When will altseason arrive? Jesse Eckel on cycle signals

Transcript

GM. Good morning. Welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show we're holding for 3 days now counts as long-term conviction. I'm your host, Jay Hamilton. It's Monday, June 16th. Today's episode was recorded on June 6th. Today, we are joined by friend of the show, legendary crypto investor, founder of Oath Venture, fellow podcaster. He once turned $3,000 into $600,000 over a six-month period in 2021. Today we're going to talk about Jesse's predictions that he made on this show six months ago back at the beginning of the year. We're going to review his predictions and see does he feel the same, anything he would update, anything he's gotten right or gotten wrong so

far. I'm talking about Bitcoin and Ethereum predictions. I'm talking about alt season predictions and his highest conviction trades for the rest of the cycle. Before we jump in, I hate to ask, but if you guys could do me a favor, wherever you're listening, podcast, YouTube, Twitter, hit us with a like, a subscribe. It really makes a difference for the show and helps us grow and make better content for you to help you as an investor. Today's episode is brought to you by Letin Get Cash without selling your Bitcoin. Without further ado, Jesse, welcome back to the Milk Road Show. Glad to be back. Pleasure to have you, my man. Always. Okay. Uh let's let's start with uh your your predictions that you've gotten right so

far or that have happened so far this year. So uh I'll I'll I'll read out I'm going to read out four of your predictions and then you can talk us through your thoughts on each of them. So um you first predicted that there would be a Bitcoin strategic reserve would happen in 2025. Check. Nailed it. Uh major dip early in the year. You predicted that. But actually, I can pause there for a second. Talk to us about that. What you the way it happened exactly. The I I predicted a major dip early in the year, but that but what happened was not what I was talking about. So the I was talking about like the typical January dip, not the there's no way I could have predicted the tariff madness dip. Okay, that's not like I'm not like a I don't have wizard level foresight here. I don't think anybody

predicted that. No. So I can't I can't claim that was we might have had I don't even remember if we had a January dip or not, but it definitely did. That didn't play out the way I was thinking. Okay. Uh you you next predicted that Ethereum would kick into high gear starting late December, early January. Yeah. And that didn't quite happen in the same way either. We have seen Ethereum start to show some outperformance like lately. Not in the same way. My my whole mental model for like the early start of 2025, I think was like probably most people's uh in the crypto space mental model, which is it was really based off the like typical four-year cycle. And everyone was just expecting, okay, it's gonna be like 2021, early start of the year. it's going to be really bullish. And everyone kind of front ran that after Trump won.

We ran up prices and then uh the liquid the underlying liquidity like fundamentals that were supposed to appear didn't appear because everyone was working off of an outdated mental model. And so uh yeah, that that did not come to fruition the same way that we that I thought it would. Okay. Uh I want to ask I want I want to ask how you've changed your mental model and what you got wrong or what you got right. But before I do, I'm just gonna The last prediction that you had early in the year was that there would be full-on alt season mania would kick off in February. Yes, correct. And we had a full-on alt season mania in December after the Trump one. Well, I wouldn't even call it allseason mania. Actually, I I've like kind of separated the definitions. I'll

call that I call that an oat season now. It's like an off-brand all season. It's like when you go to the grocery store and you get like that off-brand, you know, whatever. Oat season. Oat season. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's like uh it's it's comes from like this guy in like uh one of the comments trying to type in all season, but he wrote Ose. I was like, I like that. But um yeah, so I would call that an O season. There was no there wasn't the fundamentals that are required for an all season during that. It's just more like crypto capital rotating in pushing prices up, but obviously there's nothing to sustain it and then it comes back down. So we had that, but that again was also based off that same mental model of like just expecting a four-year cycle to appear because it's always appeared every time

before. Did we did what we just have would that be considered an oat season these past like six weeks when we've basically gotten I mean we're not at alltime highs or anything but alts are back essentially most of them at least the major alts are back compared to where they were down pretty bad a few months ago. I would just call it a like a recovery. I think we had the tariff madness prices like nuked and then but they got oversold. there was too much fear and then I think once the market kind of started pricing in like okay the the tariff stuff maybe is not going to be as bad as we think uh and you know uh maybe the entire economy is not going to collapse uh the way that we think it is uh then things kind of repericed up so I

