One More Push Higher Before the Crash?

Summary

• The core call: one more leg up, then sell it. Avi’s mental framework for the next few weeks: “you need to get people’s appetites wet and then you get a little pullback and then everybody that missed the first rally… they’re going, ‘Well, I’m sure as [__] not missing this one’… and that’s what causes something really stupid. And then it kind of unravels.” Jonah gives alt season three to four more weeks before some sort of implosion, is buying this dip (“if you’re not buying here, you’re probably making a mistake”), and would be a net seller of crypto on the next leg up.
• ETH is a flows trade, full stop. Avi’s claim: ~$10bn of treasury-company ETH buying plus an assumed $10bn of front-running is what sent ETH here — “it doesn’t really matter that ETH sucks,” someone just called everyone who missed the BTC treasury trade and said run it back with number two. “Without this structure, ETH/BTC would be below 0.25” — and it’s heading there anyway.
• The MNAV chart is cracking, and it leads everything. On the Blockworks Research dashboard, SBET just crossed into discount ($2.865bn market cap vs $3.3bn of ETH held), BTCS sits at 0.87, and even MSTR’s trend looks soft — premiums leaking lower every week in a bull market with no exogenous shock, unlike the tariff-crisis dip. At a discount, it’s very hard for these companies to raise capital to buy more, buying stops, front-runners stop, “and then who’s left to buy ETH?” Jonah’s end-of-alt-season tell: MNAVs below one.
• The home-run trade is the GBTC playbook on distressed DATs — not shorting them, but waiting for the cascade to distress and buying, “might happen at a 40% discount this time because people have seen it already” (GBTC was recalled at roughly 50-60% below spot). Jonah would scale in at 30-40% discounts; Avi would buy earlier (−20/−25%) for well-structured names like Nakamoto or Metaplanet — with Jonah’s Lehman-credit-desk filter applied: “You don’t go bankrupt because you’re insolvent. You go bankrupt because you’re illiquid.” Pick the wrong horse and “it dies underneath your feet.”
• Discipline for this phase: any alt bought here gets sold in thirds at +15%, +30%, +50%, then you’re out — this is the environment of inefficient pops, and the new holder base (pod shops like Citadel and Millennium buying DATs as equity traders) has “way lower return thresholds to feel good… They are not believers,” which is exactly why the unwind can be fast.
• The path: Avi’s “crazy take” — a broad rally for three-four weeks, Bitcoin fails to hold above 120, then a washout to 98-102 that “would feel like absolute death,” sideways, then up. Jonah’s exit differs in form: on the turbo pump he’d cut leverage and consolidate alts back into Bitcoin, not dollars. Supporting text from Roshan Patel’s journal: “ETH pumps hardest last” — one more leg, often the most parabolic; “when you’re in the eighth inning time-wise, you’re in like the third inning price-wise.”

Deep dive

1. Slow tape, ugly Twitter — the hosts call out crypto’s antisemitism turn

• Avi’s account of the weekend blowup: a formerly “very respected member of our crypto analysis and trading community” (likely Ryan Selkis) has been “tweeting about how the Jews are declaring war on America”; Jonah dubbed him “Skinhead Elmo,” and Avi’s retweet made the broader point — haters “apply different standards to everybody,” citing the circulated infographic of ~50 Jewish CBS employees against an actual media-executive headcount of ~7,000.
• The origin story as Avi tells it: at the Trump NFT dinner a year ago, Trump called him up unprompted; back at the table, with “the craziest [__] eyes I’ve ever seen,” he said, “You don’t understand. I’ve been put on this planet for a mission.” “That’s when I knew he was a little bit off his rocker.”
• Both land on the same message — “there’s no secret cabal of people plotting against you… escape the rat race, make some money” — and Jonah’s cooler read frames the whole segment: “this is the kind of thing that probably wouldn’t have happened if markets weren’t slow.”

2. Week six of sideways — the “tasting pump” and the alt-season clock

• The setup: roughly six weeks of Bitcoin sideways since the July 10 wick, while ETH “basically touched all-time highs and then retraced 10%” into reasonable support with treasury companies still buying. Jonah isn’t worried: “this is a pullback… we probably get another leg up,” at which point he’d be a net seller of crypto.
• His framework for the next few weeks, verbatim: “you need to get people’s appetites wet and then you get a little pullback and then everybody that missed the first rally… ‘I’m sure as [__] not missing this one.’ And that’s what causes something really stupid. And then it kind of unravels.” The first move was “the tasting pump” — Jonah’s garnish: “the Michelin star tasting pump” — and Jonah gives alts three to four more weeks before implosion.
• The discipline that follows: if you’re buying alts in this environment, take profit in thirds — +15%, +30%, +50%, then you’re out — and buy on red days like today, “not when they’re up 15-20%.”

3. LINK — momentum, not yet a thesis

• Jonah’s case: LINK fits the “institutional rally” — Wall Street knows it, it’s been around forever, and it “has a real job” providing oracle data, putting it in the ETH-beta bucket alongside names like Aerodrome.
• Jonah’s digging complicates it: DeFi Llama shows “pathetic” five-figure onchain revenues, with the big oracle revenues supposedly offchain and untrackable — no buybacks to audit, “a nebulous business with quotation marks around the word business.” His verdict: “not quite yet an investable thesis for the long haul, but I’d certainly buy it for a trade” in a momentum market.

