#1307 Alex Kruger | Bitcoin ETF Is A Trojan Horse!

Alex Kruger is a trader from Argentina, and he continues to figure out what is going on in the macro economic world, along with cryptocurrencies. In this conversation, we talk about why he is incredibly bullish on risk assets, relationship between Milei, Bukele, Trump, Zelenskyy, United States national debt, bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, how he evaluates assets, and portfolio construction. ======================= This episode is brought to you by Frec — Just as easy as investing in an ETF, Frec Direct Indexing can help you earn more by unlocking tax savings, no matter the market. Done for you, automatically. Check them out at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://frec.com/⁠⁠ ======================= Get Better Crypto Data: Do you want faster, easier crypto data? Sign up for Velo Data, a new product that we have been working on to solve this problem: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠velowaitlist.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Alex Kruger, a trader who's from Argentina, and he continues to figure out what's going on in the macroeconomic world along with cryptocurrencies. In this conversation, we talk about why he is incredibly bullish on risk assets from here,

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  why he thinks that Malay, Bukele, Trump, Zelensky, and more are all related, how he's thinking about the United States debt, what's going on in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency world, how he evaluates assets, thinks about portfolio construction, and where he is putting his money now. I always enjoy talking to Alex, and this conversation was no different. I think you will learn a lot from it. So once you get done listening, make sure you share it with your friends. Tell them to listen. Tell them to subscribe. Here is my conversation with Alex Kruger.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:39Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Freck.com. Go check them out today. Before we get into this episode, I also want to tell you about a brand new product called Velo. Velo is faster, easier crypto data. Everyone in the industry is always looking for, what's the price? What's going on on the exchanges? Where are assets flowing or not flowing? How is things like open interest and derivatives actually playing out in the market? Well, that's where Velo comes in. It's faster and easier crypto data. You can go to velowaitlist.com today. Myself and a couple of friends, we invested in the business. We're advising the founder and we think it's pretty cool. This one is something that keeps me informed on a daily basis. So you should check them out at velowaitlist.com. That's V E L O waitlist.com.

• 3:11Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang, I've got Alex here. I thought a great place to start this conversation is a recent tweet that you put out. And I thought it just was a perfect epitome of the current situation. You said, let me tell you why I remain very bullish on risk assets. Inflation is coming down, interest rates as well. The US economy remains strong. Soft landing is becoming a reality. Trump will win. Peace talks are in the air. China just turned dovish after two plus years. Quantitative tightening will end in 2024. Global liquidity is increasing and AI driven growth is in the process of accelerating to a point that human mind can't even comprehend. Does everything just go up from now? Like, is that where we're headed? Just risk assets are all going to go up?

• 3:50Speaker 02

  I do think so. I do think at the same time that on the short term, the market is a little bit too hot. Kind of like the example, the analogy would be, uh, this looks like June last year. We're about to, I think, pump up a little bit more and then correct. But, but like it's, I think it's important as an investor and a trader trying to differentiate between short-term trends and the bigger picture and the bigger picture and the larger trend. It is based on what you just paraphrased. It's, it's up and.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Strongly up. Short term, definitely, right now, the market is a little bit hot. The way to think about this is this is mainly driven on the risk asset side by the Fed pivot from December. So we are literally seven weeks into into into that expansion and it's been pretty significant. So it's mostly in the price, the pivot and the soft landing narrative is becoming consensus. It's not yet consensus. There is a lot of people and they make me bullish every time I read them that that firmly believe that the economy must undergo a severe recession.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Based on basically a very limited sample size from a past crisis. And one more thing to add there, or at least one more thing is when we're looking, I think when we're looking at trying to anticipate what the future is going to be based on what the past has done and the sample size is so small and stretches through such a long period of time, like the sample starts with 1929, right? It is not correct to put the same weight in. This is very subjective, but I firmly believe it's not correct to put the same weight to events that happened in 29 than in 59, than 81, than 87, 2020 and right now, because

