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Our weekly show is hosted by Michael Nadeau (The DeFi Report) and Ryan Sean Adams (Bankless). Each week, we discuss how we approach managing our own portfolio and the data, research, and analytical frameworks that inform those decisions — for educational and informational purposes.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[0:10] Welcome to The Report. We have on-chain activity heating up. It's getting hot out there. Is this the early bull phase or is this another head fake? It is September 9th, 2026. This week, we're going to go deep into on-chain activity because there's an interesting setup out there. Bitcoin just printed a golden cross. If you don't know what a golden cross is, we're going to define it in today's episode and answer the question as to whether that confirms the early bull market, or whether this is another fake out, the two possibilities there. Also, on-chain activity, heating up Robinhood chain, pawns, social crypto, consumer crypto, what Mike calls fast DeFi. Is this the new altcoin season? Can this last? We're also going to do a comparison and a matchup on the week. Pump versus pawns. Mike has been early to both. What does he think the prospects are for these tokens and these crypto networks? We'll get the full breakdown. Of course, stick around to the end. We got numbers that we're going to throw at you, but two numbers that frame everything. I want to get you guys to remember at the beginning of today's episode, 69.9 and 80.4K. Those are the two numbers. They frame everything. We'll discuss that towards the end. Mike.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[1:30] I want to open with this line from the beginning of today's report. So you said this, last Sunday, Bitcoin notched its first weekly close at the 50-week moving average since last November. Since last November. It's an important step towards confirming the early bull phase of the next crypto cycle. Okay, an important step? Like, or was that it? Was that it? Are we now in the early bull phase? Can you confirm it with that number above the 50-week?
Michael Nadeau:
[1:58] Yeah, you know, I wanted to say closed above the 50-week moving average, but I had to use the word at in that sentence because we barely got to it. So we closed basically right at the 50-week moving average on Sunday. And, you know, I'm not ready to say like, okay, this is the all clear. It's kind of like we're threatening to make this move. You mentioned the Golden Cross, which is another indicator that typically comes right around when you establish that 50-week moving average as support coming out of the bear market. So we've got some stuff sort of starting to line up here. And then, you know, when you look broadly at the crypto ecosystem, we're seeing a lot of interesting signals, I think, of sort of what is potentially to come next. And we can kind of go through. It's kind of interesting. I think there's some people thinking we're getting a little bit, you know, too out over our skis with how fast things are moving out there.
Michael Nadeau:
[2:55] But I think, you know, we can kind of go back and go through some stuff that happened also in early 2023. People that were around will remember some of these things. And it's kind of helpful to go back and realize like there are also sort of these pockets of speculation like this early in cycles. And I think it'll help us kind of just level set a little bit where we're at, start to think a little bit more about what's coming. And yes, this kind of like fast DeFi part of the portfolio, this is something we developed conviction in, you know, several months ago. And things are moving pretty fast. And we're at a point where we're almost like, you know, having to manage risk around some of these positions because they've gone up so much. So it's forced me to really kind of strap in and lock in here. And yeah, we're going to go through some of that this week.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:40] That's a good problem to have though, Mike. You know, like managing too much risk because the portfolio has gone up too much.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[3:45] Okay, so we'll talk about that towards the end and all of these other things. Maybe just to level set. Bitcoin at the time of recording, 78.4K right now. That is about flat on the seven day since the last time we were back on here. Let's go into some of the market structure and get a comparison here. So the cohort analysis that you've been putting at the head of the report for the last three weeks, how has that changed on the week and what does that tell you?
Michael Nadeau:
[4:18] So kind of playing out similarly to what we discussed the last few weeks. So what's happening is it looks like some people that were buying in the 60s was actually maybe not so much the diamond-handed long-term holder type of buy, or at least some of it wasn't. Some of those coins are being passed to holders at these elevated cost basis levels. So coins are sort of jumping up cost basis spans. That's one thing that's been playing out. And then the other thing is we're still seeing sort of the time-based capitulation coming from the top buyer cohort. So you have coins being sold from the top coming into these lower cost basis cohorts at 78 to 92K. And then you have some coins that were bought in the 60s being sold in that range as well. So kind of interesting. It looks to me pretty consistent with what I would expect to see kind of at this stage where...
Michael Nadeau:
[5:10] Coins are consolidating. I think the main question here is whether or not, you know, the people that wanted to buy maybe that 56 to 66k band that were hoping that they could do it in September or possibly October. The question is like how much of that money is actually on the sidelines that may be coming in and actually sort of buying 78 to 92k. Bitcoin's kind of been stuck in the upper 70s now for almost three weeks. It hasn't really given anybody a chance that maybe missed that big 36% move a few weeks ago. It hasn't given those folks a chance to get back in. So I'm wondering, you know, how much of that is on the sidelines and is that going to prevent us, you know, if we do have some weakness here with, you know, oil prices or, you know, look like they want to go back over 100. We've got the Fed meeting next week. So I could see like there being a little bit of volatility in the markets. And I think we're going to get the answer on, you know, how much sort of dip buying money's on the sidelines.