wouldn't call that an ose season I would just say because there was no hype driving it was more just a kind of reversion back to where we were yeah yeah good point uh okay talk to us about before we jump into your predictions that uh haven't had enough time yet talk to us about the the mental model this this shift in what you saw at the beginning of the year versus the way you're looking at the markets and investing now. Yeah. Okay. So, being completely wrong about alt season, okay, maybe to be clear, I don't just like I'm not just like out here producing content or or whatever. Like my entire life savings is in crypto and uh if I'm wrong, I I pay for it in blood. Like it costs me heavily when I'm wrong. So, I

don't like I don't like to be wrong because my net worth goes down pretty substantially. And so, um, that was like a like a brutal like maybe wakeup call of like, hey, my your my simplistic four-year model framework is outdated and and like what what actually causes four year cycles in the first place. And so I I've since done like a really really deep dive into like what causes the four-year cycle, what causes that thing, what causes that thing, and just kind of working my way down to the roots of like where does where does all this stuff come from anyway? is it is not the Bitcoin having it's not like these all these other things everyone else says it is. It just is there's just no way uh there is no way that that's actually what causes it. And so yeah, I I'm doing

a lot more work on that end to to try to time things. Uh so I'm not off not caught off guard again. I think it's okay to make a mistake once, but if I make it twice, then I'm just being like dumb because I I I should only have to learn that lesson one time. Yeah. Fantastic. Okay. Can you give us the like I know that this is a not a simple short answer uh but can you give us the TLDDR on what you've learned and how your your model has changed and what matters most in in markets in your view?

Yeah. Okay. I'll I'll start with like the basics. So like most people were like four year cycle super simplistic. People like underneath that would be like actually it's driven by M2 and it's liquidity which is true. It is driven by liquidity in and M2 like at basically every four years since 2008. So you had 2008 financial crisis, right? And then you had the response to that financial crisis which was a whole lot of money printing and a policy where we brought rates down to zero. Uh fundamentally changed the the way that that uh we did things. And then then in 2013 we had this huge spike of year-over-year uh momentum in liquidity. So like liquidity spiked up and then it retracted uh in 2014. Then in 2017 we had well in in

2016 through 2017. This one's a little bit different. It's kind of hard to uh explain, but there was money printing in 2016 that was pretty pretty heavy that carried over or liquidity a burst of liquidity that carried over into 2017 uh that fed into that cycle. And then obviously in 2021 uh we know that we had also a huge year-over-year burst of uh this the global M2 supply. So all three of those periods um you can directly trace back to like this. It's not just M2. A lot of people show this chart of like M2 and they're like look it's going up. Uh but if you look at if you zoom out on the M2 chart like it's it literally always going up. Like they're always printing money that that it never stops. They will never stop. They will never stop. Yeah. So that one's not

really as useful as people make it out to be. They they just it's like really good content but it's not really useful because there's not a lot of signal. If it's always going up then how do you how do you know? But year-over-year m like growth percentage-wise, that's a really great signal because if you actually look at the year-over-year chart, um you can look at it and you can just point out like, oh, 2013, 2017, 2021, you can see all the the bull markets and there's just all huge bursts of liquidity. So, um that's true. Global liquidity does is like kind of the next step down, but you got to ask yourself like where does the global liquidity from come from? Like why every four years are we getting these huge bursts of liquidity? And and then you go under that and under that and basically when you work your way

down to the bottom it does come down to debt. It comes down to the fact that globally we run off of debt. Uh not just governments but like people like the entire world just it operates on debt and this debt has become so massive and so huge that like it this everything accelerates. Like think about like back in the 1970s ' 80s you know like they're they're really getting into this debt. It's not really bad. It's just like a a minor thing. It's it's a minor thing. So maybe under the weight of it, things break every 10, 15 years. Like cuz it's not very often, right? Um every so often you have like a hole in the boat and then you got to patch it up. How do you patch it up? You pump a bunch of liquidity into the system. Well, as you've kept patching this boat, it it's

