Summary

Bitcoin remains in a bull market while most of crypto is already in a “savage bear market.” BTC is near its highs, yet many alts have erased the post-election move and sentiment has fallen into fear—an inversion the market struggles to process because “crypto” still gets treated as one trade.
The near-term setup rewards survival, shorts, and selective pair trades—not directional overtrading. BTC compressed from December’s $92,000-$107,000 range into roughly $94,000-$98,000, repeatedly faking breaks around $95,000-$98,000; without an imminent stablecoin bill, strategic Bitcoin reserve allocation, or another large buyer, “we’re kind of in no man’s land.”
At roughly $95,000, BTC offers neither clean momentum nor obvious value. The 100-day moving average broke and became resistance, while a reasonable $150,000 target implies a two-to-one “value” entry closer to $75,000; alternatively, another three to six weeks—and perhaps another 90 days—above $90,000 could rebase perceived value higher.
The long-term Bitcoin bid could dwarf Strategy’s purchases without requiring a federal strategic-reserve announcement. State and local pension systems hold about $6.25 trillion, while public pension funds were cited at $30 trillion; even a 10-basis-point allocation would mean tens of billions, turning today’s institutional trickle into “a fire hose of allocations.”
BTC’s resilience against falling equities may be an early signal that geopolitical uncertainty is becoming a feature, not a risk. BTC/Nasdaq held near a 4.35 base while tariff fears hit stocks; in a more adversarial, multipolar world, Bitcoin might trade as an alternative reserve asset—creating the commodity trader’s dream of “everybody else gets poor while you’re getting minted.”
ETH/BTC produced the episode’s sharpest contrarian setup after the roughly $1.5 billion Bybit hack failed to break it lower. The pair fell only about 2%-2.5%, rebounded, and never reached its range low, prompting the conclusion that “there’s nobody left to sell ETH” and raising the possibility of a 40%-50% squeeze toward 0.04.
Avi’s favored roadmap is pain first, then easing, deregulation, and a broader risk rally—but SOL remains the preferred short leg near term. DOGE-linked layoffs and uncertainty could wobble assets before a Ukraine ceasefire lowers commodities and inflation, enabling cuts and an alt season; meanwhile, roughly $2 billion of SOL unlocks beginning in mid-March make it unattractive to buy aggressively despite much of the supply potentially being priced in.

Deep dive

1. Bitcoin’s bull market is concealing an altcoin depression

Jonah’s trading report was blunt: nothing that worked historically has made money this year except shorting. BTC was roughly flat year to date, small alt longs were “a total disaster,” and the market had shifted “from player versus environment to player versus player.”
Avi mapped the chop: after BTC traded from $107,000 on December 16 down to $92,000, the broad six-week range compressed into roughly $94,000-$98,000. Repeated new highs and lows trained traders to chase breaks, only for nearly every daily candle since early February to cross back through $95,000-$96,000.
Their joint diagnosis: “We’re not in a bull market or a bear market—we’re in a bull market and in a bear market.” BTC remains close to its highs while almost everything else suffers a savage drawdown, yet the umbrella word “crypto” keeps obscuring the split. Avi also noted that the Fear and Greed Index was dipping into fear despite BTC’s proximity to its highs.

2. Exhausted altcoin holders are creating delayed, researchable trades

Avi’s best fundamental specimen was Maker. USDS market cap rose 20%-30% from January 1 to February 1, another 30% from February 2 to February 11, and from about $5 billion at the beginning of the year to $9 billion before Maker’s price action picked up on February 17. Governance helped, but the larger mechanism was simple: the market belatedly noticed that Maker’s core product was being minted and used.
The lesson applied equally to shorts: Jonah noted that a headline calling WIF a scam initially failed to move the coin. Avi said he shorted it around $1.26, covered near $1 after three or four days, and then watched it fall to $0.60. The delayed reaction showed why research can still create trades.
Jonah’s broader point was that the screen-watching crypto-native cohort is burned out, so even obvious headlines no longer produce the instant reaction traders expect.
SOL captured their disagreement. Avi emphasized the unwind after Trump’s memecoin drove SOL from $183 to nearly $300 in one week; few buyers of that 60% candle were necessarily making a durable Layer 1 allocation. Jonah instead saw disenchantment after the Javier Milei-linked memecoin debacle: users expected global payment rails and found “it’s just a casino.”
Jonah’s formulation was “rage quitting crypto”: alt season never came, “it never rained money,” and holders are puking bags or ceasing to care tick by tick. That capitulation creates opportunity for anyone still able to research through the chop, while also making each new scandal more likely to trigger wholesale exits.

