Is Crypto Still The Best Trade?

Summary

• Bitcoin’s range at the highs usually resolves down before up, per Avi’s fractal: the June 22 wick to ~100K liquidated ~20,000 coins of futures open interest, basically all of it has been rebuilt, and treasury companies buying “hand over fist” still can’t break the supply overhead. Avi expects a pullback — maybe 102K, maybe 97K, maybe 105K — with alts drastically underperforming; Jonah thinks it then keeps chugging: “if I could buy 95, I’d be buying 95 hand over fist.” Best expression: long BTC / short Cardano, though Avi also suggests trimming BTC.
• First tactical caution since April: Avi bought puts into the August 1 tariff deadline. The market prices Trump as a chicken, but as the date nears the hold-time math flips — a bearish view costs less to carry — so “people start selling as we get closer to the date.” Jonah’s pushback: Trump never chickened out because he never committed — it’s negotiation anchoring, “Queens, New York-style real estate haggling played out on the global stage.”
• The regime call of the episode: “cash is trash. S&P is the real denominator of American savings now” and Bitcoin is “the risk asset that you could take a bath on, but probably won’t.” The dollar is the best short leg post-“big beautiful bill” — “on a one-way train to zero” — so long BTCUSD.
• The 2015–17 cohort is quietly diversifying out of crypto: Avi went from 95% of net worth post-FTX to 70% (2023), 50% (2024), 30% now, and Jonah is similar. BTC still beats “99.9% of assets” but is no longer 100-to-1 — Robinhood went $7→$100 while BTC went 15K→100K from the FTX lows. Jonah’s money is going to specific names — RKLB, a robotics private round, likely Palantir (though now “a little bit overvalued”).
• The revenue meta is the only meta left: “everything is a Ponzi if it doesn’t generate revenue,” and non-buyback tokens deserve “a skull and crossbones logo.” Memecoin cycles compressed from two-three weeks in 2021 to 72 hours now, while alt seasons now “don’t last at all”; crypto VC is “totally over”; Cardano won’t stay top 25 within five years. Jonah thinks alt-exit money rotates into BTC (dominance grinds higher); Avi thinks a chunk goes to cash or the S&P.
• The one point-in-time catalyst: the strategic Bitcoin reserve, with a White House crypto staffer teasing “big news” late summer/early fall. “If the SBR does start accumulating, look out — Bitcoin is just going to go parabolic.”
• Trade on the table: sell BTC vol against spot — 30-day implied at ~35–37% versus the 80s of past cycles, but still rich against realized in a market that isn’t moving. Avi’s template is his 2014 Goldman oil trade (sell expensive puts, over-sell spot to hold target delta, collect theta) run in reverse; Jonah: structurally “now would be a good time” to sell calls against length.

Deep dive

1. The range at the highs usually resolves down before it resolves up

• Jonah opens by quoting Avi’s own rule back at him: “BTC never stabilizes on the highs” — it busts through and goes way higher or it nukes, and whether the logic is recursive “is kind of irrelevant because it’s true.” His posture: not a puke, so “I’m strapped in for a rally.”
• Avi’s tape-reading is less relaxed. From the June 22 wick to ~100K, a liquidation cleared about 20,000 coins of futures open interest — and basically all of it has been added back. Meanwhile treasury companies buying “hand over fist” can’t break the level, which means “there’s clearly a ton of supply” up here.
• The fractal: on the weekly, ranges at the highs (November 20–February 24, again in ‘24) normally break down before continuing, because Bitcoin runs on value plus momentum — 108K “is probably not value,” and the momentum is gone. Expected pullback: “maybe it only goes to 102K, maybe it goes to 97, maybe the pullback’s to 105” — and “if I could buy 95, I’d be buying 95 hand over fist.”
• Positioning: don’t add heavily here, and “if you’re allocated to Bitcoin maybe start chopping some off” — but the preferred expression is long BTC / short alts (“buy BTC, short Cardano”), since alts sell off far harder in this environment. What Bitcoin needs is time to form a base and “a psychological floor,” or a new large buyer announcing itself.

