What's Driving Bitcoin Higher?

Summary

• The $3B of weekly ETF inflows look mostly like real buying, not just basis arb — the hosts run the math live: CME open interest rose only ~$1B from April 21–28, so even if every dollar of that was basis trade, ~$2B was outright spot demand, while Binance BTC OI actually fell from $18.5B to $17.9B. With basis at just ~5%, “it’s very rare that you get a tremendous amount of inflows for trading basis when basis is low.”
• The macro case in one line: “no matter what asset you hold right now, the rules of the game are much more likely to change than they were a year ago” — Trump is making decisions on the fly, every state must respond, and Bitcoin is the asset whose rules can’t change on you. “Nobody’s inflating away Bitcoin anytime soon.”
• MSTR copycats are today’s bullish flow and tomorrow’s GBTC-style unwind. Avi says treasury-vehicle structures are “the most common thing that’s coming across our desk” — deal investors buy at a ~10% premium betting the listing trades at MicroStrategy’s premium and 2x’s. But unlike Sailor’s non-recourse leverage, these SPVs “could absolutely get liquidated in a spectacular cascade” if Bitcoin trades down 30–40%. Jonah calls it “the only major red flag that I can think of for Bitcoin” — the plan is to screen premium-to-book and buy Bitcoin puts struck at the liquidation level during peak euphoria.
• Trading plan: take profits on calls into $100K. Jonah’s out-of-the-money calls from the $85K episode paid off on a 12%-in-4-days move; he’ll offload the rest near $100K and thinks the market stalls at $100–105K rather than running to $120K in a straight line. The structure now: long spot, short 30 units’ worth of $105K calls, “collect some theta… I don’t think you want to be long calls anymore.” Downside is cushioned by a Trump put — “if it goes too low, look out for the stimmy.”
• Monero at $5B looks cheap for “the only truly private currency that exists” — Avi’s line: “Monero is what people thought Bitcoin was in 2016,” now that Bitcoin has become trackable, ETF-wrapped “gold lite.” He sees $15–20B fair; Jonah eventually $20–30B — but cites a Zack XBT tweet saying the latest pump was because a $330M Bitcoin heist was swapped into Monero so it could be moved around, so chasing here risks a 50–70% bleed. Verdict: add on a dip, five-year hold.
• RWAs and cash-flowing DeFi are the next 5–10x trade. Jonah’s Pendle homework: ~$1M/week in revenue against ~$1B TVL (PE ~22), fees dividended to vePendle stakers — “kind of like Hyperliquid… a real business trading at a decent multiple,” with 2x–10x upside if growth holds. Avi is deep-diving Maple (TVL 4x since February) and calls RWAs “a year-long 5 to 10x type trade.” Jonah: “RWAs are real AF… it’s almost time for crypto prime time.”
• The regulatory through-line: Tether is “the only company that figured out how to not get shut down by the Department of Justice,” now reportedly the most profitable business per employee in the world — and both hosts are bullish Plasma as its rails: “ETH is too slow. Tron is too drug dealery.”

Deep dive

1. The ETF bid is real — and the hosts prove it with open-interest math

• Bitcoin sits at $95K versus $85K last episode, and the setup they flagged then — Bitcoin outperforming equities on down days instead of dumping harder — held: “you shouldn’t fade that signal.” Their favorite BTC/equities ratio is “basically on the highs.”
• The obvious objection to $3B of weekly ETF inflows (IBIT took nearly $1B in a day, ~$600M net of likely ARK and GBTC outflows) is that it’s riskless basis arb: buy the ETF, short CME futures. They run the math with two numbers: CME open interest rose only ~$1B from April 21–28, so even attributing every OI dollar to basis leaves ~$2B of outright buying — and basis sat around 5%, which is low. “It’s very rare that you get a tremendous amount of inflows for trading basis when basis is low.”
• The cross-check on Velo data (as heard): Binance BTC open interest fell week-over-week, $18.5B to $17.9B. No Binance leverage build, whales accumulating, coins leaving exchanges — “these ETF inflows are real… I don’t think it’s just arbitrageurs.”

2. The regime thesis: own the asset whose rules can’t change

• Avi’s framing of why allocators are moving now: as tariffs fracture the world and the US “pulls itself into its own little economic bubble,” a cross-border asset gets more valuable — and “basically no matter what asset you hold right now, the rules of the game are much more likely to change than they were a year ago.”
• Jonah’s completion of the thought: “you know what the rules of Bitcoin are and they’re not going to change on you. Nobody’s inflating away Bitcoin anytime soon. Nobody’s playing currency manipulation games to devalue it because they need exports… It’s a simple clean asset like gold” — which is why gold has also worked.