it goes from like this, you know, nice secure clean boat to like this this thing's just falling apart. There's cracks all over the place. And so now we're springing leaks all the time. And so it's like every four years like, "Oh my gosh, some massive thing breaks." And then they gota how do they patch it up? They pump a bunch of it's uh liquidity in the system. It's kind of like that um if you ever gone mountain biking it's like that green ooze you like pump into your tire. That's basically what liquidity is uh to the financial system. So they're constantly having to pump this green ooze in there. Basically at the very foundation is like no nobody wants to be responsible for the whole system falling apart. Nobody wants this whole debt bubble to to explode on their watch. Anytime something breaks, anytime there's any sort of financial pain, they

have to respond or else it falls apart. And the only tool they have to respond is to in some way pump liquidity into this is to put the green news into the system. And so at the base core it comes down to like policy policy decisions and incentives of like what are these policy makers going to do. If you were to if you were to really zoom out like I I have this whole thing called the uh 11 rings of power which are basically just like 11 policy points of like if they flip on green think of things like money printing uh debt forgiveness things like that. when they flip on green, the more green you have, the more likely we're to hit allseason. And sometimes they can go beyond green. They can go to like mythical purple, which in uh 2021 is like it was like purple, white, green.

It was like this pristine like so much money printing happening. If you were to say those are the 11 rings of power. What's the one ring? What's the one ring of power? The one ring to rule them all. That would be basically economic pain. So any sort of huge amount of economic pain is what'll push policy makers to say okay uh we got to fix this pain by pumping liquidity into the system. So yeah that's that's kind of like the big over overview of what causes it is yes liquidity yes global M2 but what causes global M2 is this huge amount of debt that's got to be constantly maintained. And when we when a crack in the system happens or the system looks like it's about to break, policy makers rush to fix it with the only tool they know which is inflate away the value of the

dollar, pump a bunch of liquidity in the system and then uh but keep the voters happy in the short term because it's it's this is it's it's very I had a great episode earlier this week with Lawrence Leard who wrote a book all about this called the big print and I asked him I was like okay why isn't everybody seeing this though, right? Because like you see this, a lot of economists and guests that I have on the show see this. They all talk about this, right? But it doesn't seem like everyday people know about this other than inflation. Like I think that like every day people are like, "Yeah, inflation's real. I get that." But it isn't like this it isn't a a mega scale narrative, you know, pitchforks riots or anything

like that. But yet when you step back and look at it, you're like, "Yeah, they're they're like our current governments are are screwing us because they're just deflating our way our dollars endlessly." And he basically was like he was like, "It's just too advanced for most people to understand. It's like mega advanced fraud on like the highest level scale. Fraud might be extreme to call it that, but point being, it's very difficult to conceptualize this debt refinancing cycle. all these these 11 rings of power that you're talking about most people it's just it's way too much for them. I I think if you've been around a crypto cycle though once one or two times like a really basic way to think of it would be like just imagine the US government and every US government or every government in the world is they have

their own crypto token. It's it's their own little Ponzi token like the Ponzi from 2021 and every time their token starts to collapse in price or their little Ponzi starts to fall apart what do they do? they issue a bunch of new tokens and go sell those on the market to kind of p push up uh the price and and keep things going. Even though it doesn't work exactly like that, that's like a really basic analogy is like if you've lived through this like crypto has done all these experiments, you felt it and that's just that's what's happening but on um on on a much bigger scale. Selling your Bitcoin should be a last resort when you need cash. That's why there's Leen, the trusted platform for Bitcoin backed loans. You can unlock cash in as little as 18 hours with no monthly interest payments and no

prepayment penalties. They've issued over 9 billion in loans and never lost a single satoshi of client funds, even during the chaos of 2022. If you're a long-term hodler, this is the move. Get liquidity without selling at milkroad.com/letin spelled ln. I like that analogy. Okay, so let's jump into I guess your next two predictions here. Uh were and then I I would love to know where are we at in this 11 rings of power? How many are green right now? Uh I really like this rings of power analogy you've come up with. Um it so so you you predicted Bitcoin

