Will We Bottom Soon?

Summary

• Regime call: still high-vol, chop-and-recover mode — the 75K Bitcoin level held twice after the “buy with both hands” episode with Felix, and the market now sits 10–15% above it, but Avi insists “we have not left the high-vol market environment.” His advice: trim 20–50% of anything bought lower, because odds of trading 78K again in the next month are “30–40%” — and roughly the same for 92K. “Cash again is extremely valuable.”
• The episode’s operating principle, from Avi: “you only ever play at the extremes. Just don’t touch the market when it’s in the middle of a range.” Be ready to be aggressive when the market gives you the chance — “you just can’t be aggressive if you’re already fully deployed.” Jonah respectfully disagrees on selling here, feeling “we’re in the middle of the new range.”
• Revenue + buybacks is the only alt thesis left: Jonah’s portfolio is now three line items — Bitcoin, Solana, Hyperliquid — and he’s debating rotating all his Solana into Hyperliquid because “if it makes money, it’s a better project than the projects that don’t,” and it actually dividends revenue to holders. His broader dictum: “if their token is not getting actively bought back with project revenues, it’s just a memecoin — and the memecoin cycle ended mid last year.”
• Avi’s structured trade: long an RWA/revenue basket, short ETH against it for a 3–6 month horizon — accumulating Plume, Pendle, Curve, AO, and Maker on the bet tokenomics flip toward payouts; Jonah separately added Grass, whose founder “accidentally disclosed” mid-eight-figure revenues. Avi concedes “for all I know, ETH trades a thousand this year.”
• Macro fork resolves within six months: Jonah argues Trump “doesn’t have a lifetime to figure this out” — fail by the midterms and a blue wave makes him “more like Herbert Hoover than Abraham Lincoln,” so he’ll keep tweeting the market back up (“we literally saw him flinch”). Avi’s counter: he blinked on the rest of the world, but “I don’t know if he’s going to blink with China” — a revisit of the lows is live.
• Bitcoin passed its stress test: NASDAQ fell 25% peak-to-trough vs Bitcoin’s 30–32% — and stripping out the false SPR-speculation spike to 109, the “real” drawdown from 96 to 74 was only ~23%. Without long-term allocators treating it like gold, Avi “would have expected Bitcoin to be back in the 60s.” Jonah’s breakout tell: IBIT/SPY at ~0.09 vs cycle-high 0.1 — a break signals Bitcoin decorrelating to the upside and mania flows returning.
• Gold vs Bitcoin as the multipolarity trade: the PBoC has bought gold five straight months as China sells Treasuries through the “ugly divorce”; Avi is “very bullish gold and gold miners” for 6–12 months, seeing gold up in ~80% of next-year scenarios vs ~60% for Bitcoin. Jonah’s asymmetry: both bottom around −60%, but gold’s upside is a two-bagger over 5–10 years vs 5–10x for Bitcoin — and multipolarity “warrants a decade-long bull run.”

Deep dive

1. Still in the high-vol regime — trim what you bought lower, hoard cash

• Market read: after 75K held twice and the market rallied 10–15% above the “buy with both hands” Felix episode, “we have not left the high-vol market environment.” If you added lower, be 20–50% lighter on that capital — the probability of trading 78K again in the next month is “30–40%,” but so is trading 92. “This is where we go into chop and recover mode.”
• The craft rule Avi returns to twice: “you only ever play at the extremes. Just don’t touch the market when it’s in the middle of a range.” Not calling 90, not calling 75 — “there will be vol. Be ready for it… you just can’t be aggressive if you’re already fully deployed.”
• Jonah’s pushback — worth keeping: “I feel like we’re in the middle of the new range,” so it’s a weird time to lighten up; he won’t sell his Hyperliquid. His one addendum: tax-loss harvest anything bought higher — “that’s free money right there.”

2. If the token doesn’t get bought back, it’s a memecoin

• Jonah’s portfolio is now three lines — Bitcoin, Solana, Hyperliquid — and he’s debating dumping all the Solana for more Hyperliquid: “if it makes money, it’s a better project than the projects that don’t,” and unlike Curve’s “voting rights or some useless crap,” Hyperliquid “actually dividends the money to the token holders in a legal way.”
• His structural claim: any founder can now see that “if their token is not getting actively bought back with project revenues, it’s just a memecoin — and the memecoin cycle ended mid last year.” Yet “deep-seated lizard brain” greed keeps founders clutching revenue even as Aerodrome destroys Uniswap on Base and Hyperliquid destroys its onchain competitors — precisely because they do buybacks.
• Avi’s structured trade: accumulate revenue-generating names with a 3–6 month trend — Plume, Pendle, Curve, AO, and Maker — and short ETH against the basket, since “for all I know, ETH trades a thousand this year.” Jonah separately added Grass, whose founder “accidentally disclosed” mid-eight-figure revenues. Expect two-week manias in RWA, AI, and L1s “at some point in the next six to eight months”; until trend resumes, “there’s kind of no reason to do anything other than pair trade.”