• 5:45Speaker 02

  it's a different world, it's a different market, the Fed is an entirely different animal with so many tools at their disposal before they just basically manage the Fed fund rates or the discount rate that now they have the ability to do so much more. Something else on that, a couple more things. Trump. I think Trump will win. I'm not Republican, I'm not a Democrat, I'm not even American. If I would, if I would vote, in the past, I would have voted Democrat since in the last few years, I have gone to the right. I would vote Trump nowadays, even though I'm not a fan of him.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  But leaving aside preferences and views, I strongly believe that Trump will win. It's gonna be a home run for for him. His campaign is extremely well organized this time, unlike prior times. And he has a very weakened adversary on Biden. And even though the US economy is actually stronger and much stronger than than than many people think.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  There is something else which is uh perception is not in line with reality because of how strong inflation has been and was between 2020 and 2023, not any longer. They are, most people are unhappy there and also there is something else, this inflation has also driven a big wedge into society and society, US, American society and actually worldwide societies becoming more and more polarized between the haves and the have-nots. What that means is not that the have-nots vote for Trump, what that means is they vote against the status quo because they are unhappy.

• 7:36Speaker 02

  So I think Trump will win and historically actually Democrats are slightly better for stock markets than Republicans. But there is something else there which is Trump is obsessed with winning and obsessed with the stock market. So I, based on that, I think Trump is good for the market and some, something else, sorry, I keep on saying something else. The, on, something else that Trump would likely bring up is a threatened Federal Reserve. He's going to bring back, let's remember these ghosts that we experienced on his presidency.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  I think it is likely that he will go after the Fed again and threaten their independence. What that translates into, I believe, I may be wrong, but I believe that it basically pushes interest rates, short-term rates down and long-term rates up. Basically, a more dovish Fed when they shouldn't be as dovish as Trump will want them to be is going to basically, literally, bring short-term rates down and inflation fears in a backdrop of basically exorbitant debt issuance in the US should, I'm not, I'm not certain actually if, if long rates are going to go down, but not as much as short-term rates or actually

• 9:01Speaker 02

  up. I lean towards the former, but it could very well be that they end up going up. The point is for yield curve steepening and that is.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  That is, I dare say is largely good for risk assets in aggregate, not great, but is very negative for the long end of the curve and also for mortgages. So I'm not painting a disaster scenario, it's just a driver that makes things not as rosy as they would otherwise would be. Just one last comment on that, the US debt right now is growing at about 6% per annum. It's absolutely unsustainable, you know, everybody knows.

• 9:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, so we just saw the Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell say that on 60 Minutes, right, where normally I said, you know, they don't, somebody in his position wouldn't kind of fire at others in leadership positions. He's kind of an independent, he normally would just say, hey, you know, I don't have that much to say about this. But to say it is unsustainable over the long run, seems like it was almost he was issuing a warning, he was telling the American people, hey, you should be paying attention to this. And when you see the national debt now over 34 trillion, the interest payment alone is now crossed over a trillion dollars a year. How do we reverse this, or how do we get out of this situation, in your opinion?

• 10:27Speaker 02

  I think it comes, it's about economy, it requires very long-term change in the economy, in economic behavior by market participants. It takes, it's going to take a very long time, but there is a way out, I think there's only one way out, which is basically growing and growing a lot. So in a way, we could think and try to make an analogy of what happened in the late 90s with the Bill Clinton administration, the US actually ran for a brief period of time fiscal super rabbit. It is feasible, but we've gone, the US economy and the world economy has gone so far out

• 11:11Speaker 02

  that it's going to take a long time and it's basically about growth. And I think that's a reality, I think is going to happen because it's, tying it back to AI, the market commentators tend to think, and especially traders, that it's overrated, that AI is not going to solve all our problems. And yeah, they're right, but. AI is, it's in my view, and I, I, I, I'd be surprised if I'm, if I'm proven wrong in 10 years, is the most significant change in history. And it's going to happen at the fastest pace of any change in history.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  The change is going to be so dramatic that we cannot even understand how things are going to change, because it's not going to be us anymore thinking about this. It's AI, right? So it's, it's, uh, that's another, another thing that ties into this thinking of we should not be extrapolating the past as we have. We need to be open to this time, things may be different. And in fact, this time, things have already been different. When it comes to the yield curve inversion that basically got absolutely everybody bunkers, almost everybody bunkers and calling for a very hard recession.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Um, uh, since, uh, literally started in 22 and went all through 23. Uh, and it didn't happen.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  This time is different.

