Why We Are Bullish

Summary

• Jonah’s headline call, made twice for emphasis: Bitcoin outperforms every major equity index, hedge fund, VC fund, and private equity fund over the next 5–10 years — and most people will still “completely fumble that opportunity” through “underexposure, overexposure, panic selling when the greed and fear index tilts towards fear, and holding the wrong altcoin instead of Bitcoin.” With the White House crypto director saying the Trump administration will accumulate more BTC for the strategic reserve — “the most bullish possible thing that could happen” — he has “that tingly feeling” of another 50% higher.
• Avi’s answer to “how do I actually get rich if I’m only worth $100k”: not leverage and not altcoin churn, but finding underappreciated 10-baggers and rolling the winnings back into Bitcoin — Hyperliquid at $12–15 was one, Syrup is “still a very reasonable tenbagger” — turning $100k into $1.2M instead of $300k over two years.
• The regime has changed: “generally altcoins are trash,” and the 2021 flip-everything playbook no longer works the same way — “it’s not the same market.” Now “the things that make money outperform,” there are finally assets worth parking in for five years, and the right move is to raise your return threshold and stretch the timeframe from weeks to months. Jonah’s overtrading parable: an artist friend who 2x’d through the 2017 ICO craze while the space 100x’d, insisting “my P&L is growing.”
• Circle is the episode’s short thesis in fundamentals, long thesis in flows: $22B market cap on $1.6B revenue and just $18M net income (~1% margins), profits paid away to Coinbase and market makers to fight a losing battle against Tether, with rate cuts set to slash the revenue line — “even if it 10xes from here, I still wouldn’t touch it.” But the 4x IPO pop proves institutional appetite (BlackRock took 10%); Ripple will probably IPO at an “insanely stupid valuation,” and expect an eventual large correction across Circle, Robinhood, Coinbase, and the MSTR-playbook companies.
• Tether is winning the stablecoin war on organic growth: USDC has flatlined near $60B since February while USDT grinds steadily higher at $154B, and Avi wagers real financial institutions show some uptake of Tether within a year. Plasma’s XPL — “basically the Tether IPO,” launched on likely Cobie’s Echo platform — filled in 45 seconds at ~$500M FDV, passing the podcast’s new yolo framework: sub-$1B FDV plus a real-world use case.
• The structural worry: everything big wants to become its own chain — pump.fun’s $1B ICO, Plasma leaving Tron’s orbit, even likely Santiago Royel Santos launching an L1 instead of building on Solana — the same dynamic that took four years to cannibalize ETH via L2s. “Solana was supposed to be the NASDAQ of crypto. Now Hyperliquid is the NASDAQ of crypto.” Both hosts have de-rated SOL; Avi’s summary: “the age of infrastructure has sort of played out and the age of applications has dawned.”
• Avi’s other long: Robinhood, which he still owns — massively expanding coin listings and wallet integrations to capture the Gen Z cohort, with Jonah noting ~35bps fees on huge volume across 12M users makes it “the one-stop shop for people who don’t know what they’re doing.” Unlike Circle, HOOD can scale revenue if crypto keeps growing.

Deep dive

1. The generational call: Bitcoin beats everything — and how you’ll fumble it

• Jonah opens and closes on the same thesis, verbatim: “I do believe that Bitcoin is going to outperform every major equity index, every major hedge fund, every major venture capital fund, and every major private equity fund for the next 5 to 10 years.” Most people will “completely fumble that opportunity” — via “underexposure, overexposure, panic selling when the greed and fear index tilts towards fear, and holding the wrong altcoin instead of Bitcoin.”
• The mainstreaming evidence: the White House crypto director says the Trump administration will soon accumulate more BTC for the strategic reserve — “the most bullish possible thing that could happen.” Among Jonah’s non-crypto friends, the debate is over: “Nobody debates that it’s going up. Nobody debates about the fact that it’s not going to zero anymore.”
• His trader’s framing of why the price having risen so far doesn’t matter: markets are “kind of memoryless processes — what the price of Bitcoin did between zero and 107 or 108k is kind of irrelevant to its future.” The underinvestment of newly converted skeptics “hasn’t even begun to flow into Bitcoin,” and he has “that tingly feeling that we’re going to launch another 50% higher.”

