Christopher Lee

@Chrstprrr

Finding alphas

Joined March 2023

388 Following

38 Followers

101 Posts

Chrstprrr retweeted

goodalexander

@goodalexander

over 1 year ago

The Boomer Meta (long read) -- I think if I had to sum up what happened in crypto over the last little while 1] everyone got long because of de-regulation 2] but de-regulation doesn't matter in the way people think bc dapps have no users/ material fee generation so it just served to ramp supply of tokens. more supply means lower prices unless you have a multi billion dollar overhang from regulatory fees (ala XRP, some others who would have been uniquely targeted by Biden). so the outperformers were the coins completely hampered by US govt behavior, not the overall market 3] institutions were interested in crypto because of a situation where we lost the plot, fiscally. this seemed to reverse with DOGE being taken much more seriously than previously imagined. A lot of the "government is corrupt" narrative was co-oped by Elon, so DOGE (the govt agency) becomes the outlet for libertarianism - not BTC 4] at the same time tariff dynamics encouraged a mechanical squeeze on Gold/ silver prices making it 'the fastest horse' to macro funds 5] the entire market had been running hot on a surprise wealth effect (FTX estate paying out at $1.4 vs last year expectations far lower). this wealth effect was in part due to FTX's successful private investments doing way better than expected due to AI 6] this + the risk seeking nature of crypto + the intersection of your typical retail trader / SOL memes made it more risk on than usual so it got doubly schwacked with large volatility events 7] Trump launched his meme coin presumably with the knowledge that launching it *before* Bessent etc got into "reducing demand" etc was a good idea 8] this led to a prolonged mental breakdown on the behalf of market participants which we have witnessed publicly on the timeline which crescendoed into an extinction event with Milei's coin and a witch hunt for the "LA Vape Cabal" (what am I doing with my life). waiting for Kanye to drop a Nazi themed coin is the remaining chattering insanity in the retail market 9] in the background of all of this -- Michael Saylor has been doing something relatively unrelated. namely, using the jacked up implied volatility of his stock after weird CNBC appearances to sell expensive converts to retail investors. this + the Bitcoin ETF mobilized 'boomer money' -- which is an order of magnitude larger than millennial or zoomer money, into Bitcoin. Somehow even the Norgesbank (multi $t sovereign wealth fund) decided to ape into MSTR 10] the endless barrage of Saylor buys along with unwinds in memes etc created a state where Solana based western retail was basically extinct into FTX unlocks (where institutions sell their SOL they bought) and BTC.D was very high. this puts funds in an awkward position - as they're implicitly benchmarked to BTC but were all long SOL/ETH beta. this + deregulations + declining interest rates (which tend to foreshadow VC fund inflows) created an asymmetric window for funds to do degenerate things. One example would be sending OM to a $14B FDV or chasing IP/ Bera or other high beta plays. 