• 12:43Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the places where there is radical change underway, or an attempt at radical change, is Argentina. This is a country that you understand well. Uh, you spent a lot of time thinking about, uh, I believe. Um, and Malay has come in there and he was elected with a very clear, I'm going to go implement radical change. Uh, for what I can tell as an outsider, it appears that he has already taken some steps, some measures that he's trying to implement and, and kind of fulfill the campaign promises. So it wasn't, appears to be just talk, but he's actually trying to act on it. What is your analysis of him, his, you know, kind of campaign promises and whether it can be successful? Like, can he turn that country around?

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Um, well, I'm born in Argentina. Uh, I grew up there. Um, I'm Argentine. Um, I'm what you would define, what people may define as Argentine diaspora. Uh, Argentina has had a long history of crisis after crisis. Um, from the generation that left, uh, uh, in the early 2000s, uh, when, uh, basically the, uh, the socialism took, took over the country again after the, the Argentine peso imploded. And, uh, we abolished the convertibility law that had peso back to the daughter one to one. Uh, I was in fact actually working at the Ministry of Economics at the time.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Um, so, uh, that, that said, I am, uh, I, I seen Milley. It's crazy. It's, it's the first politician in my entire life that I feel connected to. Uh, he speaks to me. Uh, it's, uh, I, I do believe that governments are a bloated parasite, just sucking our blood. And, uh, that's what he's, that's exactly what he's trying to achieve. It's like going after the bloat, going after all the parasites and getting rid of them. And, uh, how successful can he be? It's difficult because he has very little support in Congress.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  He has under eight, under 10% of congressmen are his. Uh, with his alliance, he's, uh, he's, uh, the congressman he has are in the low teens. It's nothing. So the way I see it is he has to survive. He needs to survive the first two years and go into the midterms that are gonna happen in two years. And then basically change the shape of Congress to actually be able to deliver what he wants to do. Um, initially I was placing odds of, uh, him to succeed around 40%. I think it's higher now, higher than that. That being said, it went from 0% to 40, 60%. Argentina was,

• 15:33Speaker 02

  let's put it this way, if, the, the Argentine GDP has grown about 30% GDP per capita in the last, uh, uh, in the last 20 years. Uh, the US GDP, I actually forgot the number, but it's considerably higher. Uh, China has done a 10x, India I think has done an 8x, Russia has done something like a 5x. I'm, I'm pulling these numbers off the top of my head. It'd be easy to, to check them on Google, but we get the trend. Uh, every other, other single country in Latin America is, has their GDP per capita by at least up 2x. And Argentina has stagnated and is the 134th or 140th poorest country in the world

• 16:13Speaker 02

  when it comes to that. And if you go there, you're gonna find a city that is, the capital Buenos Aires is beautiful, is vibrant, people are very intelligent, very educated, incredible country, huge natural resources everywhere. How is it possible that things are not working? And the answer is, it's socialism. It's a country that we're socialists have sucked them dry. But there is, it's, some people get offended with the word socialism, and we have to differentiate, there is good kinds of socialism, responsible one, well managed, well implemented, without theft. And then you have the Argentine socialism and the socialism

• 16:52Speaker 02

  that we see in Latin America, which is basically run by thieves. So when you go so deep down the shit hole, an economy enters what we call a poverty trap. And the only, it's like a perennial negative feedback loop from which there is no escape, you're stuck there. And the only way out is through what I call shock therapy, an external shock, something from the outside needs to happen. That's Millet. It's an outsider, and he's there to break things up and try change. So that's how I see it. I'm extremely happy about it. And by the way, let me allow one more thing, Pom, there. It's, things are really bad in

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Argentina right now. It's inflation right now is running at almost 1% per month after Millet. It's, it's, there is no money. It's, things may even get violent on the streets because of this. But unfortunately, it's, it's, there's no money. It's sacrifices need to be made. I mean, and when you talk about sacrifices, Millet leads by example. He flies, commercial, even coach inside Argentina. Who does that? It's absolutely mind blowing. Like, he has a presidential plane, a huge Boeing, that plane is sitting in a hangar, trying to sell it.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  It's that's what leading by example is. I'm fascinated by it. Yeah.

• 18:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So we see Malay and Argentina doing this. Bukele in El Salvador seems to be doing a number of similar types of things, at least the outside, you know, external shock. He may not be as inflammatory in his rhetoric or, you know, be able to articulate it in the same way. But one, okay, people pay attention. Two, we only need one more. And then it's kind of a trend. Is that really kind of how you see this playing out is that we should expect more of these external shocks? That the various countries, their population are going to elect because they're fed up or they feel like there is no hope inside of the existing system?