3. Bitcoin needs either renewed momentum or a lower value entry

Avi’s framework separates momentum from value. BTC lost its 100-day moving average and then found resistance there on Friday, weakening the momentum case; value requires a plausible target, a clean invalidation level, and roughly two units of upside for each unit of downside.
Before the election, $50,000 qualified because traders could imagine $100,000 under a favorable Trump outcome while stopping below roughly $45,000. With today’s reasonable one-year target closer to $150,000—not the $250,000-to-$1 million moon cases—the same arithmetic points toward $75,000, making $95,000 unexceptional.
Time can manufacture value without a crash. The 2024 range persisted for roughly 200 days; the current structure was only about 92 days old. Another three to six weeks above $90,000 could frustrate waiting buyers into rebasing higher, though Avi’s conclusion remained: “Every day that goes by becomes a better buy,” but he was in no rush to get “giga long.”

4. Institutional flows support BTC while contrarian rotation favors beaten alts

Jonah distinguished short and long horizons: tactically there is no rush, but structurally there may be. State and local pension systems hold about $6.25 trillion, and US public pension funds were cited at $30 trillion; a 10-basis-point allocation would already produce tens of billions, potentially dwarfing Strategy’s buying.
That scale underpins Jonah’s willingness to stay exposed through selloffs. Continuing IBIT inflows need no dramatic headline: “A trickle of allocations turns into a fire hose,” abruptly sending BTC into price discovery. Avi agreed that immediate upside still requires buyers such as Strategy deploying another $10 billion-$20 billion or governments allocating meaningfully.
Avi was cautiously bullish on alt/BTC ratios because many charts bottomed around February 9, bounced 20%-30%, retraced, and still sat above their February 11 levels while BTC was slightly lower. His read: much of the post-election enthusiasm has vanished, but so have many of the remaining sellers.
Jonah warned that HYPE—and possibly LTC unless it gets an ETF quickly—could be a downturn shelter that lags when the rest of the market recovers; he owns a smaller HYPE position and still likes its team and product. Avi countered that HYPE is “negatively gamma, negatively convex”: as an on-chain leveraged casino, it should suffer when activity dries up and benefit when bull-market trading returns. Jonah replied that its outperformance may instead be reflexive: people hide in it because it has already outperformed.

5. Tariff uncertainty may be separating Bitcoin from equities

Friday delivered the S&P futures market’s largest red candle of 2025, yet BTC held up. The BTC/Nasdaq ratio stood around 4.43, above a 4.35 base despite a weekly wick to 4.25—too little evidence for a verdict, but enough to make the relative-strength chart look constructive.
Jonah reduced the divergence to “one word: uncertainty.” Trump had proved more unpredictable than even many detractors expected—from tariffs on Canada and mass federal layoffs to Russia outreach and rejection of European allies. Companies struggle to plan around that world; Bitcoin can say, “Chaos is great.”
Jonah’s higher-conviction possibility was that BTC increasingly trades as an alternative reserve currency rather than ordinary equity beta. If alliances fracture and non-dollar trade expands beyond a few pariah states, countries may need neutral settlement assets—and each government has stronger incentives to accumulate before its adversaries.