170 to 190 uh and ETH 13,000 to 20,000. Super bullish prediction on ETH. Yeah. uh thoughts thoughts on that you you sticking with those two predictions would you change them at all based on what's happened the past 6 months yeah so what I said is by the end of the cycle and I'm not changing that that's all B and I would say the range really depends on like how much liquidity do we get like how fast does uh liquidity accelerate like how big is the if you ever go look at a global year-over-year M2 chart and you you see these blobs I'm talking about how big is the blob um in like aggregate like the way I like to think of it is um which seems to work is like the total size of the blob uh equates to like the the power of that

alt season or whatever. And so if we get a crazy amount of money printing honestly like I think and I think most people sit in this camp like Bitcoin could go to around 170K or if things get out of control it could go to around 250k. I think those are the two most reasonable guesses and I kind of sit in that same one. Um, and I think most people with ETH, I don't think my prediction is that crazy because I think most people are like, "Yeah, 10K to 15K." And, and honestly, I think they're right about that is that, um, once Bitcoin has gone high enough, people, and you're already seeing it, people view ETH as like a catch-up trade. And so, and ETH's like in people's mind, it's like the silver to Bitcoin's gold.

Uh, in a way in that like, you know, you have, um, Michael Sailor out here doing strategy and all that. And then you have all these other companies that are like, "Okay, we're going to do that, but with ETH." And as the market cycle accelerates, you would just see more and more of that, which would be enough, I think, to push ET to to those levels. Okay. So, let's I let's talk about alt season. What's your prediction for for alt season? And then and then maybe you could tie it into this rings of power thesis and what how much liquidity do you think we're going to get? maybe tie it back to the big beautiful bill that's obviously going to inject a lot of liquidity. If that passes, who knows? It seems to be endless everyday fighting happening

around that right now, but give us your your take around it. So, I'm monitor like a lot of different I actually have a couple different models where where I modeled this out. 11 rings is just one of them. I have another I I love my names, but another one's called the omnicycle framework, and it basically uh is like a big view picture of um not 11 rings would be where policy starts. the omnicycle would be like the the different things like credit and like its conditions that happened after that a little bit later downstream. And so right now basically the basically the way it would view it out would be that we have enough fuel within crypto to like maybe have like an oat season. Uh so you need fuel plus a catalyst. So there's there's a lot of good crypto native fuel and the the picture for

crypto is really bullish. So we could have that if we had some sort of catalyst. Think like um 2024 we had the ETF recently we had the the Trump election. something like that that like sparked maybe like an the SEC changing or something something to spark all that fuel into like moving crypto prices higher but we don't have currently conditions for an alt season it's just not there we don't have enough global M2 growth in order to like you need like an abundance you need like think of like the dot bubble there was an abundance there too like you need an abundance uh because when you have a huge amount of liquidity pumped in the global financial markets it just kind of pushes up asset prices and as those asset prices go higher that changes like risk-on behavior because they start to head higher. People start to say, "Hey, what

if they keep going way higher?" And um it's not just liquidity that matters, but it's like the direction of liquidity. So like and like some of this kind of feeds on itself because you can create more liquidity like through a mania through credit. So like if markets are going crazy and people are taking out a ton of credit uh or basically a ton of debt uh they're using credit to take out a ton of debt, that's a form of money creation. like when uh debt is money creation. And so uh my my my point being is we're not close there. We need uh credit conditions to improve. Currently credit conditions aren't in a a great place. Um you want them to be abundant and you want them to be widely available. We need more liquidity. We need um just kind of more more momentum in in the

economy. So uh right now the way that my model So I have I have one that tries to kind of predict it. Try to guess like okay here's where we are. Here's typically how fast these things can move. So, what's the probability of like all these things lining up for us to have an alt season? The first one's not surprising. It would say that like by late by late 2025, those things should be in place enough that we would have the conditions right for an alt season. But if you look at purely just like debt and like how debt cycles play out, you'd be in like what would be considered like the winter period of of the debt cycle kind of coming into spring. And so typically and typically like in in 2017 the spring period of the debt cycle was in 2016. In 2013 the spring period of

the debt cycle was in 2012. In 2021 the spring period of the debt cycle was in 2020. Right now the spring period of the debt cycle should happen in September of 2025. So that's the only thing that would give me pause is like the the debt cycle is is going a little bit slower uh than than you would expect to see those things. And that's such an integral part of like what would what would cause an alt season. So I think there are odds that you you could basically say that uh either early 2026 or late 2026 it it's definitely possible to see an all season. It would just depend on how fast these things accelerate. I know Scott Bessent part of his like three-legged stool is trade deregulation and taxes.

