?]” on Base despite everybody else in his trading chat trading it, purely from friction: he didn’t want to set up another wallet.
• The timing argument: “even 2 years ago, you couldn’t really build FOMO as it looks today” — bridge liquidity was thin, relay wasn’t fast enough, RPCs couldn’t handle the load, and Privy-style embedded wallets barely existed or weren’t trusted.
• The team came from dYdX (his description: “Hyperliquid before Hyperliquid” — 90% of the market share and a billion dollars in revenue in roughly a year and a half to two years), built for institutional users and a specific group of high-volume traders — but “you can’t really show your mother or your sister perps.”
• The aha moment was Moonshot showing that a meaningful mainstream user group wanted this, and the churn problem defining the product: you buy Moo Deng because it’s cute, make money — “then what? You either churn because you have no idea what to buy next, or you buy a bunch of things you have no context on and lose all your money.” The answer had to be social, “because trading inherently is social.”

5. Why publicize positions? Learn by doing, and the norm shift

• Avi’s TradFi pushback: in his old world “we were very private about our positions” — on FOMO everyone sees every buy and sell, and if you’re up a million and sell $200K, “everyone might front-run you.” Why would anyone do this?
• Se’s answer runs through pedagogy: “You want to go learn how to play basketball, you’re not going to read 10 books and watch some Michael Jordan documentary… you’re just going to go do it.” Many people are stumped by P/E ratios, market caps and similar concepts before they ever exercise the investing muscle; social makes markets approachable and “raises the ceiling.”
• The norm-shift analogy, via friend Fred Wilson: he passed on Airbnb and Uber — “why would I get into a car of a stranger?” — and now it’s a societal norm. Same with trading: why hide what you own when you can “build a social presence, a profile, a brand and monetize this over time”? Se ties it to a broader self-education trend — peptides, Claude, distrust of systems, “a lot more willingness to break out of the system.”

6. Se trades FOMO on a secret alt — and defines “trenching”

• Trenching, defined for the uninitiated: “take your traditional time frames and compress them by like 100x” — intra-hour or intra-minute, some people in and out of the same coin within 60 seconds. Se leaves it “to the people who are at the computer 16 hours a day”; the winners there have superior infrastructure, faster computers, more information. What drew people to crypto was learning to hold — DOGE, SHIB, Bitcoin — not 60-second coin flips.
• His own style is “finding good spots”: Lighter “in the low ones,” sold around three-something; a HYPE swing from $35 upward. He trades on an alt — roughly #200 on the leaderboard, up about $400K on memes — precisely because a FOMO co-founder shouldn’t “create narratives or spin certain things as good or bad.” “The minute anybody knows, I will delete the account and probably start again.”

7. Creator rewards: a thousand Roaring Kitties monetizing track records instead of newsletters

• The economics already live: creator rewards have paid out $4 million in two weeks, the top earner making $300,000 “just doing the same thing that he has done every week before this existed.” Se frames memes as a wedge — a few hundred million potential meme traders versus billions of people with a financial opinion — “one market is a lot more exciting to us than others.”
• The equities transposition is the vision: a great finance YouTuber makes low six figures while making many people millionaires or more; on FOMO “what if you could actually monetize and make a million dollars a month because you’re the best equity analyst in the world,” paid on your public track record rather than paid courses. Burry and Citrini “probably monetize eight figures a year off their newsletters today” — but imagine doing it without being in The Big Short. “Imagine Roaring Kitty was on FOMO when GME stuff happened… imagine a thousand Roaring Kitties.”

8. The endgame: when AI commoditizes content, capital at risk becomes the source of truth

• Se’s boldest claim, delivered as an early company thesis: AI is “roughly doubling in its capabilities every single quarter,” making content so abundant and good that “the scarce resource is no longer attention… Now you need something else to view as a source of truth, which I think is going to be capital. It’s going to be risk. It’s going to be who is right publicly, who is staking dollars.” The top people on the resulting platform “are not producing content, but they’re producing trades” — “the highest intent social graph that will ever exist,” with hopes of Google or Facebook scale.
• Who’s actually on FOMO now: largely net-new investors — “some of these guys are like, this is the first thing I’m ever investing in.” And the platform design is deliberate: “we are not the house, we are not the launchpad, we are not the AMM… it is in our best interest for you to have longevity as a user.” People at Robinhood told him their “naive view that the $100 depositor eventually becomes the millionaire… almost never happens”; on FOMO, users arriving with a few hundred dollars have become millionaires by watching and doing. Se cites Tulip King’s tweet — watching Michael Jordan daily won’t make you a baller, but watching top traders in real time might — calling it “the world’s first social graph that’s reflexive,” where consumer becomes creator just by trading. Hedged honestly: “we’re still not sure it can be done at scale.”

