Summary

Spot Bitcoin ETF adoption is Alex Krüger’s reason to stay bullish even as the tape reaches euphoria. The institutional sales apparatus is only about 20% enabled and, according to estimates he heard, could reach 80% by year-end. Jonah adds that long-term holders are transferring coins to less reactive retirement-account buyers while miner rewards are about to halve: “This is a year many years in the making.”
The same setup is primed for violent deleveraging: BTC was near $73,000, ETH near $4,000, and three-month annualized futures basis around 25% gross, or 20–21% above a 5% risk-free rate. Avi flags $6 billion of Binance open interest and $4 billion on Bybit; Alex expects an eventual decline of at least 20%, with 35% plausible once ETF inflows slow. “Things are crazy, but things can get crazier.”
Alex is expressing the bull thesis without leverage and managing corrections through partial hedges. He typically hedges 20–30% of the book, watches basis rather than slower-resetting funding, and redeploys into weakness; when his bids or correction thesis fail, he accepts the cost of re-entering higher. “Sometimes I buy the top.”
The 2022 lesson was that surviving a black swan matters more than predicting it. Alex called the post-Luna bottom three weeks early, missed the impending 3AC failure, and heard from Alameda and FTX employees who thought everything was fine—but once ETH panicked through the upper $1,500s, traders still had time to hedge or short. The goal is a system that reacts “just like a tennis player reacts to a tough ball.”
Bitcoin should remain the cycle’s leader, with wealth spilling into altcoins and memecoins rather than replacing BTC leadership. Alex notes that warning signs can persist for a year, as they did in 2021, so red flags alone are poor exit signals. His base case is continued adoption and recurring speculative waves: “Like it or not, this is the way of the market.”
Euphoria is not an invitation for late buyers to add indiscriminately. Alex rode the move fully long from the bottom and is now redeploying existing risk among coins, not putting in new money; anyone who missed the move should wait for a pullback. He expects memecoins to cool and another AI cycle to follow within his broader adoption and supercycle thesis.
There is no reliable terminal price target, so Alex trades the cycle like an accordion. He considered selling 40% at $75,000, later contemplated $85,000, and revised upward as every flush was bought; Avi instead plans substantial scaling between $90,000 and $100,000. Alex’s answer is to keep some “air” in the position, trimming and reinflating rather than pretending to know whether any peak is local or global.

Deep dive

1. Surviving a blowup matters more than predicting it

Alex’s book contained 100 line items, versus roughly 70 in 2021—not the bear market—but breadth is not permanence: when frenzy becomes threatening, he consolidates into liquid, hedgeable assets he can manage quickly. “When things start getting frenzied and I start getting concerned, I start consolidating.”
His most memorable error came after Luna in May 2022. Alex assumed the scale of the damage usually marked a bottom, called it three weeks early, and entered CPI Friday “long to the tits” in ETH—only for the unrecognized 3AC domino to make the initial mistake extremely expensive.
Jonah’s parallel lesson is that even broad information gathering can fail. Alex spoke with Alameda and FTX employees who genuinely believed everything was fine; Jonah likewise assumed that even an Alameda failure would never be allowed to endanger FTX. With 3AC, the sharper warning was its oddly aggressive attempt to raise capital for another GBTC trade: supposed strong hands were behaving weakly.
Alex’s durable lesson is reactive rather than predictive. FTX became panicky while ETH was still in the upper $1,500s, leaving substantial time to exit, hedge or short before the full decline. A black swan need not be forecast if the trading system can respond instinctively, “just like a tennis player reacts to a tough ball.”

2. ETF demand supports the melt-up, but leverage promises a flush

At roughly $73,000 BTC and $4,000 ETH, Alex called the market extremely frothy: three-month annualized futures basis was about 25%, though only 20–21% after subtracting a 5% risk-free rate. ETF flows are what “sustain and enable this level of absolute insane degeneracy,” and he favored continuing to run risk at least into the halving.
Avi’s restraint comes from $6 billion of Binance open interest plus $4 billion on Bybit—short-term capital that will leave when momentum breaks. He considered the market overdue for a 10–15% pullback, possibly more, and held spot rather than explicit leverage. Alex was even blunter: a small push might cause at least a 20% flush, while 35% “makes sense.”
Alex hedges only 20–30% because a full exit is too costly when the melt-up resumes. He placed bids around the $58,000s during one decline, manually redeployed when they missed, and another time hedged 25% before buying back near the top. His trigger is fast-moving basis, not funding: “Funding is too slow.”

