Lao Bai

Lao Bai is running more ETH than BTC this cycle: BTC is the higher-quality asset, but ETH/BTC just broke above a long-term downtrend around 0.03 on the weekly chart. His scenarios are $200,000 for BTC in the bull case, $150,000 in the base case and $120,000 in the bear case; if BTC reaches $150,000, ETH should deliver another 50%-60% on top of BTC doubling. But he stresses that Ethereum cannot lead the market—how high it goes depends on BTC.

He sees RWA, Perps and privacy as this cycle’s core themes. The privacy names are Zcash, Zama and NEAR; in Perps, it is Hyperliquid and LIT, although neither is cheap. RWA lacks an ideal vehicle: UNDO has no token value capture and continues to sell, while he instead sees UNI potentially benefiting from the combination of Robinhood trading and Uniswap. In AI, VVV and Bittensor are worth watching, with a potential entry only after a pullback if the data has not materially deteriorated.

Robinhood has been his main battleground over the past month, and he bought HOOD in the low $100s. He likes Vlad and the team because they understand both stocks and Crypto, while Robinhood keeps expanding from Cash App-style products and Meme-stock pairings to Uniswap v4 Hook-based products. He once tweeted, when HOOD was around $76, that “the final form of every exchange in the world should be Robinhood,” but did not buy the stock.

Among L1s, HYPE and BNB are both solid: BNB is Coca-Cola and Nvidia, HYPE has more upside optionality, and Solana has the most beta. Solana’s onchain exits rely mainly on native DEXs such as Raydium, Orca, Meteora and Jupiter. He owns SOL and hopes it reaches $150 within one or two months. Whether it breaks its prior high still depends on BTC.

Lao Bai sees only two ways for Perp DEXs to challenge Hyperliquid: distribution or institutional-grade trading capabilities. Lighter could differentiate itself if Robinhood uses it as backend infrastructure; Variational is pursuing a better trading experience through RFQ and hedging. In his recollection, roughly 2% of Hyperliquid addresses generated about 80% of early trading volume, led by several hundred to roughly 500-1,000 large North American traders—though that does not mean Asian retail users have no value.

AI×Crypto is still in its third year of “looking for a nail with a hammer,” and trading agents have not yet earned his trust with capital; he sees VVV’s privacy inference as the clearest real need. OBO’s design—allocating OpenRouter inference credits to token holders and building a secondary market for idle compute—is clever, but its flywheel depends on Meme-token trading fees. He sold at $0.04 and missed the subsequent rally, and remains unconvinced by the model.

FOMO’s real edge is not buying Memes with Apple Pay—Moonshot already did that—but linking KOL trading activity to X accounts and compressing the lag from seeing a post to verifying it and placing a trade. FOMO has attracted a large number of KOLs with subsidies. If X continues integrating X Money, token price charts and trading, it could become a more complex version of FOMO. If SmartX receives support from Binance and fills the Social Trading gap, Lao Bai thinks it could potentially receive an airdrop, but that remains conditional.

He thinks this could be Crypto’s last serious, or last large-scale, bull market. A shrinking primary market, the October 11, 2025 market shock, Hyperliquid’s shift toward revenue and buybacks and burns rather than “dream-multiple” valuations, and AI’s pull on capital and attention have combined to produce the coldest bear market. The more likely future is a long period of sideways trading punctuated by smaller bulls and bears: Crypto is increasingly resembling US equities, while US equities are increasingly resembling Crypto, rather than following a clear four-year cycle.

🔗 Original source & video: 168X Talks to Lao Bai: What to Buy in This Bull Run? Robinhood, RWA, Perp DEXs, AI, and the Next Alpha