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do. I do. Now, now, this doesn't necessarily mean a move to the right. I think it's more about political polarization is whoever is whoever is on the left goes to the right, whoever is on the right goes to the left. We saw that actually in Chile about it started in 2020. We had Chile even even they've been changing the constitution to basically make it more fair to distribute profits to the masses. So I'm not a Chile expert. Unfortunately, my Chilean Chilean audience forgive my ignorance. But I know that's that's been happening. So the point there is that it's not just about a move to the right. Is we're going to see a move to the right in the US. We're going to see a move to the right in Europe this year, I think.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  We just saw it in Argentina. We saw it in Ecuador. In some other countries, we see exactly the opposite. I think it's about that and about whoever takes over has to be an outsider. We saw in Ukraine with Zelensky. Zelensky was a comedian, right? A TV star.

• 20:00Anthony Pompliano?

  That makes Trump, Zelensky, you can go to Malay, you can go to Bukele. I mean, you can go around the country or around the world. There's a lot of these. How do you think that assets like Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies play into this? In one hand, the promise of these technologies and assets was it would be outside of the system. That if you bought this, it was a way to exit to off ramp and, you know, kind of almost. An external shock yourself for your own portfolio or your own bank account. But at the same time that they're becoming popular, they seem to be getting pulled back into the system. We see the Bitcoin ETF, we see, you know, now Wall Street hedge funds, et cetera, starting to trade in these assets.

• 20:41Anthony Pompliano?

  How are you looking at this asset class? And you're spending a ton of time here right now, given, you know, the economic overlay, the political overlay. What's exciting or where are you really focused?

• 20:51Speaker 02

  I think Bitcoin, the Bitcoin ETF, started being massively bullish for things. I'm sure you've been discussing extensively. So everybody is on the same, we're all on the same page here. I think the Bitcoin ETF is a Trojan horse. Yeah, it's basically turning.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  We're turning Bitcoin into a tradFi asset, something that basically plays by the rules of the system.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  But by doing so, it's being used to onboard the system. That's it's the perfect Trojan horse and it's going to end up in the form one case of millions of people that otherwise would not have this exposure. And just having that Bitcoin there is going to make them think about it and they're going to eventually, many of them are going to align the fact that they hold Bitcoin with the fact that they're deeply unhappy about how shit is going down. And they're going to connect that Bitcoin is actually an alternative. It's an alternative to the system. That's what it is. So that's, that's how it ties up.

• 21:57Anthony Pompliano?

  What about other assets, stable coins or other cryptocurrencies? Do they follow that same trajectory of Bitcoin is the Trojan horse? And then here come all these other assets right behind it, or are they something separate and different?

• 22:10Speaker 02

  I think it's separate and different. It's a matter of educating people. All the other assets are things we crypto natives delve in. They're very hard to understand, take a long time to understand, they're complicated, it's a difficult execution, everything is difficult around them. So the way, the way I see it is basically money flows into Bitcoin and then it trickles down into all other crypto assets, but at the end, conceptually, most of the good ones, not all, they're the same. You know, then we have stable coins, stable coins, they, what stable coins do, they reduce inefficiencies, right? But at the end, they are, or they're soon good, there's some somewhat regulated assets,

• 22:53Speaker 02

  they will eventually fully regulate it. Regulators have full control over, basically, they can go to Tether and Circle and make them blacklist addresses. So stable coins do not fall outside the system like Bitcoin does. There is, yeah, it's, the way I think of crypto here is, it's on one hand, we have the store value on Bitcoin, on the other hand, we have payments, on the other hand, we have the ability of blockchain to deliver fast settlement and generate liquidity for assets in general. When people claims that there is no, there is no intrinsic value there, and they get

• 23:34Speaker 02

  so upset, and you can just, we can point at any of these things, or just say, listen, just the fact that it's trading 24/7 and offers liquidity 24/7, that's value. You cannot get that anywhere else. And then we have, we go into meme coins, and yeah, that's just a speculation, but people likes to gamble. So meme coins are casinos, right? And so it's not just garbage, much of it is garbage, but there is, there is value under the trash.

• 24:06Anthony Pompliano?

  When you're, when you're evaluating these things, how much of it is fundamental analysis, how much of it is more technical analysis? How would you describe your kind of evaluation process and what you're using to get to sift through, you know, garbage and trash versus the things that may have some sort of value?

