Summary

The core call: respect the breakout. Bitcoin recovered two months of de-risking (the mid-August 124K top down to 108K) in a single week, and Avi’s read is that fast recoveries force recent de-riskers back in — “that’s a pretty good sign that you’re going to rock it up.” The pattern mirrors the ETH setup both hosts discussed at 3,700–3,800 that ran to 5,000, and it “sets up for a like 150 to 160.”
Jonah’s sanity check strips out dollar debasement by charting BTC denominated in gold: since the Jan-2023 paradigm (post-FTX Bitcoin, post-Ukraine gold as de-dollarization hedge), the ratio sits at the lows of its trend channel around 32. Mean reversion to mid-channel (~40) with gold flat gets ~$156K by year end; if gold keeps ripping, “we’re looking at 160, 170 plus.”
The rally is healthier because it’s fellow apes, not DATs: MicroStrategy bought only ~200 BTC (“MicroStrategy loses 200 BTC behind its couch cushions”), so “your fellow apes are jamming the market.” Corroborating tell: Robinhood up 30% in a month while Bitcoin stayed flat is “implausible” — same speculative buyer — plus gold +20% in two months and NASDAQ +18% YTD.
Alt season is flickering on: Zcash doubled in a week; Avi calls the post-rally reasons cope, while Jonah says the theses are accurate (theses “always after” the rally, probably one large private transfer), but the signal is the zeitgeist — “seems like it’s alt season, man.” Avi’s playbook is restricted-supply assets washed of sellers — BNB “drifting on a parabola,” Mantle (the Asian equivalent of BNB), Aster back at $2 — and explicitly not VC coins: “your ENAs of the world are probably not gonna rip hard.” Avi cites Paul Tudor Jones: “this type of market ends in a blowoff.”
Galaxy is Jonah’s compression trade: $14.85B market cap vs Coinbase’s $98.65B, up 74% in a month, “maybe it’s a 6xer from here if it becomes a meme stock,” with the data-center business as a kicker and a stock that trades up more than BTC on up days, down less on down days. Galaxy One — the new integrated stocks-plus-crypto brokerage run by BlockFi’s Zach Prince (“the BlockFi founder’s redemption arc”) — is the catalyst; the 8%-on-cash-via-$1.1B-lending-book pitch is the one pause.
The tradeable expression: buy Bitcoin upside calls, because “calls are the most mispriced right after a big move” — vol doesn’t reprice on breakouts, so if you think BTC has 80% odds of 150 in a month, “the gamma is massively mispriced.” The Dec 26 150 call costs ~$2,900 at ~40 vol and 10x’s if BTC settles 180 by year end. Jonah proposes a 1x2 (selling 200 calls at $350); Avi refuses: “you’re going to get your eyes ripped out on mark.” They settle on outright calls or a 1x1 spread, on IBIT over likely Deribit.
Sizing doctrine, Kelly-flavored: 60–70% confident in a 2x → at least 5% of the book; 75% → 10%; a 10x at 50% confidence also gets 5% (Avi holds Robinhood at 5% on a 50–60%-confident 5-year 10x thesis). Below ~$100K, concentrate, don’t diversify — Jonah went 100% into Bitcoin post-FTX — and Jonah’s corollary: the best diversification is non-crypto income, because “the worst possible thing you can ever do… is be a forced seller of something illiquid” — including your own career.

Deep dive

Fast Recovery Sets Up 150–160

Avi’s anatomy of the move: Bitcoin sold off from the 124K all-time high in mid-August, two weeks down, a bounce, a retrace — and at 114K both hosts were tactically eyeing 105K. It reached 108K instead, and the tell was speed: a 4% down day on Thursday, September 25 “recovered in one candle.” His rule — when heavy de-risking meets a quickly-rebought down move, recent sellers buy back in quickly (“Oh, [__], did I really make a mistake?”) — “that’s what sets up for a really face-ripping rally.”
Jonah’s honest surprise, kept as hedged: “125,000, basically all-time highs within a week of local lows, was not on my bingo card.” His diagnosis: the sell-off was “just a little liquidation, a little flush,” and clean positioning — post-FTX being “the canonical example” — stabilizes, does nothing, “and then they just keep pumping again cuz the mega trend is alive.”
The zoom-out: two months of de-risking (August through September) recovered in one week on the weekly chart. Avi: “that sets up for a like 150 to 160.” The template is their ETH setup — buying it on the breakout at 3,700 because “this market is respecting breakouts,” then riding 3,800 to basically 5,000. “We’ve shot back up. Like respect the breakout, man.”