Michael Nadeau:
[6:16] Because I think the key support, so you mentioned 69.9K. We do have a little bit of volatility here. To me, that's the key support to hold that would give me confidence that, OK, we're probably the next move is probably going to go towards that 50 week moving average, probably more durably on the second attempt to get there. So that's kind of how I'm thinking about it. I think generally speaking, I still feel like what the data is telling me is that, you know, the probability supports that the low is still in.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[6:49] Well, I got to ask you then, the probability, you've been saying about 40%, 40 to 45% probability that we could go lower. And I guess the, you know, 60% probability that the low is in, is that still your number this week?
Michael Nadeau:
[7:07] I would say it's getting, it's starting to tilt even more towards the side that the low is in. I would probably push that closer to 65, 35, 70, 30 at this point.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[7:18] All right. All right. All right. Well, so if you're right then, that 70K number could be kind of sticky. If you're right that some of these, this recent rally has caught a lot of people who've wanted to be in the Bitcoin market offside and they're waiting. They'll send some support in the 70K. I mean, that's a good sign, I suppose, for the number. One thing had me a little bit worried in the report, and I want to push on this. You said this, we believe long-term holders, like the smart money investors, they're now consolidating in this cohort, the 78 to 92K cohort, possibly because they think the early bull phase of the cycle may be commencing. Okay, so if it is starting to become consensus that the early bull phase is here, shouldn't that make us worried? Like anything that becomes too consensus, I naturally get a little bit worried about. Oftentimes the market will punish the consensus opinion and catch people by surprise. So now early bull is starting to become consensus. Are you worried about that?
Michael Nadeau:
[8:30] I am now that you said it. Yes. Yeah, no, I think it's a great point. And honestly, like I'm usually like more comfortable when I feel like I'm outside of consensus. I know you are. I see where you're going here. And it does make me, it makes me a little bit nervous. You know, there's obviously we're going to get to what's happening kind of probably in the crypto ecosystem as well. And we're seeing some signs of that people are already forgetting that, you know, Points don't always go up, right? Like these things are volatile and we tend to be reminded of that pretty consistently. So yes, I would say if this is becoming full consensus, what is a little bit outside of my purview is just how much of that capital is on the sidelines that they try to, you know, get into the market on dips. And, you know, these next few weeks, I think we're going to learn a lot about this.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[9:21] Let's learn a bit about the Bitcoin Golden Cross. So for people who aren't into TA and they don't know what this measure and metric means, can you define it for folks? And am I correct in saying the Golden Cross was just cross? So do we hit that or do we just hit the cusp of it?
Michael Nadeau:
[9:38] We kind of just hit the cusp, but kind of similar to what happened with the 50-week moving average. We touched it. This is a bullish sort of indicator. And what it's measuring is the shorter term 50-day moving average relative to the longer term 200-day moving average. And we can see what tends to happen is the 200-day moving average, the blue line there, will start to level out a little bit as you get to the cycle low. So it looks like we've probably bottomed on the 200-day. It's starting to level off. Both moving averages are starting to inflect up. But what's happening is the 50-day moving average is inflecting up at a steeper pace because of the momentum that we've had. We had the 36% rally. So it's telling us that the shorter-term momentum in the market is starting to inflect relative to the longer-term average here. And this is consistent with what we would see coming out of a bear market in 2023. We had the Golden Cross that came 78 days after the cycle low was in. So it came in February of 2023.
Michael Nadeau:
[10:47] And we're about 70, I'm sorry, it was 78 days in 23. We're about 70 days into that where we just touched it this cycle. So fairly, you know, kind of in the same, you know, time zone range for where we would expect this. And it's just kind of another indicator of this and, you know, reclaiming that 50 week moving average. I would say these are the things that I'm waiting for to say, OK, it looks like we have the all clear that, you know, we've we're sort of moving into this, what I call the early bull phase.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[11:16] And you're just not feeling that all clear because we don't have enough time, you know, above the Golden Cross number, above the 50 week. That's kind of what you're looking for. I think you said something to this effect. What did you say? The key signal will be whether Bitcoin can comfortably break the 50-week moving average in the coming weeks. What is that number? And what concretely are you looking to see?
Michael Nadeau:
[11:45] So it's still, the 50-week moving, I'm just still moving down a little bit. So it's at like 80.3, 80.4, 4K, it's moving a little bit. So it's right around 80K. And what I'm looking to see is multiple, you know, at least multiple weekly closes and like kind of a firm break. The other thing is we still haven't reclaimed the high from back in May. So we are still, if you look at sort of broadly the setup and the big picture here. Oh, yeah. Bitcoin hasn't proven that it's not setting a lower high.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[12:18] Wait, we were higher in May? May did not feel as good as it feels right now. At least I don't recall it feeling like this.