• 24:23Speaker 02

  It's mostly, for me at least, it's mostly talking to people to try to assess where the market is going, where the market may be going, and if projects have good teams, not teams, what people I know, how people I know and respect greatly in the space, they think of, not the project itself, but is the team, does the team have integrity or not? So not really asking and wondering where you think the price of this thing is going to go, but more of who is behind?

• 24:58Speaker 02

  So yeah, technicals matter. I wouldn't want to go against the trend for too long. When that happens, I do what is called basically puking. I just puke the whole position and get out. But yeah, it's a combination of technicals, fundamentals, top-down macro view, and I try to think what the market likes. Things like, for example, BitTensor, Tau, Ondo, Gamify. There's quite a few games that are really good. There is some really good alt-layer ones and layer-twos in the market. Some already out there, like Core, CoreDAO. There, nobody talks about it, but it's there. There is, and there's new ones coming up.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  We have Monad, we have Eclipse, Aztec in Q1 25.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Taiki, there's a lot of innovation happening in this space. So it's, yeah, sorry, I could not provide a very, very explicit, mathematically precise answer, but it's like a holistic process.

• 26:02Anthony Pompliano?

  No, but I think it's important, right? It's not one thing to point at. Like, part of finding the value is you have to do the work. If you talk to a value investor in the public markets and looking at equities, many of the best investors, you ask them, well, how did you find that? And they say, well, I sat and I read, you know, the 10K, or I read the S1s. I read all the Qs and the Ks, and like, I just went through all this stuff, and I basically figured out exactly what I thought the commodity was worth, and then it traded below that. And I had a prepared mind, and I was able to go and buy it at the right timing. You may not be reading a, you know, a public letter or a public filing from a crypto project, but you're doing a lot of the similar work. You're trying to triangulate what is the value of this, and also what is it likely to do in the future? And then you're making investment decisions where you're risking capital.

• 26:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So I actually think there's a lot of similarities, more so than maybe people realize.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I agree. We've, um, yeah, just need to roll out the sleeves and get to work. Yeah.

• 27:00Anthony Pompliano?

  When you say something like, uh, take, I think you mentioned CoreDAO. I know nothing about that, but, uh, you say it's there and people aren't talking about it. How important is the social conversation and the memes and the, uh, you know, what I'll consider kind of the degen, uh, degen, um, coalescing around an asset? In this market, we obviously saw GameStop and other things in, you know, public markets, uh, trade very differently because there was this surge of interest from, uh, non-professional capital allocators. Is that important here? Or can you actually look at and say, hey, we think that this is a really interesting asset. We're going to buy it. And even if those people never show up and the memes and the culture doesn't come, we still think we can make money on an asset.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  I think is extremely important. Um, it's an attention-driven, uh, uh, economy. Fundamental value of most of these things is very hard to quantify with any kind of precision. So it's very subjective. And, uh, most things out there, they never get to the public eye. So it's really, it's about basically the ideal world is having a team and a product that are very, very, very good. And then bring the spotlight on to them. But without the spotlight, uh, this, this project can have the most amazing tech.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  But if they don't know how to engage with, uh, the, the marketplace, um, the, the, the, the marketplace of basically who has, people who have money, basically. Uh, to, to drive prices and drive attention. Uh, great examples of this is, let me pick, uh, a, a recent example. So for example, CoreDAO. CoreDAO is, it's a, a pretty significant, uh, layer one. It's a Bitcoin ETH hybrid. So proof of work, proof of stake. They have insane engagement numbers, but it's mostly Asians and people from the emerging markets. Real people from emerging markets. There is very little, uh, attention from the West on them.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Another one, and that can change, right? A capable team can change that. Another example that is quite fascinating is what's happening with Trump. Let's pick, I don't, I try not to shield. In fact, I don't have a position on Trump, but the Trump meme coin. It's just a meme coin, has very little liquidity. It's there. And there comes a very significant market, market participant in the market and says, "I believe in this thing. I'm putting my capital behind it for A, B, and C reasons." And suddenly goes from being an absolute unknown coin to everybody and every chatroom talking about it. And suddenly it's the shit in a good way.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  So yeah, it matters a lot how teams manage public exposure.

• 29:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think about portfolio construction in a world where assets can be so asymmetric, but also there can be kind of the classic rug pulls and things can go down very quickly as well? Is it a heavily concentrated portfolio? Is it something where there's more diversification? You're trying to just, you know, more like a venture capital portfolio, trying to get power laws to take over, even though you know some will be losers? How do you do it?