Gold Mean Reversion Targets $156K

Jonah’s framing: long Bitcoin, “you’re not really 100% sure how much of your price appreciation is just dollar debasement… versus actual crypto adoption” — early 2021 was mostly “Joe Biden and company printing trillions,” the dollar going down, not Bitcoin going up. BTC/gold strips out the noise and shows what Bitcoin is doing as a digital version of gold.
His paradigm marker is January 2023: Bitcoin post-FTX, past Terra Luna and the 2021 froth, in a “stable adoption grind-higher phase”; gold, since Ukraine, flipped from risk-off asset to de-dollarization hedge — “the US stole Russia’s dollars,” so anyone contemplating something Washington dislikes diversifies into gold.
The math: the ratio trades ~32, near the lows of the 2023-onward trend channel; mid-channel is ~40. “40 divided by 32 times… $125,000 a token — that gets me to like $156,000 a token,” assuming gold doesn’t move (“pretty big if — it looks like it’s going to keep sending”). Gold up another leg and “we’re looking at 160, 170 plus by year end.”
Jonah’s flow addendum: gold +20% in two months suggests rebalancing — his own silver position is up 40%, “obviously I’m going to rebalance that into Bitcoin.” Gold is 10x Bitcoin’s size; “if gold can move 20% in two months… let’s see what Bitcoin can do.”

Apes Drive the Rally

What makes this rally better, in Jonah’s view: it isn’t the treasury companies. “MicroStrategy bought like what, 200 BTC” — Jonah: “MicroStrategy loses 200 BTC behind its couch cushions.” Avi: “your fellow apes are jamming the market… much nicer to be in a trade with fellow apes than with MicroStrategy.”
The cross-asset check: Robinhood up 30% in a month with Bitcoin stable “doesn’t make sense” — it’s the same speculative buyer, and Robinhood’s revenue leans on crypto trading. “It’s implausible for Robinhood to be up 30% and for crypto to be down.” Add NASDAQ +18% YTD, Tesla and Robinhood ripping, decent ETF inflows — “there’s still a tremendous amount of speculative money willing to make bets on the future of crypto.”

Zcash Signals Alt Season

Jonah on the move: “Dude, Zcash doubled in a week” — Avi says the stated reasons are “all just cope”; it moved because a few buyers hit an asset that “doesn’t trade that much” and was “washed of every seller.” His caveat, kept intact: Zcash historically rallies hard “close to the end of a cycle… probably one of those top indicators that you don’t have enough back-tested data to trust.”
Jonah says the theses are accurate — best privacy coin, “genuine groundbreaking technology,” and Bitcoin “is not private at all in any way, shape, or form” — but the pop was likely “somebody moved a lot of money into Zcash to transfer it somewhere suspicious,” unownable in advance: “you all can feel very good about missing Zcash.” The signal survives Avi’s cope framing: “seems like it’s alt season, man.”
Avi’s zeitgeist read: this is “probably the beginning of the insanity,” and per Paul Tudor Jones, “this type of market ends in a blowoff. And I don’t know exactly when or how or where, but I do think we get that.”
The actionable filter is restricted supply: assets around long enough to have no sellers left — BNB “drifting on a parabola,” Mantle (the Asian equivalent of BNB), Aster back at $2 — versus “I wouldn’t buy VC coins here… your ENAs of the world are probably not gonna rip hard.”

Bitcoin’s Opportunity Cost Dominates

Jonah owns the L openly: “I struggle with alts… I don’t want to pretend I’m nailing everything.” Of the top 10,000 alts, “it feels like 9,000 of them are just doing nothing,” and buying the one that popped post-thesis means “you’re already behind the curve.” His question: “what’s a better trade right now than just holding Bitcoin with 3x leverage?” He’s still debating ramping Aerodrome (likely) or “buying some pump.”
Avi’s rebuttal, podcast-title invoked: BTC to 150 on 3x is 60% — “is that interesting if Zcash can go 100% in a week? It’s a podcast called 1000x, Jonah.” Jonah’s compromise: dabble in alts with a small sleeve “to keep your finger on the pulse,” 90% of the crypto book in Bitcoin. One longer-dated conviction: post-puke XPL/Plasma “could take over a significant chunk of the financial ecosystem globally… might be a tenbagger over the medium to long term, but you have to stomach some insane volatility.”