Michael Nadeau:
[12:24] Yeah, I mean, it was probably the other large bear market rally. And we could be in a bear market rally right now. We don't know for sure. But back in May, this is when Saylor was buying and people were saying the bottom was in. We had a pretty significant move from like 60k that went all the way up to I think 82k and we haven't quite gotten to that level so that's another you know if we start to move past that it looks like okay we're you know we've we've we're setting a higher low potentially with this next move but that's something that hasn't conferred we haven't broken the 50-week moving average so I want to see like a couple weeks you know establishing support in that range And I think that will be the confirmation that we'll be looking for. The challenge with that, obviously, is that, you know, if you're waiting for it, once it happens, you may miss, you know, a 5% to 10% move or so in there.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:22] ETF flows looking positive on the week, not blowing anyone out. Same spot volume, still positive on the week. Derivatives as well.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[13:31] We can talk about miners. Just some healthy signals out there. I do want to draw your attention to Bitcoin dominance and this idea of alt-season. You said that Bitcoin dominance continues to look like it wants to move up. Which is interesting to me, right? We have this speculation that we'll talk about later in the episode on chain speculation. And yet in the midst of that, we are still seeing Bitcoin dominance moving up. You said some altcoins have made outsized moves off the lows. And there's some speculation out there that this is altseason. People are starting to use that term, altseason. So some people are saying, hey, like it's altseason now, at least if you're in the world of Robinhood, A lot of alts are moving. That feels like alt season. Others are saying, oh, my God, if it's alt season, that is way too soon. That's actually a bearish signal. What do you think about Bitcoin dominance and alt season and whether it's here or whether it's coming too early if it is here?
Michael Nadeau:
[14:30] Yeah, I think people are getting some flashbacks already with a lot of the moves that we're seeing out there. And I think it's fair to sort of pause and say, wait a minute, are we moving too fast, too quick here? I don't think that's what's playing out. I think what's really happening is more From a sentiment perspective, markets have been going down only for, you know, we've seen quite a bit of dispersion, but broadly, the market's been in a downward channel here since last October. And I think just seeing these moves, you know, pretty significant moves off the lows has people excited. And I don't what I don't think is happening is like new people are coming into crypto right now. Even when I look at we have a lot of like really fantastic data on what's happening on pump.fun. And there's been quite a bit of activity on Pump.Fun, but when we look at like, who is that user? Is it a new user? Is it a recurring user? Is it somebody who's already been on that platform? It's mostly people that have already been, you know, engaging with those platforms. So I don't think we're bringing like new capital and new capital flows really into the crypto right now. I think what's happening is like the base asset of some of these things has repriced. Sol is up. People see Sol go up. They go onto these apps or they see ETH go up. They go onto these apps. So I think that's part of what's playing out here. When we look at like sort of some of these alt season indicators,
Michael Nadeau:
[15:57] Nothing looks like it's even remotely, you know, like at like a peak alt season or anything like that. Bitcoin dominance looks like it wants to go up when Bitcoin dominance is rising. That means that for every dollar coming into the crypto ecosystem, you know, more than 50% of that is going into Bitcoin. So even with altcoins and all these moves we've seen off the lows, Bitcoin has been actually capturing more of the capital flow than the rest of the ecosystem. So, yes, it's certainly fair to kind of point out that things are getting a little frothy. And I think. There's these new social apps out there, which we'll talk about as well, where people are sharing the P&Ls and everything's very transparent. And so people can see all of this. I think that's part of what's playing into some of the sentiment as well.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[16:45] Okay, so you do believe in the concept of alt season. You don't believe it's here. You think alt season may come later, but that Bitcoin dominance has to have a run first in the early bull phase. You think that's how it's going to shake out. But let's talk about that sentiment change because it is also measurable. We just saw the Bitcoin fear and greed index just move into green. That is greed. We have moved from fear, which we've been in a fear regime for a while, into the greed phase on the 30-day moving average. You say this aligns with what we observed at the start of the early bull phase in early 2023. Okay, so 2023 saw a sentiment shift to greed. We're seeing a sentiment shift to greed now in crypto. What's interesting is, yes, you're right, crypto hasn't seen much green since October. And so this could be existing crypto community holders like feeling that relief of, oh my God, portfolio is going up. Doesn't that feel wonderful? I would also add from October about till now, not only did they not see crypto green, they saw everyone else's portfolio turn green. So they saw AI all time highs. They saw NASDAQ. They saw S&P.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:05] And that starts to wear on an investor, too. But this is a fast swing into the greed territory. What does that show you and what does that tell you at this part of the market? Yeah.
