Summary

Jordi Alexander is “97% confident” the bottom is in at $60k Bitcoin, arguing the volume traded there, the time spent, and the fact that “literally everything was thrown at it” mean a retest would need “something really bad” to happen. The macro setup does the rest: once bond vigilantes forced the Fed’s hand, “gold and Bitcoin are the two things” that respond to dollar-debasement talk, and another speaker cites an all-time-high gold–BTC correlation with Bloomberg reporting investors buying both together.
Justin Bram makes the bear case, and his math is specific: if $60k was the bottom, last cycle’s $68k→$125k move plus diminishing returns implies maybe $185k — “is it really worth entering here at $82k for like maybe a 2x?” He also flags that no new cohort is joining crypto-native assets — the flows are AI/memory traders rotating back — and that every prior bull thesis was a financial-rails catalyst (VCs, ETF, DATs) with nothing obvious left.
FOMO’s representatives offer evidence that new money exists — just not where crypto natives look: ~40,000 new users a day from the App Store, ~39,000 of them mobile, while Se says July’s total growth spend was ~$150k. Of ~1,500 daily support tickets, roughly 1,450 are from people who “just don’t understand what’s going on” — evidence of inexperienced users — and the endgame is an IPO, not a token: FOMO wants to be “the canonical social graph of finance.”
Zcash is a major long across the discussion: Qiao Wang calls it “the simplest, the clearest, the cleanest thesis” in crypto and holds only BTC and ZEC in his personal account. The supply argument — early investors and team have distributed, mining emissions fell, and buying pressure may now outweigh distribution and supply — plus a rising shielded-pool metric and a $50M whale sale absorbed without much price impact, all support the trader argument that ZEC has Bitcoin’s supply cap at roughly 1% of the price.
Thiccy’s structural thesis: crypto’s distribution weakened as Twitter declined and the next cohort lives on mobile — crypto gachas earn a tenth of what mobile app gachas print (“a billion dollars a year type deal”), and meme-coin trading is “a funner game than Candy Crush” because you can actually win money. That’s why FOMO appears to have an advantage over Pump.fun: “whoever does the mobile side better just typically tends to win the consumer side.”
On AI and building, a host forecasts only two developer types: app-layer builders who “understand the customer really really well” and “super deep infra” developers — “everyone else in between is basically obsolete.” The discussion’s vector metaphor says AI has reduced the importance of magnitude or raw labor while making direction, taste, and agency more important — “the laborers have been nerfed.”
Positioning disclosures: Jordi is core Bitcoin plus HYPE he’s trimming into strength, and he’s demanding disclosure on how Trade.xyz fees flow back to an approximately $80B FTV HYPE asset — “people don’t want questions asked when they’re holding a bag.” Thiccy says he and the team hold NEAR and GRASS; another guest describes a treasury-bill-plus-Pokémon-card barbell with roughly $3M in cards; and Justin has illiquid AI-related venture exposure alongside his crypto holdings.

Deep dive

1. Jordi’s bottom call: 97% confident, because everything was already thrown at $60k

After four months off the pod and a violent round trip back to ~$80k, Jordi’s conviction is explicit: “I’m like 97% confident that we must have bottomed, cuz the amount of volume that traded at 60, the amount of time we spent there, the amount of things that were going wrong… if we go back to 60, who’s going to — who’s like selling again?” The retest condition: “something really bad has to happen.” The lads’ joke: a new Steady Lads episode is the “first test of a true bull rally.”
The macro mechanism as Jordi tells it: bond vigilantes pressured the Fed into interfering, which turns the conversation to the dollar — “and when you start talking about the dollar all day, then gold and Bitcoin are the two things” that respond to debasement. On shorting the 30-year against Trump and Bessent: “they’re a powerful enemy… the only thing that will keep it up is trashing the dollar, and they’re going to be willing to trash the dollar. I don’t think there’s any way around it.”
His inflation tell, as told: the pod once debated whether $10M was enough to retire; now a viral tweet says the number is $30M — “it’s gone up 3x in less than a year. So clearly there’s some amount of dollar debasement going on.”
Dim Selk’s market-structure read: two cohorts exist — the “autistic believers” glued to screens “willing to click green as soon as we see this decent intervention,” and the sidelined individuals, including institutions, who left for better-performing markets. The negative-convexity first move is done; the returning-cohort bid is a different kind of buying, so “you should have no FOMO chasing any of these coins… but you should be buying dips because the casino’s kind of back in action.”

