Summary

Avi and Jonah expect the post-New Year rally to extend through Q1 rather than culminate at the January 20 inauguration. Bitcoin had rebounded from roughly $92,000 to $98,000 while alts gained 15–40%, and the prior fall from $108,000 to $90,000 had already purged open interest. Jonah argues that even without new legislation, removing the regulatory overhang is “super bullish”; Gary Gensler was expected to resign on January 20.
Jonah frames AI coins as the new memecoins, but infrastructure offers the cleaner exposure. Avi says most agent tokens are currently “just memes,” while Jonah questions whether many have utility or are merely like WIF or Popcat “but slightly sparklier.” Jonah prefers Virtuals and ai16z because they resemble L1 platforms and Virtuals demand is tied to agent compute. He expects a point within six months—“most likely in the next three”—when AI-related assets could rise 10–100x “for no freaking reason,” but keeps the position modest.
A broad alt season may require Bitcoin at $110,000–$120,000; until then, the hosts favor targeted bets in AI and ETH. Avi expects fresh annual allocations and persistent ETF flows to benefit ETH after a reported $998 million day for Bitcoin ETFs. Having once predicted an inauguration top, he changed his mind after the market reset: “We start to rally into the inauguration and then we continue to rally through.”
Potential 2025 inflows span ETFs, FTX repayments, and a possible Solana ETF. Jonah thinks even 50% of roughly $16 billion in FTX distributions returning to crypto could mean several billion dollars of buying; Polymarket assigned a 75% chance to a Solana ETF in 2025 and 50% before July 31. His unease is that the macro backdrop looks almost too favorable, leaving the proverbial black swan as the obvious unpriced risk.
Sui may lack a compelling fundamental story, but that does not make it an attractive immediate short. Avi argues its hostile reception on crypto Twitter, broad distribution, and captured mindshare can keep it rising; “once those people capitulate,” the trade may finally exhaust itself. His explicit short trigger is two or three days below the 50-day moving average followed by a relief bounce, with an 85% estimated hit rate, while Jonah warns that a coming “white-hot mania phase” makes shorting anything dangerous.
Technical analysis works best here as a map of holder psychology, not as mystical chart prediction. Avi says uninformed participants recreate support, resistance, and trends through regret and missed opportunities; event-driven or fundamentally anchored assets behave differently. Jonah therefore treats Sui as unusually chart-driven, while AI coins and Bitcoin remain more exposed to catalysts: “Hold on to your cycle bags, don’t do anything stupid.”

Deep dive

1. The market reset turned inauguration from a sell event into a buy event

Avi opened with the year-end trade having worked: December 31 marked the bottom for many coins, Bitcoin moved from roughly $92,000 to $98,000, and alts posted aggregate gains of 15–40%. Despite every daily candle starting green, the market still felt “quiet.”
Jonah sensed somebody “TWAPing into crypto” and expected Q1 strength, particularly once Gary Gensler’s expected January 20 resignation removed adverse-regulation drag. His point was not contingent on legislation: “Just the absence of that overhang is super bullish.”
Avi does not expect indiscriminate alt season unless Bitcoin reaches roughly $110,000–$120,000. Novel products were outperforming even during weakness, suggesting demand remained selective; his preferred targets were AI agents and ETH rather than the whole alt complex.
Avi’s important revision: three months earlier he expected a face-melting rally into an inauguration top, but “that turned out to be wrong.” The drop from $108,000 to $90,000 nuked open interest across altcoins without the market imploding, making continued buying psychologically easier than a hypothetical surge from $70,000 to $140,000 and collapse to $90,000.

2. AI agents are memecoins today, but platforms may capture tomorrow’s value

Jonah’s central objection was token necessity: he could understand an agent directing marketing revenue into buybacks, but often could not distinguish utility from “WIF or Popcat but slightly sparklier.” The token can create an incentivized community without proving that the underlying agent needs one.
Avi’s own example was using some 1000x podcast revenue to buy THX, illustrating how an existing brand could link revenue to a token. More broadly, he argued that most agents are currently just memes, yet critics underestimate how quickly the space is developing. New agents naturally attach tokens because they lack existing equity or tokens; over time, brands could deploy them for engagement, while AIXBT already summarizes large portions of crypto Twitter every few minutes.
Jonah prefers Virtuals and ai16z, the platforms enabling agent launches, to individual agents. He likened buying them to buying an L1; Virtuals agents pay for compute in the platform token, creating constant buying whenever an agent tweets and accesses an LLM.
His speculative forecast was explicit but sized cautiously: within six months, and most likely three, “everything AI related just 10 to 100x’s for no freaking reason.” Following the Soros framing—when a bubble appears, try to catch it—he would allocate a portfolio chunk, not massive size, and avoid choosing agents that may simply go to zero.

