Summary

The election is the episode’s regime break: Avi Felman and Jonah Van Bourg believe U.S. political acceptance turns crypto from a stigmatized trade into an allocatable asset class. Jonah’s shortcut is “Crypto is legal now,” backed by a cited count of 219 elected pro-crypto candidates; Avi expects deregulation to release both capital and product development that had been frozen by enforcement risk.
Their pre-election positioning rested on different convictions but converged on maximum exposure. Jonah trusted Trump’s historical polling outperformance, while Avi traded the asymmetry rather than certainty, then doubled Aave at $144 and DOGE at $0.18 once Miami-Dade results arrived with Bitcoin just above $70,000. Avi’s earlier bearish capitulation—“You just gotta be max long”—landed at the end of an eight-month range.
A strategic Bitcoin reserve is the highest-upside conditional in the discussion. Jonah says its creation would validate Bitcoin as non-sovereign, reserve-grade money and calls for “a million dollars a token”; Avi argues smaller countries could front-run the U.S., creating a self-reinforcing adoption loop before Washington formally acts. They treat this as a newly material possibility, not a certainty.
Avi calls alt season already underway, but warns that its useful life may be only three weeks. ENA, Lido, Eigen, Aave, DOGE and other previously constrained or heavily shorted assets should benefit from indiscriminate inflows—“no matter what you type in that chat, the answer is probably it’s going up”—yet DOGE at $0.65 would be a reason to sell, not extrapolate to $1.80.
ETH is Avi’s short-term catch-up trade, while SOL remains Jonah’s preferred medium-to-long-term L1 exposure. Avi sees short-covering, ETF accessibility and momentum producing a 15%-20% ETH/BTC move within three weeks; Jonah calls that a “falling knife” and argues SOL/BTC offers more upside because users must maintain meaningful SOL balances to trade meme coins. Avi concedes Solana probably outperforms over the next year.
The sharpest disagreement concerns leverage, not direction. Jonah has repeatedly increased exposure and uses mild Bitcoin leverage because he expects the best Sharpe ratio in crypto; Avi dislikes making a correct monthly thesis dependent on surviving a three-day drawdown and wants dry powder if Bitcoin revisits $72,000. His preferred leverage setup is after liquidation events such as FTX, for brief mean reversion.
Their exit dashboard is explicit: extreme funding, volume exceeding market capitalization for several days, instant 100x launches and pundits multiplying already-raised targets. Avi’s archetype is Bitcoin reaching $120,000, prompting calls for $250,000 precisely as $120,000 becomes the top. “Winners average winners” applies early; once leverage and reflexive target revisions take over, take money off the table.

Deep dive

1. The election converted an eight-month range into a regime trade

Avi’s bearish capitulation proved timely: after months of range-bound boredom, he decided “you just gotta be max long,” immediately before the breakout. His post-election posture is simpler still—“stay long and close my eyes”—though investors with large existing gains might clip some profit.
Jonah’s pre-election edge came from polling methodology. Trump voters appeared less likely to respond, but pollsters could not simply add the four-to-seven-point misses seen in 2016 and 2020 without committing malpractice; Jonah therefore made the adjustment himself and positioned aggressively.
Avi distinguishes a favorable payoff from an election forecast. Crypto had already faded enough to price some probability of a Kamala Harris victory, giving him room to exit if she won while preserving “giga rockets” upside under Trump: “I’m gonna go super long because there’s good asymmetry.”
Miami-Dade was Avi’s confirmation. Once Trump materially outperformed there, he considered the race over, with Bitcoin just above $70,000; he doubled Aave at $144 and DOGE at $0.18. Jonah’s verdict on skeptics who called the election irrelevant or fadeable: “This wasn’t a fade.”

2. Regulatory relief unlocks both multiples and products

Jonah cites Brian Armstrong’s count of “219 pro-crypto candidates and counting” elected to Congress and distills the repricing into three words: “Crypto is legal now.” Markets can price future adoption before a fully tangible application arrives, particularly as previously skeptical individuals begin accumulating Bitcoin.
Avi sees regulation’s largest cost not in legal bills but foregone innovation. Builders who cannot know whether a new feature will land them in court—or jail—stop imagining ambitious products; removing that threat changes the industry’s “mind frame,” reviving DeFi development and usage.
Jonah extends the blockage to trading: Americans cannot freely trade perps, and legitimate TradFi firms avoid simple spot-versus-futures basis trades for fear of SEC action. His expected reversal includes new leadership and discontinued cases against firms such as Uniswap, Coinbase and Cumberland: “Donald Trump ran on a #PumpYourBags platform.”
The direct trade is the “SEC coins” Avi had repeatedly flagged: UNI, Aave and Lido, alongside ETH-beta names such as Eigen and Lido; Avi also says he likes ENA. Jonah thinks beaten-down enforcement targets could rise another 300% if lawsuits disappear, while emphasizing that the trade should be exited before valuations become nonsensical.

3. A Bitcoin reserve creates a sovereign game-theory loop

Jonah’s conditional is categorical: “If a strategic Bitcoin reserve is created, million dollars a token.” U.S. adoption would lend official credence to Bitcoin as non-sovereign, reserve-grade money comparable to gold; other countries would then follow “like lemmings” rather than risk arriving late.
His mechanism goes beyond a price-support program. A reserve would preserve national financial potency if the dollar weakened or trading partners stopped using it, implying Bitcoin could take share from the dollar, euro, pound, yen and won. Global reserve-currency status—or hydrocarbons settling in Bitcoin—would justify the million-dollar outcome “overnight.”
Avi expects faster-moving countries to front-run Washington once U.S. intent becomes credible. For a smaller country, adopting Bitcoin has little downside if it assigns even a 25% probability to American adoption; its own move also raises the political likelihood of U.S. adoption. Avi says “the game theory” is highly favorable toward BTC.
They retain the uncertainty: Jonah says reserve probability moved from roughly “one delta to a 50 delta” over the last six months, while Avi speaks of “even a hint” that the U.S. is serious. Trump’s conference appearances, Bitcoin transaction and DeFi project are signals, not an enacted reserve.