11] in the meanwhile Ethereum had a top-down driven failure - which was more of a self-goal. any hope it would be taken seriously by institutions was hindered by Vitalik's strange behavior, management churn, apparent DEI hiring while that's not a popular thing to do and a reliance on L2s for basic usability which don't clearly flow through to ETH supply (which has been drifting upwards, hurting its 'moneyness narrative). made worse by large scale hacks denominated in ETH (Bybit) 12] and despite deepseek and very substantial open source AI developments/ hype there is not material on chain activity from AI agents or people paying for ZK AI inference or any other number of ideas that seemed good last year. SOL fees are at 6 month lows -- so dePin etc very much remains a narrative rather than a driver of usage 13] The silver lining is that Tether supply continues to be up only (currently at $142B) despite the fact that Binance is internally trying to compete with it (offering new stables/ margin deals etc). And Tether anecdotally printed very substantial PNL ($13B+) on its reserves last year so has a big war chest. if there were a regulatory jackhammer coming for Tether, Thiel probably would not have recently backed Plasma -- a private start up aiming to move Tether transactions back to BTC 14] the biggest gap risk is that after the disastrous Zelensky meeting Trump said he wants to look into 'what happened' to a lot of the military aid that was sent to Ukraine. If billions of dollars found its way into crypto (which wouldn't be at all shocking) and the administration decided to pay Palantir/Chainalysis to find the money and then seize it or freeze it, that would be pretty horrendous. This brings us up to the present moment where Trump clearly thinks crypto is still important enough to have a summit about it this week (even while allies are up in arms about the Zelensky debacle). And the fact there's a summit this week makes me think #14 is a very low probability tail risk. And you've had his son Eric tweeting things like "Buy ETH thank me later", after previously having stated in December that 'crypto made in the USA would be tax free' at a MENA conference. He probably wouldn't be tweeting things like this without explicit assurances of catalysts from the government But - because "buying ETH and thanking him later" didn't work -- market participants have lost trust in Trump resulting in positive price gains so he'd have to deliver 1] explicit outlines around a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve -- maybe funded by sales of natural parks or something like that 2] removal of Tax on US based cryptocurrencies my view is that the horrendous ETH price action wasn't a Trump betrayal, but rather a Vitalik Self Own - so people are probably bearish unnecessarily into what is likely a pretty bullish event. there are clearly big things on Trump's plate, like the fracturing of NATO and the fact he's taking time out of his week to discuss crypto is pretty bullish. So I personally am in the "Trump is going to deliver bullish things" camp if you have sustained lower interest rates and monster AI research valuations (like $30B series A rounds) -- that's also a structural tailwind for family offices to deploy capital and for large VC funds to receive inflows even with weak performance vs BTC. if you look into something like $OM it's very much not a 'tech' play -- it's more based on proximity to government officials, the blessing of Binance etc. So I continue to think the "B2B" or "finance coins" continue to dominate - which will be confusing and disorienting to people who want Popcat to go to $1T and pleasing to Boomers who go onto HBAR's website and think "wow these are serious people doing serious things" so we probably find ourselves in a spot where you just want to be long coins that institutions can justify owning to their investors, and then promote on CNBC to the boomers (and even Silent Generation) that control the vast majority of wealth in America. It's probably time to buy a suit