Michael Nadeau:
[18:20] It's interesting. I mean, I don't put a ton of weight on the fear and greed index. It's something I'll look at and fold it into what we're doing. But what's interesting about the fear and greed index is you can be in extreme fear and be in a blow-off top scenario where you just get a liquidation and the markets are way up, but people are scared. So you can have fear when you're in a, you know, bull market frenzy. And then you can also have greed, which is where we're at right now, in a sort of more of a bear market structure, which I still think we're in. We've just sort of reversed out of sort of the lows.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[18:57] So you think it's like too jittery or something to like put much stock in?
Michael Nadeau:
[19:01] It's kind of just measuring the, you know, the psychology of the market a little bit. And, you know, humans just tend to overshoot everything. We go too low and then we go too high. So we're like too high right now for probably where we should be. But we were also doing the same thing back in early 2023. So if I went back and looked at 23 and I could see that, oh, wait a minute, like we were actually in fear when we were coming out and people were still scared, but Bitcoin was grinding up. Maybe I would have a little pause with what I'm seeing right now, but I think it's pretty much on par with what I would expect.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[19:36] Let's talk about on-chain and maybe we can compare that, as you said you wanted to do, to early 2023 when we saw these pockets of speculation. So right now, and we'll talk about this more in a little bit, for the past few weeks, month or so, Robinhood chain has been on an absolute tear. You know, social consumer trading, what you call fast DeFi, has been doing incredibly well. You're seeing early bull signs of on-chain activity. We'll talk about all of that. But people coming into the report today, they clearly see some speculation out there, some greed, let's say, in the markets. How does this episode compare to 2023 early bull? Were we seeing pockets of speculation at that time?
Michael Nadeau:
[20:24] We were you know i think we forget it but um but we were and it kind of started so bitcoin bottomed in in november of 2022 after ftx um and we had a few months of sort of people kind of the smoke was clearing and people are figuring out you know where what where we're going to go next and we started seeing like speculation starting in february really um with with blur and people might, crypto natives might remember, Blur actually captured, you know, OpenSea's market, captured the NFT market and took over from OpenSea. This was in February or so. They launched a new product and there was a lot of speculation around that. Didn't really last, right? But there was interesting speculation for how kind of early in the bull market we were. People might recall, All, you know, going back to this period, this is when the L2 tokens first came out. So Arbitrum, Optimism, there was speculation around that. Those were pretty interesting. That was a pretty interesting thing at the time. Sure, Bankless was covering a lot of what was happening in the Ethereum ecosystem at that time. Those tokens were coming out to pretty large market caps and rallying after they released those. So there was plenty of people that wanted to speculate at that time. We had like probably the most speculative period we've ever seen on Bitcoin and
Michael Nadeau:
[21:49] Back in March of 2023 with ordinals. This was like NFT speculation, people built using Bitcoin block space for things other than just transactions, which was interesting, caused a lot of controversy. We saw the most transaction fees ever on Bitcoin during this period.
Michael Nadeau:
[22:09] And then we had Pepe launch in April, got to a $1.6 billion market cap. I mean, massive massive market cap for you know the market at that time um so you know you kind of had this stuff going on and like this starts to create the the wealth effects potentially that can sort of lead to the next phase of the cycle and i think um the key thing is just like all this stuff was happening well before bitcoin bitcoin's trading at 20 between 25 to 30k as all of this is happening. We know Solana had a massive move that started really like in kind of late 2023. So, you know, I think we're before like that type of, you know, we haven't really seen the L1s make a move. We're seeing kind of what I think is happening in social trading right now just kind of looks similar to some of the other things. I think when you look at this list, you might say, well, wait a minute, Mike, like none of these things really lasted, right? This was all kind of like quick, quick stuff that didn't really have a ton of staying power.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:14] You might say that.
Michael Nadeau:
[23:15] Yeah. And that's that's one thing like, you know, we get to we'll get to what's happening with like ponds and stuff. I think it's a little different with these specific apps and what I'm seeing. But in terms of just like the desire for people to come back on chain, prices are going up, people want to speculate. I think this is pretty consistent with what we would expect, you know, in the early stages of a bull market.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[23:39] Yeah, that's true. I guess broad strokes, people don't look back and think of 2023 as a particularly bullish year for crypto. And yet there were all of these pockets of speculation of assets doing very well, like Blur and the L2s and Ordinals and Pepe, even WorldCoin launched. And then you had Frientech and that was a whole thing, you know, summer of 2023. And then later the Gito and Tia AirDops, you almost got a full
Ryan Sean Adams:
[24:04] year in the early bull of these speculative pockets that shifted around and moved into crypto. Well, let's talk about the speculative pocket that seems alive and well right now. And I'd like to know if you think this is particularly durable, but let's talk about it in the context of maybe people haven't used it before. They don't know what's happening. Robinhood is on an absolute tear in terms of the revenue it is generating. And it's primarily because of tokenized stocks and I believe also the meme economy. And a central asset and meme launchpad called PONS seems to be at the focal point of some of this activity. I know this is a TDR portfolio asset. I think we can say that now it's in the portfolio. You're coming out with that and you've had it in the portfolio and I think are doing quite well on that investment. Tell us what's going on with PONS first, and then maybe we'll do a contrast with Solana, with POMP and that ecosystem as well.