2. Justin’s bear case — the upside math doesn’t clear the hurdle

Justin’s dissent, in full: nothing changed in his thesis, but “I just think it’s a little early for the bear market to be ending. Maybe I’m just following the Q4 bottom prophecy a little too hard — that’s what got me to sell at the end of last year, which I’m fortunate for.” The arithmetic: last cycle ran $68k→$125k, “a pretty small return”; with diminishing returns again, “what’s the upside from 125k? Is it 185? Is it really worth entering here at 82k for like maybe a 2x when I could look at tech, AI?” Jordi’s retort: “I’d be so happy if we went to 180… it’s going to be utopia.”
Justin’s deeper worry: “it seems pretty clear that there’s not new entrants and new money coming into the crypto-specific space” — the buyers are AI/memory traders rotating back once that trade washed out, and “our cohort, we’ve solved the game” on these assets. Jordi’s response: “those guys have a lot of money… if it’s just them, that’s enough. I’ll be happy.”
A host’s catalyst framing sharpens it: most bullish crypto theses over the past four years rested on “some financial-rails reason” — VC money, the ETF, DATs — “and I don’t know if there’s anything left on that front. The show-me-the-money moment is: are people actually moving their money into Bitcoin so they can escape their country or their currency?” Jordi says the answer is no today, and “everyone’s been perpetually trying to front-run that for a long time now.”

3. The digital-gold debate: all-time-high correlation vs. three failed auditions

Justin’s pushback is the episode’s best disagreement: “It’s just hard to imagine that BTC can run back the digital gold narrative for the third time.” During COVID Bitcoin nuked then rallied; in the hiking cycle it nuked; when inflation came down it nuked — “it’s not really respecting that… it seems hard to me that people will buy into it yet again after being burnt by it so many times.”
Another speaker’s direct rebuttal: “I disagree, sir. The all-time-high correlation is hit between gold and Bitcoin” — with Bloomberg reporting investors buying both together rather than choosing. Jordi’s dinner discussion with Kyle Soska adds that, as long as the debasement trade runs, Bitcoin becomes “part of the conversation around being a defensive position that’s part of gold beta” — “I know that kind of sounds ridiculous” — and outside money can flow into BTC specifically even if not into alts.
Jordi’s alt corollary: as long as Bitcoin isn’t nuking, “these good alts like Hyperledger, Zcash, Pump, they can continue to go and that’s where our focus should be… most alts are just dead — they should just not be touched.”

4. FOMO’s growth machine: 40k users a day on a $150k July budget

FOMO’s representatives answer the new-money question unambiguously: “we 100% think it’s net new people.” Evidence: of ~1,500 daily support tickets, 1,400–1,500 are from users who simply don’t understand what’s happening. “We’re adding about 40,000 new users a day from the App Store. I don’t really think there are 40,000 existing crypto people every day discovering FOMO.” The on-chain dashboards are real and “probably 20 to 40% understated” given data spans six or seven chains plus perps.
The distribution playbook, as told: UGC experiments since July of last year scaled to ~50M impressions/month across ~100 creators, all managed in-house — and it’s already shrinking as a share, with only ~30% of lifetime users attributed at all. Best anecdote: a teammate got served a slick FOMO Instagram ad — “we look into it and it’s not even our guy. This guy is just shilling his own referral link on his own paid ads and he’s crushing it.” Se says total July growth spend was ~$150k, with August expected to ramp — “the bottleneck is not money, it’s talent.” Another speaker reacts: “There’s no way.”
The normie-sphere piercing: “Kimchi,” a trader who went viral with Rolex/Maybach collages, allegedly made $40M on Trump and has been seen with Gunna — “reinforcing traders as the new celebrity… the lifestyle stuff is coming from traders now instead of course sellers or vloggers.” FOMO doesn’t work with him directly.

5. FOMO’s endgame: the social graph of finance, IPO’d — not tokenized

FOMO’s representatives tier the ambition: $100B companies are trading apps (Robinhood, Coinbase); trillion-dollar ones run AUM (J.P. Morgan); multi-trillion-dollar ones own social graphs (Meta, Google). FOMO wants the last category: “the canonical social graph of finance.” The AI logic: “as AI commoditizes content… risk is going to be the only atomic unit that is actually going to stand the test of AI commoditization. You can’t just fake content — you have to go do the thing and do it publicly.”
On the token question — Jordi says he gets “tens of DMs” about it — the FOMO representative says: “our plan is to become a publicly traded company. We want to IPO,” modeled on Robinhood and Meta, so any consumer can partake in upside through public markets rather than a closed private graph.
On the negative-sum problem (90%+ lose money on Pump.fun assets), FOMO’s team counters: most losing coins are bundled by repeat deployers; a report put trader profitability at ~20% on Polymarket, ~20% on FOMO, with Hyperliquid slightly higher — about what one might expect from trading apps. The structural claim: “we’re not the house. We don’t actually benefit if you lose money,” and the goal is graduation — “you might come in to trade meme coins, but hopefully you discover Bitcoin. Hopefully you discover Nvidia.” Se says fees are half a percent versus peers’ 1% and Coinbase’s 2.5% on Bitcoin.
The chain-abstraction proof point: yesterday 110,000 traders used FOMO — ~90k on Robinhood Chain, ~100k on Solana, ~60k on Base, ~80k on BNB — the same users crossing chains because “to you it’s just one coin.” After fumbling Robinhood Chain’s day one and getting spammed “Where’s Robinhood?” for 48 hours, by day three FOMO was 3x every other trading wallet combined; today it’s 90,000 of the 115,000 wallets trading there.