2. Avi’s first “hold on” since April — puts into August 1

• Avi is nervous on equities into the Liberation Day 2.0 deadline. The market has rallied “in the face of it all” because Wall Street views Trump as a chicken and never believed the big tariffs would stick. But there’s a trading subtlety: as the date approaches, the hold-time math flips — expressing the bearish view requires holding the trade for less time, so it becomes more rational to take that view. “I think people start selling as we get closer to the date.”
• So he bought puts — the first defensive move after consistently saying “these headlines are nonsense, stay invested.” The reasoning: last time the same setup actually broke, and the breakage was the opportunity. “Why put myself in the position where I can’t play the game?”

3. Jonah’s pushback: Trump never chickened out — and markets have learned the reflex

• You can’t chicken out of a stance you never held: the extreme tariffs were posturing to anchor a negotiation — likely Kahneman and Tversky, signing-bonus haggling, “Queens, New York-style real estate haggling played out on the global stage.” The real chickens are “the economists and pundits, people like Larry Summers” who disappear into the ether when the outcome is stocks at all-time highs.
• The desensitization analogy: dollar-yen in 2010–11 exploded on every Kim Jong-un rocket test, then after a couple, stopped moving — “all right, show me the nuclear war.” Oil just did it with Israel–Iran, and equities are doing it with Liberation Day 2.0: “show me the global economic collapse, otherwise I’m just going to keep grinding higher.”
• The regime that falls out of this: “S&P is the new dollar and Bitcoin is the new S&P.” Avi’s supporting read — Trump’s $1,000-in-the-S&P for every American newborn is the tell that he wants wealth denominated in the country’s output, and he’s openly tanking the dollar for export competitiveness, which is “very good for Bitcoin in the long run.”

4. The 2015–17 class is quietly diversifying out

• The 2011–13 OGs are “fanatics” who will never sell. The 2015–17 cohort is different: Avi took his net worth from 95% crypto post-FTX to 70% in 2023, 50% in 2024, 30% now, and Jonah is “similar.” The idea of diversification “is spreading rapidly” through that class.
• The reason isn’t just wealth preservation: Bitcoin’s risk-reward still beats “99.9% of assets” but “it’s not like 100-to-one anymore.” The example that stuck — “if Robinhood can go from $7 to $100 and Bitcoin goes from 15K to 100K, Robinhood’s outperformed… and it was a stock” with a real business.
• Jonah’s money is going to specific names — RKLB, a robotics private round, likely Palantir (though now “a little bit overvalued”). Neither thinks OG selling caps the price: even long-term holders agree BTC is “certainly still way better than SPY.”

5. Two catalysts: the strategic reserve, and the great altcoin rotation

• The point-in-time catalyst: the young White House crypto staffer — “not David Sacks,” Jonah blanks on the name — touring every conference promising big news on the strategic Bitcoin reserve late summer/early fall. “If the SBR does start accumulating, like look out. Bitcoin is just going to go parabolic.”
• The flow catalyst: everyone has finally woken up to what the no-coiners said — there’s no reason for a token unless it’s an equity-like instrument with buybacks, “kind of like Hyperliquid does.” Governance tokens, meme tokens, name-only tokens “don’t need to exist” — and their holdership is “in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.”
• Where that money goes is the live disagreement: Jonah says the Celestia/Polkadot/Cardano crowd rotates into Bitcoin and BTC dominance grinds higher; Avi thinks “a lot of that money is going to be taken to cash or placed in the S&P if they’re smart.” Jonah’s retort: anyone degenerate enough to hold coin number 50 isn’t going to sit in dollars “as they spiral down the drain.”
• Adjacent casualty: crypto VC — a game of “getting in at very low prices and then selling very tightly controlled stuff at high prices… selling a vision and a dream most of the VCs didn’t even believe” — is “totally over.” Avi exempts one name, Chris Prinski (likely Chris Burniske), as genuinely rigorous. And the marquee call: Cardano held the top 10 for five years, but “it’s not going to be in the top 25 in the next five.”