$goodalexander's tweet photo. The Boomer Meta (long read) -- I think if I had to sum up what happened in crypto over the last little while 1] everyone got long because of de-regulation 2] but de-regulation doesn't matter in the way people think bc dapps have no users/ material fee generation so it just served to ramp supply of tokens. more supply means lower prices unless you have a multi billion dollar overhang from regulatory fees (ala XRP, some others who would have been uniquely targeted by Biden). so the outperformers were the coins completely hampered by US govt behavior, not the overall market 3] institutions were interested in crypto because of a situation where we lost the plot, fiscally. this seemed to reverse with DOGE being taken much more seriously than previously imagined. A lot of the "government is corrupt" narrative was co-oped by Elon, so DOGE (the govt agency) becomes the outlet for libertarianism - not BTC 4] at the same time tariff dynamics encouraged a mechanical squeeze on Gold/ silver prices making it 'the fastest horse' to macro funds 5] the entire market had been running hot on a surprise wealth effect (FTX estate paying out at $1.4 vs last year expectations far lower). this wealth effect was in part due to FTX's successful private investments doing way better than expected due to AI 6] this + the risk seeking nature of crypto + the intersection of your typical retail trader / SOL memes made it more risk on than usual so it got doubly schwacked with large volatility events 7] Trump launched his meme coin presumably with the knowledge that launching it *before* Bessent etc got into "reducing demand" etc was a good idea 8] this led to a prolonged mental breakdown on the behalf of market participants which we have witnessed publicly on the timeline which crescendoed into an extinction event with Milei's coin and a witch hunt for the "LA Vape Cabal" (what am I doing with my life). waiting for Kanye to drop a Nazi themed coin is the remaining chattering insanity in the retail market 9] in the background of all of this -- Michael Saylor has been doing something relatively unrelated. namely, using the jacked up implied volatility of his stock after weird CNBC appearances to sell expensive converts to retail investors. this + the Bitcoin ETF mobilized 'boomer money' -- which is an order of magnitude larger than millennial or zoomer money, into Bitcoin. Somehow even the Norgesbank (multi $t sovereign wealth fund) decided to ape into MSTR 10] the endless barrage of Saylor buys along with unwinds in memes etc created a state where Solana based western retail was basically extinct into FTX unlocks (where institutions sell their SOL they bought) and BTC.D was very high. this puts funds in an awkward position - as they're implicitly benchmarked to BTC but were all long SOL/ETH beta. this + deregulations + declining interest rates (which tend to foreshadow VC fund inflows) created an asymmetric window for funds to do degenerate things. One example would be sending OM to a $14B FDV or chasing IP/ Bera or other high beta plays. 11] in the meanwhile Ethereum had a top-down driven failure - which was more of a self-goal. any hope it would be taken seriously by institutions was hindered by Vitalik's strange behavior, management churn, apparent DEI hiring while that's not a popular thing to do and a reliance on L2s for basic usability which don't clearly flow through to ETH supply (which has been drifting upwards, hurting its 'moneyness narrative). made worse by large scale hacks denominated in ETH (Bybit) 12] and despite deepseek and very substantial open source AI developments/ hype there is not material on chain activity from AI agents or people paying for ZK AI inference or any other number of ideas that seemed good last year. SOL fees are at 6 month lows -- so dePin etc very much remains a narrative rather than a driver of usage 13] The silver lining is that Tether supply continues to be up only (currently at $142B) despite the fact that Binance is internally trying to compete with it (offering new stables/ margin deals etc). And Tether anecdotally printed very substantial PNL ($13B+) on its reserves last year so has a big war chest. if there were a regulatory jackhammer coming for Tether, Thiel probably would not have recently backed Plasma -- a private start up aiming to move Tether transactions back to BTC 14] the biggest gap risk is that after the disastrous Zelensky meeting Trump said he wants to look into 'what happened' to a lot of the military aid that was sent to Ukraine. If billions of dollars found its way into crypto (which wouldn't be at all shocking) and the administration decided to pay Palantir/Chainalysis to find the money and then seize it or freeze it, that would be pretty horrendous. This brings us up to the present moment where Trump clearly thinks crypto is still important enough to have a summit about it this week (even while allies are up in arms about the Zelensky debacle). And the fact there's a summit this week makes me think #14 is a very low probability tail risk. And you've had his son Eric tweeting things like "Buy ETH thank me later", after previously having stated in December that 'crypto made in the USA would be tax free' at a MENA conference. He probably wouldn't be tweeting things like this without explicit assurances of catalysts from the government But - because "buying ETH and thanking him later" didn't work -- market participants have lost trust in Trump resulting in positive price gains so he'd have to deliver 1] explicit outlines around a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve -- maybe funded by sales of natural parks or something like that 2] removal of Tax on US based cryptocurrencies my view is that the horrendous ETH price action wasn't a Trump betrayal, but rather a Vitalik Self Own - so people are probably bearish unnecessarily into what is likely a pretty bullish event. there are clearly big things on Trump's plate, like the fracturing of NATO and the fact he's taking time out of his week to discuss crypto is pretty bullish. So I personally am in the "Trump is going to deliver bullish things" camp if you have sustained lower interest rates and monster AI research valuations (like $30B series A rounds) -- that's also a structural tailwind for family offices to deploy capital and for large VC funds to receive inflows even with weak performance vs BTC. if you look into something like $OM it's very much not a 'tech' play -- it's more based on proximity to government officials, the blessing of Binance etc. So I continue to think the "B2B" or "finance coins" continue to dominate - which will be confusing and disorienting to people who want Popcat to go to $1T and pleasing to Boomers who go onto HBAR's website and think "wow these are serious people doing serious things" so we probably find ourselves in a spot where you just want to be long coins that institutions can justify owning to their investors, and then promote on CNBC to the boomers (and even Silent Generation) that control the vast majority of wealth in America. It's probably time to buy a suit$

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Christopher Lee

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