6. Thiccy’s mobile thesis: meme coins are Candy Crush you can win

Thiccy built a Pokémon gacha in ~1.5 months “on a whim” with AI tools, and the discovery generalized: “the crypto gachas are making like a tenth of what the mobile app gachas are making. They’re just printing money hand over fist — a billion dollars a year type deal. And they don’t even have a web product.” Pump.fun versus FOMO is the same pattern: web strategy versus mobile-first, and mobile wins the marginal Web2 user.
His blunt market-psychology read: “there actually is no price discovery being made on technological assets — that’s just too high-IQ for the mobile users. They need meme coins, the dumbed-down version packaged into a mobile app, and it’s a funner game than Candy Crush. They’re happy to put in billions of dollars a year.” Se agrees mobile is decisive: of 40,000 daily signups, ~39,000 come through mobile, and more users are web-plus-mobile than web-only.
Se’s transparency point is that position-attached opinions can wash out low-tier influencers — “you care about a million-dollar position’s thoughts a little more than somebody with a $4 position.” Jordi calls the feed “the BitMEX troll box of 2026, except there’s a position attached.”

7. Zcash: a clean thesis, with price finally confirming

Qiao Wang, back from sabbatical (“it doesn’t feel like a dead cat bounce — it feels to me like the start of a bull market”), holds only two crypto assets personally: Bitcoin and Zcash. His case: “Zcash is just the simplest, the clearest, the cleanest thesis in crypto” — privacy, quantum resistance, and a thesis that has not changed in a decade. He’s followed it since 2016 but never went big because the chart was terrible; “now the long-term chart has really dramatically changed… you really want the price action to confirm your fundamental thesis.”
The supply mechanics Qiao flags, hedged as “I don’t know this for a fact”: early investors and the team have distributed what they wanted to sell, mining rewards have decreased, and “now finally the buying pressure outweighs the distribution and the supply.” Taiki’s usage evidence is the shielded-pool percentage: “an actual objective way to measure people literally buying ZEC and putting it in the shielded pool… as long as this percentage or metric is going up,” the market is signaling that it matters. Jordi’s tape read: a whale bridged $50M of ZEC and sold via Hyperliquid spot around $800 “and it really didn’t do too much to the price — a really constructive sign.”
Jordi’s pushback — worth keeping: “we’re doing the crypto thing again where we project onto the world what we think the world’s going to want and front-run that buying… today people aren’t using it for its intended purpose.” Qiao’s concession-plus-rebuttal: “that’s absolutely right, but that’s just true in general with assets that don’t have cash flow.” On Bitcoin as store of value, Qiao is personal: “it gives me peace of mind that if my bank account gets shut down, I have something to rely on” — while Zcash is “a much more emergent store of value, meaning it really is not really a store of value yet.”

8. The not-late trade, and the missing third horse: AI money

The reflexivity argument from Jordi: “everyone knows you’re late to Bitcoin now, but you’re not late to Zcash — it’s got the same exact supply cap as Bitcoin at 1% or so of the price. You can’t get a 100x on Bitcoin anymore, but you can theoretically on Zcash.” Jordi expects it to trade like 2015–16 Bitcoin: no cash flows, pure speculation, “it’s going to overshoot both ways… a good asset for range traders.”
A host’s basket idea: Bitcoin, private money (Zcash), and a yet-unbuilt “AI money” — where “probably most money will be made.” Bittensor tried but “it’s become overly gamified… past so many halving events that the incentives for really good subnets just aren’t enough anymore to attract good talent.” Another speaker’s punchline: “Zcash is backed by Mythos. It’s AI money.”