• 30:11Speaker 02

  For me, it varies greatly and what I do for myself is not what I would recommend for other people, honestly, because I'm a very extreme risk taker. So I wouldn't say do what I do. I think everybody should have a very significant exposure to crypto. I would say somewhere between 5 to 10%. None of that 2% thing, that's, that's nothing. Have some balls.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  But when it comes to that is it should be mostly, for most people, I think it should be mostly Bitcoin, ETH and Sol and a few alternative projects out there once, like things that are very liquid. Because the thing is with the most liquid things, as you well know, they can, something bad can happen overnight and the thing drops 90% and never recovers. They can get hacked or somebody in the team may have access to the private keys. There is an internal hack and he takes over the treasury and he dumps the coin and it just never recovers.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  When it comes to me, it's, I'm right now, 70% of my book is BTC ETH and so quite evenly distributed. The remainder is all over the place, literally all over the place. Gamify, trying to get exposure on the AI side, Ondo on the RWA side.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  A lot of L1s and L2s, the rest is all over the place. It's quite a lot of basically spread and pray.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then some narrative trading, which is kind of like conceptually different. It's like you have cash and then you put a trade for X number of days or weeks. Try to get that 10 to 40% and out.

• 32:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk Ethereum, Solana, say Monad. Maybe those are like four assets that generally are in a similar area. I think that there is a very hardened group of Ethereum holders or Ether holders. They remind me a lot of Bitcoin maximalists, just they're holding Ether instead of Bitcoin. Some people would critique them and say, hey, you're going to miss other things because you're part of the Ether religion. Then we have Solana, which seems to have become, you know, the prettiest girl at the dance. And then it crashed, I thought it was over, but it's come back and showed some resilience.

• 32:46Anthony Pompliano?

  And now there are these new projects that want to do these, you know, parallelizations and kind of go and say, hey, can we take these ideas and improve them? How do you evaluate? Okay, we have four assets, they're all generally in a similar bucket. Should I buy one and try to pick the winner? Should I just buy all four and say, hey, it's so asymmetric that like just get exposure to all four and whoever goes up the most, great? How do you think about, you know, actually putting a position on in an area like that?

• 33:13Speaker 02

  I think you have to have a lot of conviction to just pick one.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  I breathe crypto and well, macro as well, but it's like I'm almost 24/7 on this. And I still don't have the conviction to go all in to one and just ignore the other ones. So it requires a very special mindset to just pick one and also very, very extensive knowledge. There are people who do it very successfully, like for example, there is a famous, a well-known influencer on Twitter. That's gone all in on Tau, BitTensor and hats off. It's remarkable. But that's difficult. On what you said about ETH, I think ETH is fantastic.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  I agree with you what you say about ETH MAXes. They're a little bit more rational ETH MAXes than BTC MAXes. But they're still, they're MAXes. Sorry, but I don't mean to, I never want to offend people, but maximalism. It implies, Maro9 said me, implies inflexibility. And that's never good. It's good to be able to change our minds.

• 34:29Speaker 02

  On ETH, right now ETH is doing very well today because Eigenlayer reopened their. Lifted their cap, so reopened their restaking program. I forgot about the exact number, but it was a very significant number. So ETH is now undergoing a move of like, let's buy ETH to put into Eigenlayer for restaking. And then basically more or less, I gather in four months, where are restakes? So you get your ETH, you stake on say Lido or one of those. And then you restake that token, the liquid token into Eigenlayer.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  And in say end of H1, you get points from Eigenlayer that eventually they are transformed into tokens. And the expectation is that that's going to yield about 50 to 150% based on Eigenlayer valuation.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  That's a short-term move, I think. Then we have the ETF narrative that may or may not come true in May. The market is expecting right now probability of sixty or maybe even seventy percent right now that it gets approved in May. I think it's too rich. I think for that to happen, we need Gensler out. And that happens once Trump wins. But I may be wrong. Solana offers fantastic innovation and product market fit today just