6. The macro roadmap starts with layoffs and cheaper commodities

Avi’s roadmap starts with DOGE firing large numbers of federal workers, raising unemployment and labor-market slack while risk assets wobble. Jonah said that phase appeared to be underway and assigned roughly an 85% probability to some market pullback through that mechanism. He pointed to spillovers from government contracts and newly cut NIH-funded research, not merely direct federal payrolls.
Next, Avi expected a Ukraine ceasefire. His trade expression was weaker oil, LNG, and wheat, potentially stronger Russian equities—though they found the relevant US-listed Russia ETFs no longer tradeable. Polymarket showed about a 70% chance of a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire in 2025, which Jonah thought reasonable or perhaps low.
Jonah thought oil could fall from roughly $75 toward $45-$50 because OPEC cuts might stop working if the war ended and too much oil began sloshing around. Alongside labor-market slack, cheaper energy would ease major CPI inputs and give the Fed room to cut after inflation moved into the “rearview mirror.”
Jonah remained nervous because inflation data had not cooperated. Avi argued that higher unemployment and an end to the war would put inflation behind the market, and noted that energy had materially contributed to the latest CPI increase. They differed on the beneficiaries: Avi called the scenario very bad for Bitcoin dominance, while Jonah agreed that higher alts could be the real winners even if BTC also rose.

7. Deregulation and AI are bullish; austerity remains the tail risk

Avi’s roadmap places mass deregulation six to 12 months into the administration, after the painful realignment, with crypto and equities then entering “moon time.” He initially placed major AI productivity gains one to two years out; Jonah argued they were already operating quietly as a constant backdrop.
Avi recalled discussing AI with Hal Press in May 2023 and concluding it was “insanely good for the Nasdaq.” He first said the Nasdaq was up “like 90%” since then, then corrected that to 70%—still a good call—with gains concentrated among the large technology companies best positioned to deploy AI.
Avi distinguished front-end rate cuts, which make private borrowing easier and help crypto, from a lower 10-year yield achieved through Greece-style austerity, which would remove deficit-fueled demand. With deficit spending around 7% of GDP, balancing the budget rapidly could mean “a real recession” and a market crash.
Avi argued that cheap commodities and AI-led productivity could let Trump cut taxes while continuing to spend on difficult-to-cut programs. He noted that Social Security, Medicare, defense, and interest payments make up most government spending and are hard for DOGE to reduce meaningfully. Jonah put only 50%—perhaps lower—on that deficit-ramp scenario, citing Trump’s repeated promises to cut spending and run government like a business.
Their deficit disagreement ultimately narrowed. Jonah thought a balanced budget was very unlikely, while both agreed that a major acceleration of the deficit was unlikely; the base case was persistent, not rapidly expanding, deficits.

8. ETH’s refusal to fall turned a hack into a bullish signal

The Bybit hack involved roughly $1.5 billion worth of ETH, yet Bybit appeared able to cover customers for now. Jonah shorted ETH/BTC within about 30 seconds of the headline; the pair dropped only 2%-2.5%, then recovered roughly 1%-1.5% from its intraday low without even testing the bottom of its range.
For Avi, that failure was the information: “There’s nobody left to sell ETH except this North Korean guy who just stole it from Bybit.” ETH/BTC had been falling since December 9, 2021, so more than three years of underperformance may have already expelled the ETH maxis.
Looking for an overlooked fundamental narrative, Jonah went through a report covering 50 non-crypto companies working with Ethereum and found little beyond one-off NFT efforts. The more interesting point was real-world assets, where activity still concentrated on Ethereum; he saw RWAs as the next step after stablecoins and before companies issue tokenized equity.
That combination led Jonah to see a possible 40%-50% ETH/BTC rally, potentially back toward 0.04 within a year. Avi thought that if it happened, it could happen within a month because “if bad news can’t send the market lower, it’s not going lower.” Jonah challenged that timing, pointing to stablecoin legislation in two to six months and the possibility that the stolen ETH still had to be liquidated.

9. Traders are dropping ETH as the short leg and substituting SOL

Avi suggested that Bybit’s replacement buying could explain some of ETH’s resilience: the exchange was effectively short ETH while North Korea was long it. Jonah agreed that Bybit probably bought ETH quickly for solvency reasons.
Jonah’s positioning change was concrete: after using ETH as the short leg against nearly every alt for a year, he saw “basically zero chance” of shorting it for at least the next month. Buying ETH still gave him “the willies”; Avi treated that shell shock as an additional bullish sentiment signal.
SOL became the replacement short leg until unlocks begin in mid-March. Avi estimated roughly $2 billion could unlock against daily volume of $1 billion-$2 billion. Jonah thought much could already be priced in and that some buyers might simply be waiting until after the unlock. Their conclusion: not an existential event, but “definitely not the time to be buying lots of Solana.”

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