Michael Nadeau:
[25:08] Yeah. So, you know, just going back really just the last few months here, Robinhood Chain has launched in early July. A lot of developers flocked to that ecosystem. And I think a lot of sort of Ethereum folks have been, you know, happy to kind of try the apps and the different things that are being launched on Robinhood Chain. We also know that they're doing a lot of stuff with stock tokens. So there's kind of a lot of energy around Robinhood chain right now. So we've kind of just been observing this a little bit. And we have our thesis for Pump for this cycle.
Michael Nadeau:
[25:44] And so I've been particularly interested in what was happening on Launchpad. This was one of the first, I would say, apps that started to... We saw five or six of these come out almost immediately. Um and that to me you know is kind of interesting it kind of starting to starts to look a little bit like what we've seen in the past in defi you know even going back to the early days of like you know when dex is relaunching when uniswap is launching one of them comes out it works and you'd see like five or six of them pop up immediately they're forking the protocol they're trying to bolt on a few different features trying to vampire attack users like this is what happens in crypto, it's incredibly competitive. And the sort of probably the biggest risk, I would say, with PumpFun, when we were like underwriting that, it's like this type of thing could happen, right? There could be something else that comes along that's able to, it's just like a little bit more viral of an app, it's able to capture the users. And, you know, this is the challenge of investing in crypto, because switching costs are so low for users. And, you know, Every app and protocol is going to do everything they can to try to pull users from different places using incentives. So it's a very challenging environment for builders, I would say, as well.
Michael Nadeau:
[27:04] But we saw what was happening with PONS pretty early on, and we ended up buying the token a few weeks ago. A small percentage of the portfolio, but it's gone up so much that it's actually become a pretty meaningful position.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[27:16] Are you able to say, Mike, what price point you bought the PONS token in terms of market cap and what is it now?
Michael Nadeau:
[27:22] It was like 45 million, you know, market cap or so. And we bought it because of basically the upside there, because it was already showing that it could produce pretty high revenues. It was getting the narrative. You could start to see there was a little bit of a community forming, had a fair launch, really strong token economics, 80% buybacks. And we feel strongly about this sector. Like what we're seeing, I would say this is still very experimental,
Michael Nadeau:
[27:50] But because of like the performance of PumpFun over the, basically over 2026 in this bear market, when, you know, very few crypto users were still around, Pump was still doing roughly a million dollars a day in revenue. And so I have to sort of like respect that and say like, this is probably not as sort of. Short term as some of these other things we've seen in the past because we have proof that you know people like using pump fun even even in a bear market so um
Michael Nadeau:
[28:22] So anyways we we said you know what this is sort of like this thesis that we have is working it's now working on another chain that looks to be attracting like it's not really like pulling users from solana which we can talk about it's it's just sort of like broadening the market is what i thought ponds was doing and so we said you know, we need to have exposure here. This is sort of doubling down on this thesis we already have. And yeah, the position moved a lot in a short period of time. This happens in crypto, you know, it's a nice thing to have, but then you got to start getting to work because you got to protect that position and really understand it. So really a lot of the report this week is me sort of going through this process now that this is happening really quickly. We need to understand how this could potentially play out. And I've been trying to just ask myself questions about this particular sector, these particular apps, and looking at the user bases and what's happening here to try to get a signal as to how this could start to shake out.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[29:22] Yeah, some interesting things here. So you brought it at around a 40 to 50 million market cap. It went as high as 676 million. It is now still over half a billion dollars. and on some real revenue here. So $100 million in total fees and $24 million in protocol revenue with 80% of that used for PONS buyback. So there's actually kind of a buyback and burn type of model. I thought one of the insights that was interesting here is because I think you were doing a lot to sort of, think through your investment in PON relative to POMP and kind of re-underrate both of those. And you came away with this idea that PONS is not actually taking away from POMP so much.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[30:09] You had this line from the report, is mostly, this is PONS, Ethereum folks who did not participate in POMP fund meme coin mania last cycle. So you're almost seeing, not necessarily an outside crypto cohort, But you are seeing an internal crypto cohort that had not participated and played in the Solana meme coin economy on the pump side of things now entering. So still crypto native, but also a bit of a different cohort. So did I get that right? And what does that make you think? Does that make you think that both Pons and Pump can have a good run in kind of the early bull phase and on the next few months and few years in crypto?