2. The $100k problem: 10-baggers rolled back into Bitcoin

• Avi flags overexposure as the biggest listener risk, and explains why it happens: “if you’re worth $100,000 and you put all your money into Bitcoin and Bitcoin 3x’s, you’re not rich” — so people reach for altcoins and leverage.
• His alternative: find the underappreciated 10-baggers — Hyperliquid “when we were shilling it ridiculously hard at $12 to $15,” and Syrup, “still a very reasonable tenbagger” — then “roll them back into Bitcoin and suddenly you’ll find that after two years maybe your $100,000 hasn’t gone to 300. Maybe it’s gone to 1.2 mil.”
• The companion warning is fatigue: with tailwinds “so undeniably clear,” the best move is to “pick some things and sit in them… If you believe in something, literally just believe in something.”

3. Selective trading replaces altcoin churn

• Avi’s change of mind is explicit: “generally altcoins are trash… they don’t actually make you any money” — advice he’d never have given in 2021, when “flipping and trading was making a lot of money” and he’d have laughed at anyone who told him otherwise. Now: “it’s a genuinely new market environment… the things that make money outperform and the things that don’t make money don’t actually particularly do well.”
• The difference from 2021, in his telling: back then “I don’t think there’s a single asset I would have confidently told you, yes, this is going to exist in five years” — other than Bitcoin (and ETH, “before I knew anything”). Now there are real assets to park in.
• Jonah’s cautionary tale, as told: an artist friend in the 2017 ICO craze, all over what was likely Poloniex and “60 other random exchanges,” flipping Lisk one day (“Python for crypto”) and Tezos the next, insisting “my P&L is growing” — while 2x’ing money in a space that 100x’d, leaving “98% of the cash on the table.” The FTX third-anniversary water bottle in Jonah’s hand is the monument: they “overtraded their way to ruin… the lesson for all of us is don’t do meth, don’t overtrade.”
• The exceptions still exist — buy the dip when “the market vaults lower on Trump saying a bunch of stuff that’s obviously not going to become policy,” short likely WIF when the Vegas Sphere says “they never contacted us” — trades worth “a quick 50 to 500%.” But the discipline is to raise the return threshold and stretch timeframes from weeks to months: “crypto is starting to grow up, weirdly.”

4. Circle: a terrible company, a telling IPO

• The numbers: Avi says Circle is up 300%; Jonah gives the fundamentals: $22B market cap on $1.6B of 2024 revenue and just $18M of net income (~1% margins). Jonah’s diagnosis (with his own caveat — “I’m not an equity analyst”): Circle pays its profits away to Coinbase and, from his market-making days, “pays the market making community… for every unit of USDC that a market maker mints” — minting that isn’t sticky, it “ends up getting migrated to Tether.” Meanwhile “16 Italian dudes in Lugano run Tether as basically the most profitable business per employee in the history of the world.”
• The macro kicker: with rates potentially headed lower under a successor appointed by Trump, who wants them at zero, “as interest rates come down, this revenue is going to get slashed in a major way. This is not Apple selling iPhones.” Verdict: “a terrible company priced by professionals at a fair to rich valuation and then retail degens bid it to the moon… even if it 10xes from here, I still wouldn’t touch it.”
• Avi’s counter — the signal matters more than the stock: “there is a whole new class of investor that wants access to this market,” and it doesn’t have to be a good company, it “just has to fit a market need for exposure.” BlackRock took 10% of the IPO, which the Wall Street Bets crowd read as validation. Ripple’s probably going to IPO at an “insanely stupid valuation,” and eventually “a large market correction” in these stocks — Robinhood, Coinbase, and the MSTR-playbook companies included.
• Jonah’s fair-minded counterpoint: BlackRock took it at the IPO price and may simply be seeking crypto exposure or regulatory safety. “Maybe Tether is likely the Cantor Fitzgerald bucket-shop coin, and USDC is the white-shoe-firm coin.” Even so, “even if it 10xes from here, I still wouldn’t touch it personally.”