3. The Sailor copycat machine: bullish flow now, structural risk later

• The flywheel, as Avi lays it out: MicroStrategy trades at a premium because “when Bitcoin goes up $1, our stock goes up $1.20,” so Sailor sells stock for cash, buys more Bitcoin, and the loop feeds itself. The world’s realization: “why should we leave this financial engineering game solely to Sailor?” — hence Metaplanet, vehicles in Brazil, and a ~$3B raise by [likely Cantor] for an effective MSTR competitor.
• The deal math is why it’s proliferating: sponsors raise $100M to buy $100M of Bitcoin at a $110M valuation, betting the listing instantly trades at MicroStrategy’s premium — “it’s going to 2x… you basically get your free money.” Jonah’s aside: “You just described crypto VC right there.”
• Avi, from the inside: “this is now the most common thing that we’re getting pitched… whether it’s for Solana, Bitcoin, and whatever jurisdiction.” His prediction carries the GBTC scar tissue: “it’s going to work really, really, really well until it massively imploded and then a bunch of people lost money.”
• Jonah’s distinction is the load-bearing one: MSTR’s legacy software business once covered the interest on Sailor’s debt (no longer — he now sells shares to service it), but the new SPVs are not non-recourse. “Those vehicles could absolutely get liquidated in a spectacular cascade — and they probably will if Bitcoin trades down 30–40%.”

4. “The only major red flag” — and the puts plan for peak euphoria

• Jonah, self-described blinders-on bull, elevates this above every other risk: “This is the only major red flag that I can think of for Bitcoin.” The perverse mechanics make it worse: it’s easiest to raise convertible debt when Bitcoin is up, so these vehicles “raise a lot more money at the exact wrong time.” They note that Sailor “consistently buys the tops over and over” — his average price is now ~$70,000, “which is insane.”
• The monitoring plan is concrete: build a screener of premium-to-book across these vehicles; when premiums approach GBTC’s 2021 levels, “we’re at peak bubble mode” — then work out the Bitcoin price at which the SPVs get liquidated and buy puts struck at that level during peak euphoria, because “that’s when the market could move fast… you want to own optionality.”
• Neither treats it as actionable yet: “it’s not a problem yet because I do think we’ll get some more euphoria” — though the copycat rush itself may be “a sign of froth.”

5. Sailor is running a commodities squeeze — the question is who legitimizes it next

• Jonah’s professional read: “Sailor is behaving like a commodities trader. He’s trying to squeeze something… This is a classic squeezy type play” — the same thing that happens in nickel and silver, and “Sailor has identified perhaps the squeeziest commodity of our time.” Avi’s thinly-veiled anecdote imagines Sailor’s 2019 pitch: “This is the greatest short squeeze of all time, if we can get people to FOMO in” — how could you not front-run a buyer with infinite capital?
• Avi’s caveat on who plays: “the market attracts losers” — like GME, it’s companies with nothing going on throwing a hail Mary, “that’s kind of what Sailor did.” But he expects escalation: within two years “a reasonable company will do this because they can improve their bottom line by 10–20%,” and it’s telling “that there’s just broad acceptance of Bitcoin now… this probably accelerates.”
• Jonah’s gigabull scenario, told as a hypothetical: a non-US defense contractor like BAE Systems, generating ~$3.5B of free cash flow, issues a “Bitcoin bond” to hold balance-sheet Bitcoin and sell weapons outside a Mar-a-Lago-Accords hemisphere “set up by an arbitrary dude called Trump.” “If that sort of thing were happening… Bitcoin is going to $500,000 a token.” He expects sovereigns — “debt-fueled entities” — to do this: “I expect it actually.”
• The real unlock is collateral: “you never want dead capital on your balance sheet,” and borrowing against BTC today means banks that are “pretty anal” on rate and LTV. Jonah’s current workaround for buying a house with Bitcoin wealth: cash out, buy in dollars, mortgage the owned property, re-buy Bitcoin — “wouldn’t it be easier to eliminate those six steps?”

6. Tether, Plasma, and crypto as a DDoS attack on legacy finance

• Jonah’s conversation with Zahir of Split Capital (friend of the pod): commodity-producing economies like Angola and Nigeria could drive Tether settlement for hydrocarbons — “rather than going through 17 correspondent banks and getting dinged by 5% along the way, just send us Tether to this wallet address.” Avi suspects it’s already happening at the intermediary level.
• Tether is reportedly the most profitable business per employee in the world, and Avi’s explanation is pure regulatory arb: “their business is basically we’re the only company that figured out how to not get shut down by the Department of Justice.” His 2018 anecdote — SEC commissioner Robert Jackson explaining why Binance wasn’t shut down: when something gets big enough, “you might end up hurting more people than helping.” Jonah thinks Tether crossed that threshold.
• Both are long the rails: Avi disclosed a small Plasma investment and wishes he had more; Jonah agrees — “Plasma is a winner. ETH is too slow. Tron is too drug dealery.”
• Jonah’s philosophical frame, worth keeping whole: “I view crypto as a DDoS attack on legacy financial infrastructure” — millions of tokens spamming the regulatory state until some (Bitcoin, Tether) get through, organically minting bag holders who become influencers who now sit in the executive and legislative branches. The Gensler era hurt the crypto consumer, “and that’s exactly what happened” — the opposition used it to throw the incumbents out.