9. AI redefines the top 1% developer — taste is the new scarce input

Thiccy on why he quit profitable trading to build: AI tools let him be “a professional-level developer or advertiser or animator in a few days,” so “the feedback loop in building has almost been gamified and casinofied” — with the eerie side-effect of OpenAI researchers following him mid-build: “are they observing me work like a little ant in an ant colony?”
Qiao’s structural call: bearish big-tech engineers (“they don’t have that many good ideas and need far fewer developers”), bullish devs in specific verticals — banks, hospitals — and “definitely bullish for people who have good ideas and a lot of agency but didn’t have the technical chops before.”
A host then forecasts only two developer types: app-layer builders who deeply understand customers and “super deep infra” developers; “everyone else in between is basically obsolete.”
The discussion’s basketball analogy is a move from five-on-five to three-on-three: replacement-level players drop off, but superstars matter more “because there’s less people on the pitch.” It then reframes the percentile itself — cracked coders who can’t articulate thoughts or pick priorities “went from 1st percentile to 10th percentile.” The vector metaphor says “magnitude has been nerfed — AI can scale magnitude. It’s just: can you point the vector in the right direction?” The conclusion: “the laborers have been nerfed.”

10. Portfolio round: barbells, two-coin books, and the HYPE disclosure fight

One guest reports: “treasury bills and Pokémon cards. The barbell” — roughly $3M in cards, unhedged by choice, and a general bearishness on tokens: “I’ve always been bearish on all and any tokens… except for the ones that I have investments in, obviously. Until I vest.” Thiccy says he and the team hold NEAR and GRASS. Qiao’s stock-to-crypto ratio is roughly 70/30 to 80/20, with crypto personally limited to Bitcoin and Zcash. Justin tax-loss harvested “at the bottom at $1” and now owns spot Zcash in size, while also holding illiquid venture exposure.
Jordi’s HYPE position and gripe, in one breath: still long from the Dreamcash vault unstake but trimming — “the P/E ratio is getting a little too expanded, and it’s more just the DAO buying that you want to hold on for. I don’t think it’s sustainable.” His governance question that “pissed off” the “HYPE retards”: Trade.xyz equity holders are capturing RWA fees while the relationship to Hyperliquid stays unannounced — “as a HYPE holder, do I not deserve to understand if these fees are in any way going back into HYPE?” — for what he calls an $80B FTV asset. Jordi said Bloomberg had reported that one Paradigm round had already happened, while he did not know whether a second had happened. Taiki says the market assumes hyper-alignment; Jordi responds: “aligned, but what does that mean? Are they going to buy HYPE and burn it? Give it to employees?… People don’t want questions asked when they’re holding a bag.”
The episode also noted that the last three months’ top volume was RWAs — SpaceX, Nvidia, SanDisk, and Korean stocks — but the last few days’ top four were Bitcoin, ETH, SOL, and HYPE: “the speculative traders have returned to crypto as a source of volatility.” It also noted that Hyena shut its validator — “anyone who tried anything without a USDC stablecoin basically ran into the wall once they enshrined USDC.”

11. The Twitter/crypto-funnel hypothesis — plus pastas, politics, and a Trump smirk

Thiccy blamed Elon Musk for mismanaging Twitter and said it had been the main way crypto spread. Justin added that Nikita’s product regime “nuked a lot of the crypto influencers and the crypto-related algorithms,” while advertising also deteriorated. The bullish flip: “if you can shill on Instagram Reels and TikTok, that’s where the new cohort of users are.” A tweet-volume-versus-Bitcoin chart backs the discussion; the lads note Musk closed the Twitter deal on October 27, 2022 — “literally the week before FTX,” with CZ having put $1B into Twitter.
A political pasta carries a real warning: Polymarket has the CLARITY Act at a sub-20% chance of passing, Democrats taking the House in the midterms “seems likely,” and “the Trump administration’s kind of rushing to get these crypto changes with SEC and CFTC in before the end of his term… AOC presidency is not going to be great for crypto.” The lighter entry is Justin’s freeze-frame of Trump’s smirk while saying “Hyperliquid” — “the face of a man who 100x’d long HYPE 10 minutes before.”
Taiki’s pasta caught the mood at 4.4k likes: “we’re this ancient barbaric tribe that just got rain for the first time after 80% of our population died… the pumps aren’t even that real, or at least not yet.” Jordi’s health-max coda — 26–27% body fat to 14% after a KBW period of high cortisol, sleeplessness, and a Korean-hospital “your platelets are broken” lab mix-up — plus the chat’s best sleep advice: “not holding ETH also helps with sleep.” (“I can confirm.”) A live show at Token2049 Singapore was announced as the plan, tentatively for October 7.

Episode 194 - August 28, 2026 How AI Is Reinventing Computing from Chips to Power