3. Trump has six months — he flinched once, but China is different

• Why 3–6 months? Avi admits “candidly, I just pulled it out of my ass” — but it’s the time needed to learn whether tariff uncertainty actually degrades consumption: “either we’ll be in the middle of a spiral or we’ll say okay, nothing really bad is happening. Time to go up now.”
• Jonah is “so bullish risk assets” over six months because “Trump’s not Xi Jinping — he doesn’t have a lifetime to figure this out.” Fail by the midterms and a blue wave leaves him a lame duck, “more like Herbert Hoover than Abraham Lincoln.” He started the chaos with a Rose Garden speech, “he could end it with a tweet — and we literally saw him flinch. He just tweeted the market back up.”
• Avi’s counter: he blinked on the rest of the world, “but I don’t know if he’s going to blink with China… this guy does have a pretty big ego.” Jonah adds that there’s no bilateral trade between China and the United States and 300% tariffs — “it’s not improbable that things crash again” and the lows get revisited. Jonah accepts the “third-grade playground tit-for-tat” scenario but reads it as the start of an east-vs-west split: “volatility but not necessarily bearish” over the medium-to-long run.

4. The world’s choice: contract law or Xi’s brain

• Avi, channeling a note from someone likely named Peter Zeihan (“sometimes a bit of a quack”): this ends “when everybody makes their decision” on whether to gang up on China. Jonah adds that many now weigh “do you want to join the rocket ship or get on the sinking ship” — and says “every single Chinese person I know” sees the US as the sinking ship.
• Jonah’s rebuttal from his physical-oil career: business cultures differ everywhere — getting a barrel out of the Nigerian creeks means bribing “every single person along the way” — but “certain types of capitalism enjoy Cambrian explosions of success and others wither and die.” Marrying China means “subjecting yourself to a style of capitalism for which there’s no precedent of success.”
• Avi extends the IP point to crypto itself: with everything open source, “your job is to invent something and then extract as much money as possible as quickly as possible, because in six months you’re going to have 300 billion copycats” — weak IP protection disincentivizes invention everywhere it appears.
• Avi’s close: America is the world’s biggest customer and should become the Walmart kind — haggling suppliers “down to the bone” rather than giving up “$10 a barrel by being idiots on every single trade” like his former customers in an unnamed region. Meantime, “a tremendous amount of volatility”; medium-term, markets “go up quite a lot.”

5. Every price is unstable — trade the dislocations, know your blind spot

• Jonah: “$84,000 on Bitcoin is a horribly unstable price — basically every price on the market right now is.” At-the-money Bitcoin vol at 48 — about the same as crude oil — “doesn’t really make a ton of sense to me.” Avi says to watch for dislocations: when M (likely Mantra’s OM) started liquidating over the weekend, understanding why meant catching a short that fell 50% in 15 minutes. “You need a bullish market to prop up a scam.”
• Jonah’s confession: great at the immediate term and the two-decade macro call, “but I kind of suck at the medium term… Bitcoin’s trading 83 — is 78 next or is 90 next? I’m so blind there.” His leading indicators are ugly: NY Fed consumer-expectation surveys on unemployment and inflation “rocketed over the last week,” credit-card balances rocketing, buy-now-pay-later Coachella tickets. His plan: wait for lower lows to buy.
• Also the S&P math from Avi, citing a Quinn tweet: the index carries the same earnings expectations and multiple as at the start of Trump’s presidency — if tariffs stick, margins shrink and multiples must come in. Once that rerate happens, “then I can start to be ridiculously bullish — hopefully that’s in the next month or two.”

6. Bitcoin passed the crash test; gold is the nearer-term bet

• The resilience case: NASDAQ fell 25% peak-to-trough vs Bitcoin’s 30–32% — and Avi argues the top was inflated by “rampant speculation on the SPR which turned out to be false,” so the real move from 96 to 74 was only 23%. Absent long-horizon allocators treating Bitcoin like gold, “I would have expected Bitcoin to be back in the 60s.”
• Jonah’s flow tell: IBIT/SPY, now ~0.09 vs a 0.1 cycle high — same NY open and close, cleaner than BTC/SPX. A break through signals “Bitcoin is decorrelating to the upside” and “when capital really starts to flow into crypto.”
• On gold: the PBoC has added to reserves five consecutive months, parking proceeds from Treasury sales amid the “ugly divorce” — China alone can push gold up a lot. Avi is “very bullish gold and gold miners” for 6–12 months, seeing gold up in ~80% of next-year scenarios vs ~60% for Bitcoin; a 15–16-year-old asset replacing a 5,000-year one “might take 20” years, though Jonah hopes for five.
• Jonah’s asymmetry to end on: both assets bottom around −60% (gold ≈ $2,000/oz; Bitcoin there is “the best trade of a lifetime”), but upside is a two-bagger for gold vs 5–10x for Bitcoin over 5–10 years. He concedes the portfolio-construction point — gold’s higher Sharpe funds bigger Bitcoin drawdowns — and stakes the thesis: multipolarity is “a generational shift… I think that warrants a decade-long bull run.”