7. Monero: the last of what Bitcoin used to be — cheap, with a heist-shaped caveat

• Avi has had Monero on his watchlist for three years and owns a “nonsense amount,” but keeps concluding he should own ~5% of his portfolio: Bitcoin was once “a Swiss bank in your pocket,” and now it’s trackable, exchange-held, ETF-wrapped “gold lite” — “Monero is what people thought Bitcoin was in 2016.” At a $5B market cap, “the only truly private currency that exists in this world” feels cheap: “it should at least be worth 15 to 20.” Zcash is no competition — “complete and utter trash,” with backdoor worries from its launch ceremony.
• Jonah’s structural take: Monero is “basically Bitcoin plus Tornado Cash — a store of value with a mixer built in.” His concern is the off-ramp: few gateways accept it, so a holder trying to exit “would probably demand a massive discount” — whereas Bitcoin’s transparency is offset by jurisdiction-hopping and centralized exchanges acting as de facto mixers.
• The timing warning: Jonah cites a Zack XBT tweet saying the latest pump was because a $330M Bitcoin heist was swapped into Monero so it could be moved around. “If you’re holding it and there’s no heist… do you bleed out 50% or 70% in short order before it then rallies?” Both land on the same trade: don’t chase, add on a dip, “on my short list of things to buy and hold for five years.”
• The non-criminal case, from Jonah’s own family history — multiple relatives told to leave a country within 24 hours or be killed: liquid, portable, private capital flight matters, and “the history is not that ancient.” “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

8. The trade from here: sell the calls into 100K, collect theta, trust the Trump put

• Jonah’s out-of-the-money calls from the $85K episode ($100K/$120K strikes) paid off on a 12% move in four days; he sees $100K “in short order” and will offload the rest there. But he expects a stall around $100–105K, not $120K in a straight line: the structure now is long 100 units of spot, short 30 units’ worth of $105K calls — “collect some theta… I don’t think you want to be long calls anymore.”
• The market is “digesting” until the next headline — likely “chaotic and vomit-inducing” from Trump rather than bullish — but there’s a floor: “I do think there’s a put under this market. If it goes too low, look out for the stimmy… These guys aren’t going to tank the markets.” The tail risk that changes everything: if Bernie and AOC’s “fight oligarchy tour” politicians take over, “you can sell everything.”
• Avi’s sizing of the walk-back trigger: equities are up 17% from the lows, and “he’s not going to flinch on a 5% pullback” — it would take another ~14% drop to force Trump to retreat again.
• On earnings season, Jonah expects theater over information: CEOs will cut guidance and cry about tariffs, bankruptcies, and consumer uncertainty — “lobby season is the new earning season,” CEOs begging Trump via earnings calls — with the stock market at 5,570 versus the 6,100 it might merit absent tariffs already pricing in “whine season.”

9. Pendle, Maple, and the RWA inflection — “the next big trade”

• Jonah finally did the homework on Avi’s repeated Pendle mentions and it passed every filter: a real business earning ~$1M/week (per DeFi Llama) against just under $1B TVL — a PE around 22 on growing revenue — with fees effectively dividended to stakers via the vePendle mechanism. “It’s kind of like Hyperliquid… if the growth continues, I think you’re looking at a two to a 10 bagger.”
• His honest reservation: splitting yield-bearing assets into principal and yield tokens “is kind of strange and unintuitive to me” — in bonds those are linked. Avi’s context: Pendle was born when crypto yields whipsawed from 30% to 100%, and locking a fixed rate was the product; now it doubles as an 11-chain, one-stop DeFi dashboard — solving the real problem of forgotten, stranded assets “sitting on a DEX on Near.”
• Avi’s quarter goal is to dive into “everything that actually makes money and is growing” — next up Maple, whose TVL has 4x’d since February. His call: “RWAs are coming, man. Don’t sleep on this… this is going to be a year-long 5 to 10x type trade.”
• Jonah’s closing synthesis: “RWAs are real AF” — stablecoins proliferating, L1 rails handling billions of transactions, gateways popping up — “it feels like a when, not if… we swap out existing trad plumbing for crypto plumbing… It’s almost time for crypto prime time.”