4. Margin vs fresh capital — “it’s the exact same thing,” and a live L

• Jonah’s confession: crypto is “a roach motel for money” — he’s been burned since selling bitcoins at $300 in 2013 — so instead of wiring fresh capital at all-time highs, he margin-buys ETH and Aerodrome against existing tokens, arguing $1m on Kraken caps his loss at $1m versus $1.2m if he wires in more.
• Avi’s pushback, worth keeping: “Isn’t that the same [__] thing?” Right in an absolute sense, wrong on risk — margin adds a liquidation price, making losses likelier, and “safer is not the word I would use”; the only real advantage is friction. Jonah concedes to “psychologically easier to manage”: he can click X on a levered position, but cash on a crypto venue “very quickly turns into crypto.”
• The owned L: mid-show Avi realizes he borrowed USDC against his ETH at 6.5% when he should have just borrowed ETH — “that was [__] stupid of me.” Jonah: “We own our L’s on this podcast… you just get the unfiltered truth.”

5. The MNAV chart is cracking — and ETH is pure flows

• Screen-sharing the Blockworks Research dashboard: SBET just crossed into discount ($2.865bn market cap against $3.3bn of ETH), BTCS trades at 0.87, BMNR has paused buying, and even MSTR’s trend is “not looking so hot”; Metaplanet on strategytracker.com is “grotesque.” Jonah’s key distinction from the tariff-crisis dip: premiums are “leaking steadily lower every single week despite the fact that we’re in a bull market” — a pure-play read on treasury-company health.
• Why a discount matters, per Avi: they can’t raise debt to buy more at a discount (only warrant exercises work), so “you’re going to see the buying stop” — then the front-runners stop, “and then who’s left to buy ETH?”
• His maximal claim: ~$10bn of DAT buying plus an assumed $10bn of front-running “is what sent ETH here.” “It doesn’t really matter that ETH sucks. What matters is that you missed out on the BTC treasury trade” — and without the structure, “ETH/BTC would be below 0.25… it’s heading there anyway.” Both admit they missed the first 2x and only caught the last 25%: “you’re not going to hit every single [__] trade.”
• Jonah owns his own rage-bait tweet (“this is all a deregulation trade, not the DATs”): “I don’t actually believe that… I was playing with words” — DATs are a symptom of deregulation, and they are driving price. People really vehemently disagreed with him, including a likely Fejau.

6. The home-run trade: rerun the GBTC playbook on distressed DATs

• Jonah’s challenge to Avi: even if ETH just flatlines around $4,000 when the buying stops, the DAT equities can crash fast — the holders are “people at pod shops like Citadel and Millennium who can’t buy ETH or the ETH ETF… they’re not loyal people,” and discounts could go as deep as GBTC’s, which he recalls at 50-60% below spot.
• The trade is explicitly not a short: “wait until they suddenly just cascade down to distress levels and then rerun the GBTC playbook all over again. It might happen at a 40% discount this time because people have seen it already.” Jonah would probably scale in from 30-40% discounts; Avi would buy earlier (−20% for Nakamoto and perhaps −20/−25% for Metaplanet) for names he thinks are “structured okay,” and frames it as the show’s whole purpose: home-run trades “happen maybe once a year… unless you’re prepared, you can’t take advantage.” Prep on the best-structured names promised for next episode.
• The aside on the OG: Saylor is up roughly $27bn on his bitcoin against only $8.21bn of convertible debt costing $35m a year. “Move over Warren Buffett” — both in genuine awe.

7. The Lehman lesson: insolvent vs illiquid

• Jonah’s credit-desk saying from the Lehman collapse: “You don’t go bankrupt because you’re insolvent. You go bankrupt because you’re illiquid.” GBTC was neither — its bills were a few salaries and lawyers, easily covered by the 2% fee — which is why you could bottom-drawer it and “check your portfolio in two years and feel smart.”
• The DATs are different: the ones at steep discounts relying on equity financing “may very well be insolvent” and could become illiquid quickly — you can be right on the trade “and you just picked the wrong horse and it dies underneath your feet… the rest of the race is going on and you’re just sitting there underneath a dead horse.”

8. The path: three good weeks, then “absolute death”

• Avi’s self-described crazy take: a nice rally everywhere over three-four weeks, Bitcoin fails to hold above 120 for an extended period, then a washout to 98-102 “which would feel like absolute death,” sideways, then up — “really good for the next three weeks, then really bad for a little bit and then really good again.” Jonah is adding now: “if you’re not buying here, you’re probably making a mistake” — though when ETH and alts rally, “we’re close to the general global end, not just the alt end.”
• Jonah’s exit differs in form, not thesis: on the next turbo pump he’d cut all leverage and consolidate alts back into Bitcoin, not dollars — Bitcoin still has room, and he sits in a high-tax jurisdiction.
• Jonah reads Roshan Patel’s journal line approvingly: “ETH pumps hardest last… we have another leg. It’s often the most parabolic” — even though “we’re pretty darn close” cyclically. The part that flatters his margin habit: “when you’re in the eighth inning time-wise, you’re in like the third inning price-wise.”
• The part that scares him: today’s buyers have “way lower return thresholds to feel good” — buy, nearly triple, drop 20-30%, move on. “These aren’t delusional moonboys… They are not believers.” Avi’s blunter translation: “we’re dealing with paperhanded losers.” And the tell that ends it all, per Jonah: this alt season is over “when those MNAVs go below one.”