9. The dark side of public P&L — and the tooling to fix it

• Se doesn’t dodge the front-running problem, but flips it: “it went up in public, so it should go down in public” — if people found conviction because you did, exits should be public too; net-net the group ends up better off, and reputation risk may make big accounts more selective about what they buy. He’s realistic that the social graph won’t purely self-correct — “there’s always new people” — so the platform must “remain neutral but give enough tooling.”
• Concrete tooling so far: average hold time, attacking time-horizon misalignment — his example: you copy his “hold Bitcoin for 10 years” buy, come back in 10 years, “and it’s like you sold month six.” A floated idea: score creators using feedback from the dollars behind their calls, weighting a $100K buyer’s feedback more than a $1 buyer’s — “56 out of a hundred… 90 is good intent, always right; 20 is bad actor, don’t follow.”
• Avi’s confession in agreement: he now articulates timeframes on every asset he mentions after listeners held things he’d sold — “three months later they ask me about it and I’ve completely forgotten… that thing I sold two and a half months ago?”

10. Does the rally have legs? Gradual growth says yes; Avi adds the 94.4% caveat

• Se’s data: three growth events in company history. November and January were spiky — “10x over two days,” up fast, down fast, attributable to one or two coins. Since roughly June it’s been “gradual… every single day goes up by 5 to 10%,” visible on the Dune dashboard — and referred users have fallen from ~60% (X, TikTok) to ~25%, which Se presents as a possible sign of a healthy, organic graph. Durability is contingent on games not getting “solved” — “it’s kind of like market making, why would anybody else participate at that point?” With Bitcoin around 80k, “I don’t think most retail shifts attention until Bitcoin breaks all-time high. That could take 6 months. That could take a year.”
• Avi’s counterweight after the interview: 94.4% of people have lost money trading on FOMO — “that’s not an indication of what FOMO is as an app. That’s an indication of what meme coins are,” which is gambling. Yet the AMC tweet sent a coin from $100K to $100M market cap in five hours — “that actually can’t happen anywhere else… crypto is the only place that can react quickly to events that have attention.”
• On MemeFi — where a stated mechanism directs 20% of volume or fees into buying the underlying tokenized stock — “still a total and complete lottery ticket gamble. But it’s way more real, at least, than meme coins have been in the past… it’s basically the meme coin version of a DAT.” Avi says the DATs he is discussing, except MicroStrategy — and even MicroStrategy — have failed pretty miserably. The broader shift: real-revenue apps (Hyperliquid, Lighter, pump.fun “making money hand over fist”) have given the market “an appetite for reality” versus 2021’s what-might-happen speculation.

11. GPT-6.0, beating the Bart, and buying only the leaders

• OpenAI’s GPT-6.0 release is “crushing benchmarks across the board” per the company (Avi hasn’t used it): SanDisk +10%, Intel +4%. He’s long Intel, sees $140 by year-end — but a returning AI trade makes him nervous: a concentrated rally (Intel, SanDisk, Nvidia, some hyperscalers) can coexist with crypto; a broad-based bubble — “SK Hynix doubling in 2 weeks, Korean stock market going nuts” — “would be worse for crypto.” He bought back into Nvidia Wednesday.
• The chart call: break 80K and “we have beat the Bart” — his coinage for escaping the classic bear-market pattern (pump, consolidation, crash — shaped like Bart Simpson’s head) — which would “solidify in people’s minds that crypto is in a new era,” with 100K and possible all-time highs by year-end. Bullish, but “just because I’m bullish doesn’t mean you go all in.”
• Structure advice: beta trades matter less. In 2021 a Uniswap rally helped Trader Joe — “just a Uniswap clone” — go up in a straight line after Avalanche announced its EVM-compatible chain; now chains are abstracted away and usage of the underlying product is what matters. “If you have a thesis on perps eating the world, buy Hyperliquid and Lighter. Don’t look for a third crazy asset… don’t buy the number 50 asset hoping for a catch-up.” His dot-com analogy: buy Uber, not Lyft — “Lyft, just terrible company.”

12. Robinhood the multi-bagger, and watch perception over the data

• Robinhood, up from his 92 entry to 123, remains a conviction hold: “Robinhood could eat finance in a way we really haven’t seen since Interactive Brokers” — whose founder Thomas Peterffy is worth $105 billion, “the richest guy you’ve never heard of… that’s how much money financial plumbing can make you.” Annualized, chain revenue would add 20–25% to the bottom line, but he expects a “huge drop-off” in trading fees before a sustainable rebuild on tokenization and stablecoins; what’s really priced in is that Robinhood is “the only financial institution taking crypto seriously.”
• Closing themes from Q&A: his monetary trio is fixed — “Zcash, Monero, and Bitcoin… those are the only monetary assets that I will ever care about” — with shielded ZEC usage growing. He says the Pew poll shows Americans souring on a “rip-roaring” economy, with sentiment about whether the economy is good or excellent roughly 12% lower than a few months earlier; he attributes that perception mainly to gas prices, the Iran war and feared AI job loss “even though that is really not happening.” This makes him nervous about a short-lived dip into the midterms. His book: Bitcoin, Zcash, ARKG, XBI, Intel, Nvidia — “I think that portfolio could be up 50, 100%” over six months.
• His trench-training advice, as told: keep a notepad and drill the reflex — “for any headline, any tweet that comes out: how can I make money on this?” AMC CEO tweets about tokenization → does it hit AMC, Robinhood, a meme coin? “It’s a mental rep exercise.”