3. Fresh capital could arrive from several independent channels

Avi highlighted a reported $998 million Bitcoin ETF inflow as evidence that investors had waited for the new allocation year. He expected the first two January weeks to bring additional buying and argued that persistent ETF flows could benefit ETH and produce “pretty explosive price action” before and through inauguration.
Jonah called that inflow “the tip of the iceberg.” With CME basis not especially high, he doubted it was primarily paired against futures and instead read it as fresh capital; he expected multiple comparable days during Q1 and few meaningful outflow pressures.
FTX distributions offered another route: even if only 50% of roughly $16 billion returned to crypto, Jonah estimated several billion dollars could be recycled, though he conceded some hedge funds owning claims would cash out. Polymarket also priced a 75% probability of a Solana ETF during 2025 and 50% before July 31; Jonah thought it could launch more strongly than the prior ETH ETF. Solana’s brand could attract no-coiners who cannot or do not currently buy it directly, and Jonah thought the timing after Solana’s unlocks could be particularly bullish.
Avi also regretted missing the Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund, which had traded at roughly a 20–25% discount before the inauguration. He had successfully traded the GBTC and ETHE discounts, but missed this third opportunity; Jonah agreed that it was an annoying omission.
Macro supplied no obvious negative catalyst. Avi viewed the Fed’s message that it would slow down—not a genuine paradigm shift—as already ingested by equities, noting S&P and Nasdaq gains of 1.2% and 1.6%. He argued that large moves on Fed announcements are usually a complete fade unless they mark a real inflection point. Jonah saw solid GDP growth, equity-price appreciation, home-value appreciation, and no inflationary shock, while admitting that conditions looked “a little too good.”

4. Sui is a psychology trade before it is a fundamental one

Jonah could not tell whether Sui was “the next Solana” or a head fake. He said he did not believe it was a good platform or meaningfully competing as an L1, while Avi noted that niche retail communities had already made Cardano massive. Shorting it therefore offered no special edge versus shorting any other altcoin.
Crypto Twitter’s hatred was therefore not necessarily fatal: people repeatedly called Sui dumb while discussing it constantly and watching it rise. Avi’s rule was to leave it alone until those skeptics capitulated. He expected it to keep doing well until something catastrophic happened, such as the team selling everything at once; if that was the alpha, he said to track the wallets.
As a trading instrument, Sui “respects its levels really nicely,” flips resistance into support, and is more broadly distributed than a typical memecoin. Avi would trade it technically but not hold it fundamentally; its many uninformed buyers and sellers make the chart unusually expressive.
Avi’s eventual short setup is precise: since September 1, Sui had broken above and retested its 50-day moving average four times, with that average acting as the bottom. He would wait until Sui remained below it for two or three days, then short the bounce. He assigned that setup an 85% chance of working, but Jonah’s pushback matters: do not pre-empt the signal in a market that may enter a “white-hot mania” phase.

5. Charts work when they encode regret, but catalysts can overwhelm them

Avi’s mechanism for technical analysis is aggregate psychology. When price regains a prior high, sellers who congratulated themselves during the pullback begin wondering whether they exited too early and buy back; they are not drawing breakout lines, but their regret produces the breakout behavior.
That explains why technical analysis works especially well amid bull-market masses of uninformed participants. Avi stressed that it was less reliable in the choppy, event-driven 2022 bear market, when Three Arrows’ collapse took ETH to $888 before it rebounded toward $2,000 within two or three weeks. Jonah added that Bitcoin’s March rally to $48,000 head-faked much of the market before the slide, another reminder that technical analysis does not predict events.
Jonah’s “TradFi brain” remains skeptical where fundamentals dominate. He views Bitcoin and AI coins as more catalyst-driven because participants anticipate fundamental news or technological developments; Sui is closer to a pure technical asset because few buyers expect it to solve payments or deliver a transformative product.
His historical contrast was XRP in 2013: Ripple promoted American Express and Santander partnership announcements to make the token feel investable on future adoption, even though Jonah characterized the activity as vaporware. He doubted that synthetic-catalyst playbook would persuade a more mature 2025 market, leaving Sui closer to Cardano—a coin traded through charts, channels, support, and resistance.

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