6. Hype vs Hood: some decentralization matters, but fees and dopamine decide

• The frame: Hyperliquid and Robinhood are the two founder-led exchanges ripping right now, and both will “eat Binance’s lunch” — without CZ, “I don’t expect Binance to be a force to be reckoned with,” per the Yanowitz line that once you lose the founder “you end up with value extractors” (Nadella being the one-off exception).
• Avi’s non-consensus bull case for Hype: “some decentralization matters” — you don’t need Ethereum-level purity, which he calls a fallacy “effectively disproven,” but developers will build financial applications on Hype with confidence they’d never have on “Jonah-chain… me hosting a Google spreadsheet.” He’s market-made on Hood — “a super incompetent tech team” and slow API negotiations — versus Hype’s open-source docs and money Legos. Plus Hood charges ~10bps per crypto trade, possibly almost 10x Hyperliquid’s fees.
• Jonah’s counter: decentralization was Ethereum’s argument and Solana won anyway — “it really just comes down to fees and marketing,” and Robinhood is far easier for consumers in a world where everyone wants everything in one place. He’s “super super super bullish on Robinhood” and moved his whole Fidelity portfolio for a 1% transfer promo.
• The honest coda: Robinhood is more fun, so he trades more — “how many of these trades am I taking out cuz they’re good trades and how many cuz I want to feel something?” His antidote is keeping equities at JP Morgan, whose UX is so bad he phones in T-bill rolls “Gordon Gekko style” — human friction as risk management, because saying a trade out loud “still makes you think twice.”

7. The memecoin cycle now dies in 72 hours

• Avi’s specimen, as told: $2K into a Solana memecoin at a $100K market cap six hours after launch — the gimmick being it dividends tokenized S&P 500 ETFs to holders every five minutes. It 30x’d immediately, then “literally went back to zero in less than 72 hours.” He pulled his $2K flat and kept ~$1,000 of airdropped tokenized S&P: “I made $1,000 in three days.”
• The point isn’t the grand: last summer that arc “would have lasted like three months.” Participants are so fed up that even the coin that perfectly captures the current meta dies before you can blink. “There should be a skull and crossbones logo on any token that isn’t actively buying back tokens with business revenue… Everything is a Ponzi if it doesn’t generate revenue.”
• Avi’s timeline of decay: in 2021, buying Aave clones on newly EVM-compatible chains, “alt seasons would last two to three weeks — and now alt seasons don’t last at all.” At least, he says, “we’re more honest about what we’re doing here, which is just playing a little game.” His own lottery ticket, Zen: “a thousand bucks into that thing went to 150” — sold at 90.
• The successor meta worries them: Hyperion DeFi ripped 50% in a day on plans to buy Hyperliquid while HYPE itself went nowhere. Verdict, in one word each: “Ominous. Ominous.”

8. The trade on the table: sell Bitcoin vol against spot

• Avi’s template is his 2014 Goldman oil trade: shale was grinding the market slowly lower while panicked participants bid puts to the moon, so he sold the expensive puts and over-sold spot to preserve his target delta — collecting theta and rich vol while the market fell. The mirror image fits BTC now: unlikely to rip, likely to grind higher for a year or two — buy (or over-buy) spot and sell calls.
• The vol check, live on air: 30-day BTC implied around 35–37%, versus the 80s it used to print — “I feel like I lost a child.” Jonah’s correction: it’s not “too low,” the market changed — front-end options are math against realized, “not about reversion to some historical mean,” and realized is even lower. Avi calls it “a sneaky time to sell some optionality.” Jonah says it’s structurally and flat-price-wise attractive — vol-wise “five out of 10.”
• The war stories that earn the register: Avi’s July 2021 Friday call-buying into a thin book that obliterated shorts and ran BTC 30K→40K — “I think we made $200 million on that trade” — plus rotating everything into gold on Liberation Day and back into equities at the bottom, and the annual Fantom “spooky season” pair (long the ghost-mascot coin into Halloween, short Avalanche).
• And a victory lap with a lesson: Jonah called Circle’s “exact pico top” the day CRCL hit the full market cap of USDC (~$300); it now trades $200, 30% off, while Coinbase sits on highs — the Coinbase/Circle pair trade worked. The closing admission: this market pays decisiveness and structure now, because “we’re not just going to be able to buy Zen and have it 70x on us.”

Verification Notes

• The raw captions render the token name inconsistently as “Zen” and “Zin”; the digest uses “Zen.”