Galaxy Is a Compression Trade

The catalyst is Galaxy One — “the first truly fully integrated brokerage” for stocks and crypto, versus Robinhood’s crypto fees “over a percent most of the time relative to Coinbase.” The wrinkle: it’s run by Zach Prince, famous for building BlockFi and blowing it up on GBTC-trade leverage — “the BlockFi founder’s redemption arc. He’s probably learned how to not do that this time.” The one pause: Galaxy offering 8% on cash off a $1.1B lending book — “yo, love to hear that… no” — though Avi counters they have “a good risk team, actual real people, as opposed to young guns slinging risk left and right” like 2022.
Jonah’s valuation frame: “Galaxy is just a compression trade to the market cap of Coinbase or Robinhood” — $14.85B vs Coinbase’s $98.65B — “maybe it’s a 6xer from here if it becomes a meme stock,” plus don’t sleep on the data center business given AI multiples. The stock has doubled off early-September lows (+74% in a month), trades up more than BTC on up days and down less on down days, and Avi still doesn’t think it’s crowded. Jonah’s thesis for the show itself: “we just jump from one two-bagger to the next two-bagger over and over.”

Sizing Drives Portfolio Outcomes

Avi’s plain-English Kelly: 60–70% confident in a 2x → minimum 5% of the portfolio; 75% confident → 10%; a 10x at 50% confidence also gets 5% (“confidence level is lower but return target’s higher”). Robinhood is 5% of his book on a 50–60%-confident, 5-year 10x. “It doesn’t really matter if I put 1% into something and it 2x’s. Sizing is everything.”
Jonah’s discipline on the downside: if your 10% active-trading sleeve goes to zero in six months, “it probably is a signal that you kind of suck and you should stop and re-evaluate” — letting the hole grow from 10% to 20% to 40% is “playing on tilt.”
Jonah’s concentration doctrine, with the change-of-circumstance flagged: post-FTX “I just put every dollar I had into Bitcoin.” Below ~$100K, “you need to create wealth by concentrating” and weather drawdowns; diversification is for $1–2M+ books. The log-wealth logic: “the marginal value of every dollar from $10,000 up to a million is massive,” while $10M to $50M “doesn’t really change your life.” He’s more careful now only because he runs off trading income with no job — at hedge funds he was 100% all-in.
Jonah’s structural version: he didn’t go all-in immediately post-FTX because he was already “balls long at work” (his firm pulled assets off FTX hours before withdrawals halted — “we were kind of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company after that huge storm”); when he left, he reverse-engineered the after-tax equivalent and put more into his PA. The principle: “the best diversification is having non-crypto income to plow into crypto,” because “the worst possible thing you can ever do in any business interaction is be a forced seller or a forced buyer of something illiquid” — and your career is a very illiquid asset.

Bitcoin Calls Offer Cheap Leverage

Jonah’s mechanism: Bitcoin is “very reflexive,” and after a breakout “calls are the most mispriced right after a big move” — vol doesn’t immediately jump 10–30 points because breakouts aren’t violent. The math: 60 implied vol prices ~3% daily moves, which looks rich against 1.5% days — but if it’s 1.5% a day in the same direction, gamma pays; and “if you think Bitcoin has an 80% chance of going to 150 in the next month, then vol is massively mispriced… you’re getting very cheap leverage.” The rule of thumb: “if you expect markets to move fast, buy options” — and Jonah expects fast.
Live pricing on stream: the Dec 26 $150K call is quoted around $2,000, or $2,900 to lift; a nearby quote shows ~40 vol, while the $200K call is at 50 vol and $350. The disagreement worth keeping — Jonah, who “doesn’t like advocating trading options,” proposes a 1x2 (long 150s, short two 200s); Avi refuses: “if Bitcoin rips to 175, that $200K call is going to be trading like 5,000 and you’re going to get your eyes ripped out on mark.” Jonah: “I just really don’t think you’re getting above 200K this year.” Avi: “I don’t either, but you’d have to stomach some insane mark-to-market.” They settle on a 1x1 call spread or the outright.
The payoff case: “if you buy the 150 call right now and it settles 180, you’ve 10x’d your money” — and 180 is on the table per the gold chart if gold adds 10% and BTC just mean-reverts to mid-channel. Venue: “probably IBIT” over likely Deribit. Closing mood: “all of this is pointing towards moonboy mode in crypto… wasn’t expecting it, but now let’s play for it.”

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