Michael Nadeau:
[30:56] Yeah, that's kind of my read on this right now. And, you know, the first thing I did when I started to see Pons numbers, you know, shooting up, we built a dashboard for this. I think I need to make that. I think it might be private right now. I'll make that public for people. we built a dashboard and then we started to look at what was happening on pump fun you know as ponds was was growing and um what i've seen is like pump fun all of the fundamentals on pump fun are inflecting up right during this this period and this is interesting to me because pump fun has been challenged before this happened um a little over a year ago where radium launched a launch pad called launched let's bonk and it immediately and they were able to attract a lot of the creators on pump fun this was on solana so it's a little bit different but they were able to like essentially capture most of the fundamentals most of the economics that were on pump fun immediately went to let's bonk pump funds uh fundamentals came off a cliff token launches volumes um revenues it lasted for about a month and then pump fun you know basically regained that and now is back to a 90% market share and has been for the last year or so. So we've seen this before. PumpFawn has dealt with threats on Solana before
Michael Nadeau:
[32:17] And has been able to come out of that. What's happening now is I think basically what you said there where this is not the same user, I don't believe, that's on PumpFawn that's going over to Ponds. It's really more new people, people that are crypto native, that are involved in these markets at this stage of the cycle and possibly like, you know, sort of a younger generation
Michael Nadeau:
[32:43] Kind of like cohort of crypto users maybe a little bit newer to the space that are mobile that are mobile first which is very interesting this is new um for this cycle i would say that we have this mobile onboarding experience now through these apps like fomo through robin robin hood wallet where you can sort of like get a wallet set up like very quickly fund it with apple pay and you're in the trenches like immediately. Like you used to have to, you know, anybody who's crypto data has been around for a while, you know, it's usually a lot harder than that. There's way more risk, there's bridging, there's, you know, managing wallets and seed phrases. All these things have been abstracted away and these apps just work and they're kind of going viral a little bit. There's a lot of people using these and I'm noticing lots of people in the Ethereum ecosystem are using these people that maybe were frowning upon this type of activity on Salada last cycle have kind of come around to it. So I think this is, to me, like what's happening is the market is broadening. It's not a, it's not a vampire attack where Pons is stealing like this little subset of speculative activity that wants to participate on these things. It's sort of a broadening of the sort of addressable market, I think is what's happening.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[33:59] Do you think Pump will just deploy on Robinhood chain? And I must have a question here is like, how could they have missed this opportunity? Right. Is it just because there is still a like there's the Solana virtual machine and then there's the Ethereum virtual machine, SVM versus EVM. There's kind of a chasm. Or do you just expect, you know, PumpFun is just kind of being like, oh, shoot, we missed this, but we're going to deploy there. I mean, they will go where the users will go.
Michael Nadeau:
[34:27] Right. I think they will. Right. Will that be successful? Hard to say. You know, it's this is happening. I mean, imagining, you know, I'm worried about this, just kind of managing a portfolio. Imagine you're the pump on team and you have to respond to these things this fast and figure out, is this thing sustainable? They're doing the same assessment that I'm doing, trying to figure out, is this a new user? Do we need to go over here? Do we need to deploy? How long is that going to take us? Are we, is the Ethereum ecosystem going to be hospitable to a Solana app coming, coming over there? So I think it's a very interesting setup here. And I think PumpFun can launch over there. They probably will. They have demonstrated that they will go to wherever the user is. They actually started in the Ethereum ecosystem before they went to Solana originally. So I think it's going to be interesting to see what their next move is. We talked a little bit in the report just about there's going to be a ton of these competitors popping up now. There's other launchpads that are sort of focusing more on stock pairs. These are popping up on Solana. They're also popping up on Robinhood chain. And so this is, once something works in crypto, everyone tries to build it.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[35:41] I know. It's very, the dynamic is very interesting. You have to, I'm sure Pomp is looking at pawns and being like, okay, we would love some of that. Like altering their plans, devising some plans. Also, you have Bass from Coinbase, who's been here doing the L2 thing for what, like two years? And really investing the time. And they're looking over at Robinhood chain taking off and being like, that could have been us. Why wasn't that us? And I know you have a report coming out this week, actually, which I'm excited to read. I think on Friday, Coinbase, and you're going to contrast that with the CoinStock versus Hood, I believe, which is going to be interesting to read.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[36:19] But there's a lot of shifting dynamics here. I guess one other question for you for some of the ETH bulls and holders in the audience. Do you think any of this Robin Hood activity is good for ETH or do you think it's kind of a totally separate thing?
Michael Nadeau:
[36:34] I think it is good for ETH. I've been thinking a lot about ETH, actually, you know, since this activity has been starting. And I do think it's good for ETH. I think it's great just to see like the Ethereum community, like kind of getting involved with this, supporting this. ETH doing well is like very important to crypto broadly. And I think this is an interesting setup. I put out a tweet last week, sort of proposing like the idea of like, why would Robinhood not buy ETH? right now, right? Which got a decent amount of attention and a lot of pushback actually from crypto natives like in the comments, which I thought was kind of interesting. I think people broadly liked it, but there was some pushback. And, you know, you can see this momentum that's happening with Robinhood Chain. Base has sort of lost this for now. And we're going to see kind of where this ultimately goes. But one thing that like I've been trying to think about, What are the scenarios that ETH, you know, just outperforms Bitcoin? ETH did not outperform Bitcoin last cycle. What are the scenarios where we see something that's just like very different? It looks very different from last cycle. And I think the scenarios are kind of what we're starting to see where you have L2s getting lots of traction. Robinhood chain, maybe BASE has something up its sleeve. There's a meme coin launching I heard over there today.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:56] Is this the laptop coin?