• 35:57Speaker 02

  went down today, you know, I don't know how many hours, four or five, so ETH Maxes are having a good day. I think Solana is fantastic and it's a proven winner. With the other ones, let's put it this way, there is three chains that have a real community and there's a community. It's not hot money going in and out. Bitcoin, ETH, Solana. That's it. All the other ones are ghost chains for now. Say, you mentioned Say. I just used Say for the first time last week. It was a disaster. My transactions wouldn't go through. There was very little volume, so it was not a matter of, hey, it's a launch, things are going crazy, my transaction doesn't go through. No, just didn't go through.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  I think ETH has very low TBL, Aptos has very low TBL, there is very little money on these chains that is hot money. You mentioned Monet. Monet is Monet is a new chain and is extremely, they've been doing an extremely good job on the marketing side, on basically capturing the mind share of crypto setters, traders and investors. So I think not only that Monet is going to be doing extremely well, but also it has a chance to achieve what other chains like Say and Sui and Aptos have failed in doing, which is building a new community.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  That's very important. Aptos and Sui, unfortunately for them, they launched in the midst of like suicidal tendencies in crypto, like the depression, extreme depression, it's over, so they failed to, they just got unlucky. They failed at building that. I don't know, what do you think of that actually? I'm curious about your thoughts there. How do you see that?

• 37:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that

• 37:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Maximalism is not true on a macro basis. It can be true in a silo. So for example, I think that Bitcoin is the winner for the global store of value. Right? Like you can become a money maximalist. I always use the example, if you grew up in the United States, you're a dollar maximalist. You get paid a dollar, you save a dollar, you buy a dollar, you pay your taxes dollars, et cetera. But if you grew up in Mexico, you're a peso maximalist, right? Like, you know, it's kind of that, that is the thing. And so this economy for sure Bitcoin is that store of value. It wins and so being a monetary maximalist makes a lot of sense.

• 38:26Anthony Pompliano?

  But confusing the rest of these assets as competition to Bitcoin, I think is wrong. They're just, you know, technology evaluation, right? Same that you would do with public companies. You would never be like, you know, I'm an iOS maximalist. I don't think Android's valuable. I may prefer iOS, but I don't, it's not, I can't say Android's not valuable. And so same thing here. And I tend to think that portfolio construction is really important. But if I was to boil down from like the, the essence of, you know, how I view investing today. Macro matters and global liquidity. Crypto is really just a trade on global liquidity. Then you look inside of crypto and it's, if you are investing in the crypto sector, you probably are fishing in the right pond. If you're not, or you have a very small allocation, you're probably just going to miss out performance because you're just in the wrong pond.

• 39:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And then within crypto, there's really a bifurcation. There's kind of the blue chips, those blue chips will continue to do well. But as they get larger, their returns will go down. So, you know, people who thought that the Bitcoin ETF was going to get approved and then we're going to hit all time highs, you know? I said it beforehand, I went on television and talked about it. I said, look, you know, maybe, but also I, you know, would caution that that might not happen. And then the long tail is early stage venture, right? A bunch of them are going to be zeros. Some of them will win. The ones that win though, will likely, if you build a portfolio correctly, be power law drivers that end up paying for the losers. And so just got to ask yourself, you know, what type of investor are you? And frankly, I think a lot of people, they don't have the time,

• 39:53Anthony Pompliano?

  they don't have the interest or, or the energy that you or I would have to go and spend, you know, all day long thinking about this stuff, talking to a million people, trying to figure out, you know, all the, the latest trends. They're like, look, okay, I'm gonna take, you know, 5%, 2%, whatever the number is. I'm just gonna buy some Bitcoin, maybe I'll buy, you know, one of the other ones and let me know how it goes. I'll look back in five years. And for them, guess what they're doing in the rest of their portfolio? Passive indexing in the S and P, you know, queues, like they're just, that's the way they invest. It's their kind of passive indexers. And so I don't think that we should critique them or yell at them or any of that stuff. I think it's just, you know, different people do different strategies and that's okay. You just gotta be comfortable with whatever strategy you pursue.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Yep, 100%. And something you said, I fully agree on the fact that Bitcoin is is an entity by itself. Bitcoin has has some competition from me, but not from the other ones. Is, on the other hand, has competition from everybody. So that's, that's an issue. That's a, that's a problem for you.

• 40:58Anthony Pompliano?