3. The wealth-sales machine has barely switched on

Jonah’s supply argument begins with Coin Days Destroyed and ETF-flow data: older holders are taking profit around all-time highs, but their coins are passing into BlackRock ETF accounts whose retirement-oriented buyers may not sell after another $10,000 or $20,000 rally. Roughly $11 billion of ETF buying accompanied a $30,000 BTC advance; the next $11 billion could have greater impact as that supply clears and miner rewards halve.
Alex clarified that the cited 20% figure measures enabled distribution machinery, not assets already allocated. Wirehouses and RIAs need technology, sales materials, track records and risk approval before advisers can promote an ETF. Merrill Lynch and UBS had just said they would start offering the ETF to clients, while ETF firms expected roughly 80% of their sales force to be enabled by year-end; the discussion referenced roughly $30 trillion in wealth-platform assets.
This supports Alex’s BTC-led “supercycle” lean: adoption demand enters Bitcoin first, then spills into altcoins and memes. Red flags had already appeared by January, but exiting on them would have missed the move; 2021 likewise carried warning signs for most of the year before its remembered finale. Jonah noted that speculation historically gets crazier after the all-time-high break, not while approaching it.
Jonah’s market-structure puzzle was why a roughly 20% return from buying the ETF and shorting CME futures had not been arbitraged away. Alex’s honest non-answer: “I don’t have the answer,” but funds need capital, legal structures and approvals. Few prepared while expecting basis to collapse; now that the trade persists, institutional capacity should eventually be built to put it on at scale.

4. Meme coins turn missed upside into a market-wide free-for-all

Jonah described funding Phantom with ETH from Friend.tech and some Stellar, cleaning up those holdings, and putting them into Jeo Boden at roughly a $15 million market cap after the Trump token had reached about $400 million. He viewed Jeo Boden as the political counterpoint meme and said he was getting deliberately degenerate.
Avi described receiving 15,000 Jensen Huang tokens as an airdrop after buying Jeo Boden; he later found that position had gone up 100x in a week. He also mentioned a $1,000 Zin position that had ripped and people sending him tokens such as Monkey Getting a Haircut on Solana. He called it the craziest market he had seen.
Jonah said this differed from prior cycles, when speculation concentrated by ecosystem: an Avalanche fund would lift Avalanche coins, then attention would move to Solana or another chain. Now it is more of a free-for-all where a coin with a funny name can go up. He called the period a “Cambrian explosion” in the golden era of memecoins, while warning that all of it could go to zero.
Alex expects memecoins to cool and then another AI cycle to emerge. He is more open to the supercycle idea—that the market keeps going—because Bitcoin has finally been enabled for adoption, pent-up demand is large, and wealth spills into altcoins and memecoins. “Like it or not, this is the way of the market,” especially when launching altcoins is so easy.

5. Position sizing works like an accordion, not a top call

Alex drew a hard distinction between managing an existing winner and chasing one: “I’m not buying new shit—I’m redeploying from some shit to other shit.” Having remained fully long from the bottom, he could rotate at euphoria levels; someone arriving unpositioned should wait patiently for the correction or risk getting “fucked.”
His levels are revisable. Alex once planned to sell 40% at $75,000, then reconsidered because each flush was immediately bought and considered $85,000 instead. Avi uses levels to enforce discipline and expects substantial selling between $90,000 and $100,000, but recognizes that repeatedly revising a target upward is itself “a danger zone.”
Jonah prefers external signals to BTC price: on-chain measures such as MVRV Z-Score or a qualitative excess marker like the return of the Matt Damon “Fortune Favors the Brave” commercial. That mirrors his crude-oil process, where refinery margins or OPEC behavior determine exits. Alex’s rebuttal is that oil ranges, while crypto’s exponential right tail can punish a fundamentals-only exit with a missed 400% move.
Alex’s resolution is an accordion that always retains some air: regularly sell or hedge a little, then reinflate on corrections. That preserves psychological room to decide whether to buy, deleverage or exit without identifying a global top. Truly exceptional regime changes—a dramatic Fed reversal, major war such as Russia and Ukraine, or an FTX-style failure—justify abandoning the local-versus-global distinction and getting out.

6. FOMO is rotating into majors while ETH waits for a catalyst

Exchange volume was reportedly only about 25% of 2021 levels, suggesting much of retail had not returned. Avi expects those buyers to prefer WIF, BONK or DOGE over BTC; meanwhile crypto natives who missed both Bitcoin and memes may rotate into familiar laggards. Avi liked that structure in MATIC, while Alex wanted to buy NEAR only after a pullback because its AI-chain relabeling had already produced the run.
SOL was Alex’s catalyst thesis: he understood FTX’s locked-SOL sale to have begun roughly three weeks earlier and to be about 50% complete—“I may be wrong”—with removal of that pressure potentially sending SOL straight toward its prior high. Avi admitted being underpositioned despite liking the user experience, while saying that a conventional P/E valuation would put SOL’s multiple “in the thousands.”
ETH remained the conspicuous laggard. Alex did not expect an ETF until next year, but believed ETH could “outperform massively” once it exists; he did not know when the market would front-run it. Market-implied odds had fallen from roughly 60% or slightly higher early in the year to roughly 40%, possibly 30%, yet he distrusted tiny Polymarket pricing and suggested options might reveal more credible implied probabilities. He had not done that analysis himself.

Alex Morris on what you can learn in his new book: "Buffett and Munger Unscripted"The Bitcoin ETF Impact | 1000x