Michael Nadeau:
[37:57] We can talk about that.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[37:58] Oh, God.
Michael Nadeau:
[37:58] Okay. But maybe BASE has something up their sleeve, but this is kind of the bull case for ETH where you have institutions building on it. What could really come that we're not expecting? Maybe it is Robinhood saying, hey, we're going to align ourselves with the Ethereum community. We're going to go out and buy some ETH. We're signaling to the Ethereum community that we want to build here. We want to align with everybody long term. And we're going to put this asset on our balance sheet because we believe in ETH long term.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[38:27] Yeah, I mean, that is interesting. And that is why it does matter a lot who the actual participants are in the PONS-Robinhood wealth effect. Because depending on the participants, if they get wealthy on Robinhood, Shane, it will dictate where they actually deploy that wealth, right? And if it's pump fund, it's going to probably be in the sole token, the Solana ecosystem. If it's EVM and it's Ethereum people, it might fall back on an asset like ETH. Right.
Michael Nadeau:
[38:58] It seems so obvious to me that if Robinhood came out and said, we're going to do this, this is why we're doing it. We think it's strategic for our business. We think the asset's strategic and we want to signal long-term, they're going to get a massive free marketing campaign. Yes, they're already getting a lot of attention for what they're building, but they're going to get that. And then if ETH runs behind that, what you just mentioned is very interesting because you just created a wealth effect of all these Ethereum crypto natives that hold ETH in their wallets, that that is going to go into Robinhood products. It's going to go into Robinhood chain and activity on there. So something to think about. I have no inside information on whether they're considering doing something like this, but you could imagine if they do it, Then the next, you know, institution that comes on to ETH is probably going to do the same thing, right? And you can see that that could get interesting. So I think ETH is in a good spot. It's very healthy for crypto as a whole. And I'm very happy to see it.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:53] You like POMP. You like PONS right now.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[39:56] You've liked them for a while. Let's quickly shift to macro before we close this episode out. So you said this earlier in today's conversation, the market is currently pricing a 60% chance of a rate hike September 16th. That's just next week, Mike. And we just had a stronger than expected jobs report. So this really blew the jobs out of the market. So I guess analysts were expecting 53,000 jobs added. We got 162 jobs added. We have PPI numbers coming out Thursday. Oil is up quietly in the background, $94 per barrel ahead of the writing. So some interesting things going into macro. What do you think? Does that weigh on your mind this week?
Michael Nadeau:
[40:44] A little bit, a little bit. I mean, you know, well, I think the CPI print is going to tell us what's going to happen probably with whether we're going to see rate hikes next week. So you mentioned oil prices. I think it's even up to $96 an hour. So it looks like oil may want to go back up to $100. Nobody's talking about this. And I wonder if that means, you know, we potentially have some volatility coming.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[41:08] Is that good for crypto? It's like, you know, this whole rally started in earnest on sort of the Treasury put debasement trade thing. If we get inflation numbers that are high and then we get Fed rate funds up in September, is that good for debasement trade?
Michael Nadeau:
[41:26] No, no, this is not good for debasement trade. This is probably yields going up. And, you know, I think what we're going to we may see, you know, how much ammo Besson is willing to put into play here, because if if if let's say oil keeps going up to 100, we get the CPI print Thursday or PPI Thursday, CPI Friday. Those numbers come in higher than expected. I don't know if they are going to come in higher than expected, because I think we're still in this sort of window where oil prices were down mostly in August. Maybe it was creeping up. But if we do get a higher than expected CPI print, PPI print, then it may force, and oil is rising, it may force the Fed to hike rates or credibility. Yields go up. We may get that little sort of scare volatility. And that will be when like the 69.9K, the 200-day moving average. Potentially comes into play if this plays out. The reason I'm not as concerned about it as I normally would be was just because of the messaging coming from the treasury. And even yesterday, I think they just hinted at potentially even larger buybacks.