4. Alt season is live, but its clock runs in weeks

Avi expects fresh money to lift almost everything: ENA, Lido, Eigen, Aave, DOGE and Solana meme coins, plus heavily shorted assets because nobody wants to remain short in that environment. His joke captures the indiscriminate phase: “Even USDT is gonna go up, guys. USDT is gonna hit $2.”
The instruction is to avoid excessive churning while inflows remain dominant. Crypto’s existing participants are “a small circle in the world” who can all agree and still be right, as in 2021; when genuinely new capital arrives, “winners average winners.”
Yet Avi says alt seasons “only last, like, three weeks” because prices become absurd almost immediately. If DOGE reaches $0.65 during that window, investors should probably sell instead of revising the target to $1.80.
The same reflexivity applies to Bitcoin: price could reach $120,000, induce universal $250,000 calls, and top at $120,000. Exit evidence would include funding rates going through the roof for a week, memes trading more volume than their market caps for several days, and new launches racing to 100x. Jonah counters that the move from $70,000 to $76,000 is still only an early inning.

5. ETH owns the rebound trade; SOL owns the longer thesis

Avi likes ETH specifically for a short window. Stock-market-only allocators can buy its ETF, which he says traded at a premium that day for the first time in a long while; he expects ETH/BTC to rise 15%-20% over three weeks and views a 25% move as the fuller target.
His three-part mechanism is short-covering, portfolio allocation and momentum. ETH served as crypto’s standard short leg, new long-term ETF buyers may include it in their portfolios, and a reversal from multiyear ETH/BTC lows could become self-fulfilling. “If we can get above 0.4, maybe 0.45 on ETH/BTC, like, I’m out.”
Jonah accepts the possible pop but calls it “catching a falling knife.” Ethereum lacks an activity demanding large user balances; even institutional settlement on Base might require little more than cheap gas. He would buy SOL/BTC instead, absent a catalyst as large as BlackRock migrating Aladdin to Ethereum—and doubts even that would guarantee outperformance.
Jonah’s revised L1 framework asks how large a wallet users must maintain to participate. Solana’s meme-coin market encourages balances ranging from thousands to millions of dollars for rapid rotation, potentially disrupting the “global lottery system.” Formerly a Solana hater, he moved most of his old ETH allocation into SOL and wants a six-to-12-month horizon; Avi agrees Solana probably wins over a year, while calling SOL/ETH topped for three weeks.

6. Mild leverage expresses the trend; heavy leverage can erase it

Jonah has broken his personal rule, having thought he was max long “like six times” before adding fiat and mild Bitcoin leverage. His rationale is not maximum absolute return but Bitcoin’s expected P&L per unit of volatility: the best Sharpe ratio in crypto if regulatory acceptance produces a steadier one-year advance.
Avi’s objection is path dependence. A trader can be right over one month but panic, cut or liquidate after three bad days; if Bitcoin falls to $72,000, he wants to add rather than nurse losses. He reserves leverage for brief mean-reversion trades after collapses and mass liquidations, citing an FTX-type setup.
Avi assigns a 95% probability that the rally eventually stops because traders get ahead of themselves, not because of geopolitics. Crowded leverage leads traders to cut positions, floods the market with supply and triggers liquidations that kill momentum; at the time, however, Velo data showed little leverage.
Jonah supplies the tail risk behind his caution against 5x-10x exposure. Saudi Arabia plus other producers have two-to-three million barrels per day of spare capacity, enough to replace Iran’s 1.6 million barrels per day of exports, but Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz could obstruct roughly 30% of world oil flows. If Iran blocked exports from itself and other regional producers, the world could be short 30 million barrels per day. Jonah says even a 5% chance of that scenario, potentially if Israel attacks Kharg Island, would create enough volatility to liquidate traders before Bitcoin resumes upward.

7. Concentration beats wallet sprawl in a fast market

Jonah floats keeping 50%-80% of a portfolio in Bitcoin until $100,000, scaling out into SOL, ETH and meme coins as the level approaches. He goes further on tactical exposure: “Literally do not have $1 in fiat right now of your crypto allocation,” because he views the opportunity as unusually asymmetric.
Avi keeps most trading capital on centralized exchanges and roughly 15% on-chain, enlarged by gains in Geco. His on-chain method resembles “perverse VC style investing”: buy sub-$50 million-cap cat coins, hold them for long periods and recycle occasional winners, while actively rotating larger positions on exchanges.
His portfolio-management rule is the episode’s cleanest operational warning: “It is really easy to lose money when your money is everywhere.” Capital scattered among Robinhood, Fidelity, Coinbase, multiple chains and 13 wallets creates enough mental friction to forget trades; Jonah adds that above $100 million to $200 million market cap, a portfolio should hold no more than ten coins.
Their live purchases of PNUT crystallize both the opportunity and the danger. Jonah sees PNUT and GOAT as outlets for crypto’s post-election vindication, while Avi likes PNUT’s combination of political and animal memes; both buy during the stream, watch it rip, then disclaim any influence: “We don’t know what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a frigging PNUT coin.”

Trading Crypto's Bull Market Breakout | 1000x Live No Priors Ep. 98 | With Convective Capital Founder Bill Clerico