  One other thing that I often think about, and I'll say this with, I don't know, 80, 90% confidence, is, you know, people would critique Bitcoin and be like, oh, it's the first one. It's the AOL, right? It can't survive. And obviously, if you go and you look, like, people have been trying to create a digital currency for a very long time. It's, you know, 40 years after the first attempt, frankly, right? Bitcoin kind of breaks through. So it's, it's not the first one. It's more similar to Facebook being like the 22nd social, social network. But I do think that Ethereum actually is the first attempt at kind of a smart contract blockchain. And so in a weird way, Bitcoin being, you know, the, the result of 40 years gives it strength.

• 41:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Ethereum being the pioneer in a new way to do this actually may be a weakness. Doesn't mean that it'll fail, doesn't mean that, you know, it won't be valuable in the future. Doesn't mean the price won't go up like, like, but structurally, actually Bitcoin is not the first thing. And Ethereum is the first thing in their category. And so thinking through the, the pros and cons of that is pretty interesting.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  That's a very good point. I have to say I hadn't thought about it this way, and I think you're right. Yeah, very good way to put it.

• 42:10Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, like, in some way, the critics say that Bitcoin is AOL, but, and again, I'm not saying that this is 100% true, but actually is Ethereum AOL and Solana already showing it's the second, you know, quote-unquote, social network, it's the second search engine, and the Googles, the Facebooks, the, you know, the 20, 30th, 40th iterations of these things that end up being the real winners, those are yet to come. Again, I don't know, I know just enough technology history to be dangerous, right? So I'm not even an expert on that. But I do think that these are the components outside of just evaluating the community, outside of the technology, outside of the fundamentals of the assets and the markets

• 42:51Anthony Pompliano?

  themselves. Trying to look at history and how has it evolved is pretty important here as well, because I don't think that human nature's changed, and I don't think that these technology waves have necessarily changed either.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  Something else on Bitcoin I'd like to add is the Taproot upgrade. I think it was on December 22 that opened up the way to Ordinals and this whole Ordinals layer to Bitcoin wave. And it literally solved the main problem Bitcoin had, which is very low fees and what do we do once mining rewards evaporate? Now there is finally, these guys with their JPEGs and eventually much more, they actually, it's not that I think, is they brought in a

• 43:42Speaker 02

  solution that works. And also, I perceive that that space has very little penetration in mind share. It's like nobody outside of crypto knows about it. And most people in crypto still, they don't, they're not interested in that space because they perceive they missed the beginning and it's too late. So that what that means is there is a lot of room for for for growth to show up on top of Bitcoin still. I think it's very early, I think.

• 44:16Anthony Pompliano?

  I completely agree. And in a weird way, I think there's been a narrative from some over the years that like the altcoins were R and D for Bitcoin. And that seems to be playing out in that specific use case. Doesn't mean that, you know, kind of altcoins and et cetera won't be valuable or find their own use cases. But definitely, I think that Bitcoins layer two activity in Taproot, et cetera, has learned a lot from what the altcoins have done, has seen a lot of use cases. And in some way is copying and trying to port back over some of that innovation, which is exactly what a great company or a great organization would do. Right? Is you you pioneer some yourself, you you solve some problems.

• 44:56Anthony Pompliano?

  But then when you see somebody else doing something that's working, you don't have too much pride to incorporate that as well. And so I think that that also shows Bitcoins ability to adapt to, you know, market conditions and incorporate other innovation as a positive as well.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the beauty of it. I mean, like it or hate it, a big number of these things are copy paste. You can't copy paste the the underlying chain, but all the applications are copy paste or not all that.

• 45:26Anthony Pompliano?

  A lot of them. Yeah, a lot of them for sure. Alex, I could talk to you forever. Where can we send people to find you on the Internet or find out more about what you're doing on a day to day basis?

• 45:37Speaker 02

  The easiest way is actually the only way. It's just Twitter, X, X dot com forward slash Kruger Macro. And I, yeah, I'm oftentimes there. I enjoy tweeting actively and engaging with people on direct messages. That's that's a way I have for learning about what's going on.

• 46:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I love following your Twitter account because you're one of the only people who is weird enough to have the dual interest of macro and crypto. And so one day you may be talking about global liquidity or, you know, a foreign central bank. And then the next day you may be talking about a random blockchain that, you know, everyone's talking about. And I tend to think that that is where outsized returns are going to come from in the next, you know, 10 years or so. So I think that you're on to it and people should definitely go give you a follow if they haven't already.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Thank you, I appreciate it very much.

• 46:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. All right. Well, I appreciate your time very much and we will do this again in the future.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  Awesome. Thank you.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Thank you.