Michael Nadeau:
[42:39] So I think the market is just kind of like, yes, this is happening, but you basically have the treasury secretary saying that they're going to cap yields. So if they're going to cap yields, then yeah, then it sort of cancels it out. You're not really dealing with a free market in some ways. And you have to respond to that, I think.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[42:59] So the ban for you still key levels at the end is 69.9K. That's the 200 day moving average and a channel between that and 80.4K, which is the 50 week moving average. And ideally confirmation of the bull, which you don't quite have for Bitcoin, would be Bitcoin closing a few weeks over 80.4K. That would be the 50-week moving average and also not breaking out of this channel. So ideally not going below the 69.9K. And recall, guys, we are in September. Historically, September has been really bad for crypto, has been really bad for Bitcoin. The first half of it hasn't seemed so bad to me, Mike. It's been pretty good. We'll see what the second half brings. Yeah.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[43:49] Let's talk about maybe how you are playing the portfolio. So it was a quiet week this week. You're just kind of letting everything ride. I think TDR Pro members, by the way, I've looked at the stats, TDR Pro members, all time highs. Congrats on that. I've seen tons of testimonials riding in and I'm talking about the product, how great, how fantastic it's been. What are your plans for the portfolio? You hinted a little bit about worrying a little bit about some of the risk. I mean, this is upside risk of some of the positions appreciating a lot relative to your other positions. How do you intend to play this moving forward?
Michael Nadeau:
[44:27] Yeah, I think that's always the name of the game is just like managing the risk in both directions. And, you know, it's kind of interesting to be at a point where the early bull cycle hasn't been confirmed, in my opinion. So you actually do have some risk to the downside. I also think there's significant risk to the upside of Bitcoin actually, you know, establishes that 50 week as support. I think, you know, we could see a situation where the on chain area starts to move closer to like a frenzy situation if we if we see that move from Bitcoin. So there's risk in both directions we have some positions that have gone up and you know normally if i have a position go up as fast as the pawns did you know you'd probably be looking at scaling out of that right if we were kind of moving through a cycle here and we were kind of in what i thought was a later stage of the cycle i would be looking to to scale out of that and i've had rules in the past about you know something goes up 5x you just automatically you know start to sell a little bit of that. I've kind of come off of that a little bit. I just think it's really hard to have like kind of firm rules when you're managing crypto assets because... Things move so fast, things change. I think it'd be very easy to look at our pawns position and be like, oh, that's up over 10x. You got to get out of that, you just sell it.
Michael Nadeau:
[45:48] I'm not of that mind right now because I think there's a chance that it's significantly undervalued at a $500 million market cap based on the way it's printing money, the way that the token economics
Michael Nadeau:
[46:02] Is structured, the fact that it was like this fair launch And you don't have tons of VC capital in there that could potentially make it harder for that to sort of really reprice. And like what we haven't seen with these types of assets as well is like this idea of these buybacks and the reflexivity during bull market conditions when liquidity is more ample. I am interested in just seeing how this plays out because I think it's going to pull momentum traders into these assets as well when they know there's a buyback behind something and you're kind of in a
Michael Nadeau:
[46:38] Liquidity positive environment where people are coming into crypto. I could see momentum traders coming into these types of assets as well and pushing them even higher than people think. So, you know, we don't know, right? This is so early. There's no way to really underwrite something like PONS. But for me, I think the risk is almost on the upside. Even though I'm holding a position that's up multiples, I think there's still risks, you know, significant risks to the upside on something like this. So we're happy to kind of just sit in spa. We're going to continue to monitor these positions. We've had some other positions doing well. Our non-BTC part of the portfolio is up almost 2x, which is amazing. Wow. You know, at this stage of the cycle. So getting a lot of great feedback from pro members. I think people are happy. I also think we're super early here. So I know people, if you're coming into crypto right now, maybe you missed some of this like easy money possibly, but we're so, you know, when you zoom out on this chart in a few years, I think, you know, the difference from buying, you know, 80K Bitcoin or 75 Bitcoin versus like the lows is going to look like you won't even be able to tell the difference almost. So very early, but excited to see kind of what the signals the market's giving us at this stage.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[47:55] Well, that's it. None of this, of course, is financial advice. This is an investor journal. And if you are new here, because I think the TDR podcast is hitting all time highs on the channel. So we probably have a lot of new folks listening. Let me just explain to you guys how to lock in. So we do these episodes every Wednesday. You can subscribe to it on Spotify, iTunes, podcast, wherever you get those feeds, or also YouTube. We would encourage you to subscribe cross-channel as well so you don't miss out on that. If you are benefiting from these episodes, please leave a comment for us. Please leave a review. Let us know. That's how we kind of launch up the charts and get more exposure. And so that you can do. That is for free. If you want to subscribe to Mike's portfolio and the full Investor Journal, get those alerts so you know about Pons ahead of time and what he's doing, whether he's entering or exiting, You can sign up for TDR Pro. That's what we've been talking about. And you can do that. I think there's a 30-day free trial. So you have nothing to lose at all by just doing that locking in for what might be, what looks to be the early bull markets. Mike, a 70% probability that this is the early bull. So now is the time to lock in.
Michael Nadeau:
[49:08] I'm with consensus, though.
Ryan Sean Adams:
[49:10] I'm with consensus. I'm with consensus. Maybe I seeded some doubt in today's episode. So anyway, we are along the journey, just like you. Until next time, stay curious.