5. Tether is winning — and Plasma is its IPO

• Avi’s chart-share: USDC at $60B has flatlined since early February (one ~$10B January pop, then “three months of nothing”) while USDT grinds steadily to $154B — “USDT is getting organic growth.” Tether is cleaning up, “coming to the states… probably taking meetings with politicians as we speak,” and he’d “wager in the next year we see some uptake of Tether from real financial institutions.”
• Jonah’s steelman for USDC, kept honest: even at a 90/10 split, stablecoin TAM is huge — “crypto’s second best use case behind Bitcoin” — and if New York and London pivot from “crappy legacy SWIFT tradfi rails” to USDC, $18M of profit becomes billions, with a big party at what is likely Jeremy Allaire’s house. Avi’s reply: “a much better argument a year ago.”
• Plasma’s XPL is the trade expression: “basically the Tether IPO — but public and decentralized” on likely Cobie’s Echo platform, KYC’d and above-board. It filled in 45 seconds with a $50M-per-wallet cap. The token itself is “a bit woo woo handwavy” (it secures the Bitcoin bridge, not the network), but a dedicated stablecoin chain has a real pitch to tradfi: why adopt a payment network “that also contains all of your competitors on it”?
• The episode’s stated framework, stress-tested live: a project is worth a yolo if FDV is below $1 billion and it has a potential real-world use case — with Avi’s caveat that “a coin for hamster racing” at $500M doesn’t qualify; it needs a real team tackling a large problem that they agree with the team is big. XPL passes both.

6. Robinhood: the distribution trade Circle isn’t

• Avi is “still very bullish on Robinhood” and still owns it: massive coin-listing expansion, integrations coming, and a wallet that in the next year will probably let users “interact with crypto through their wallet, which would be amazing.”
• Jonah’s texture from having quoted them as a market maker: Robinhood takes roughly 35bps on gazillions of volume across 12M users, and its Gen Z base — “the cohort that grew up online during COVID” — treats it as “the one-stop shop for people who don’t know what they’re doing.” At a P/E of “69.420,” it’s rich, but unlike Circle, “if crypto grows, it can scale its revenues and scale its profits.” Both still rank Hyperliquid and Syrup above it.

7. Everything wants its own chain — and that’s the Solana risk

• Pump.fun’s $1B raise crystallizes it. Jonah’s advice for the money: build a Launchcoin-style configurable launchpad replacing “120-page convertible note safe agreements” with a few clicks — but “I think they’re going to fall far short of that,” and what they do next “is going to impact Solana too.”
• Jonah’s structural point: “anything that gets big will eventually want to be its own chain” — and there are “no switching costs and no cost to starting your own city anymore,” his update to the old “blockchains are cities” essay. It rhymes with 2021’s L2 debate on ETH: “L2s are going to cannibalize ETH usage… that’s actually exactly what happened. It just took four years to play out. We could be in the early stages of that for Solana.”
• Avi adds the fat-protocol thesis — every app is incentivized to become its own L1 rather than “bleed all the value back to the creators of the L1 on top of which I sit” — with likely Santiago Royel Santos launching his own L1 instead of building on Solana as the classic example. The rationalizations about chains not fitting needs are “not true. It’s just about value capture.”
• The positioning upshot, hedges intact: Avi watches the HYPE/SOL pair, still owns some SOL but “I just don’t think it’s going to perform the best from now on.” Jonah: “Solana was supposed to be the NASDAQ of crypto. Now Hyperliquid is the NASDAQ of crypto… I love Solana. I think it’s probably still going to go up a lot” — but he regrets not selling when Trumpcoin took it to 290. Avi’s closing frame: “the age of infrastructure has sort of played out and the age of applications has dawned on us.”