And so we know taxes are in the big beautiful bill that is tax cuts are a form of liquidity. Uh we know what we know what they're doing with tariffs. And then deregulation is around like the SLR exemption and things like that like uh in the financial markets loosening things from the 2008 standards so that that banks can buy more bonds and we can kind of create less friction so that these things could go quicker. So if that were to happen quick enough maybe that pushes things quicker. I I don't know. But um the earliest we could see it would be late 2025. So it's it's we're not going to see it anytime soon until then. And then as we get closer, you know, those things will either start to come into picture and flip green or they won't flip green and you you keep

pushing it out. But you know when they're when they're flipping green, you know we're close and we have the conditions present. We just need a spark. Mhm. I I should have mentioned your your prediction here back at the beginning of the year was that we would have full-on mania mode in 2025. Crypto would be insanely bullish. Retail would be back. Prices would skyrocket uh to higher levels than most anticipate. basically classic euphoria mania mode all season. One thing that we've been talking a lot about is if we get an alt season, which I think you and I would agree that we will. Uh will it be like the past though? That's a conversation that keeps coming up and lots of people saying it won't be like the past. It won't be, hey, everything goes up. It's going to be certain sectors within

crypto or certain only certain narratives. It won't be every token. What's your take on that? My take is that okay so so when people talk about the insane amount of to tokens in crypto they're primarily or they either don't know what they're talking about or they're primarily talking about memecoins 99.999999% of tokens in crypto are memecoins and that has to do with the fact that pumpf fun is it's to launch a token takes like 15 seconds and literally anyone could do it and so because of that you just if you make it that easy to launch a token everyone's going to launch tokens and then even outside of that like a lot of the tokens are are inherently going to be scams because it's just it really is easy to launch a token. And so if you're talking about those, what do you think the number is? Just just out of

curiosity. I think it's about like we're talking about like 40 million probably meme coins and then probably like 10 to 20,000 actual tokens. I don't know what if if that's I would think it was even I think it's around 1,000 2,000. Um okay. And and that's not just a guess like I have set sat down with like um 03 and like lit and grock and all those things and done like deep research and like hey like and this is better than I could do you know those deep deep research tools are insane and so I've been like try to guess how many tokens are like real think of like the team's got to have innovation be like they're just doing something innovative they have some sort of revenue like it's a real project this just not a scam not a Ponzi and it's like somewhere between a,000 and 2,000

and that sounds about right to me it's like you know people are scared to build in the crypto face. They're scared of the SEC. It's been horrible. Most people that were building left. So, yeah, 1,00 to 2,000 sounds about right. All the other ones would be like just nonsense, right? And so, when when I talk about all season and you know, alts doing good in general, talking about those 1,00 to 2,000, I don't think all the meme coins like that'd be crazy. That's there's too there's too much dispersion among that. But, I think when most people think of memecoins, they think of memecoins as like a thing. I don't like nobody's diversifying across the 99% of memecoins, right? If they're if they're doing meme coins, maybe they're like, "Okay, I'm doing um you know, Bonk and you know, whiff and whatever, Pepe and Doge and a few blue chips and Yeah.

Yeah. But that's like their memecoin bucket. So, so I'm talking about like utility tokens, like real projects, all that kind of stuff. People have discounted it. A lot of people are saying like cryp is just a scam. It's just a grift. But you're starting to see that change. We we had the um the IPO for Circle just happened. 22 times overs subscribed. Uh that thing soon skyrocketed as soon as soon as it went. Man, what what think of in it doesn't make any sense to me. I just got to say it quickly. Like uh I like Circle a lot. I think it's a great business, but it's currently valued similar to Coinbase, and that does that's not that's just that's that's not accurate. There's just no way. Like I would not be buying it right now. I like coin as an investment circle. I don't

think so. But what does that tell you about like how many other for one any company that crypto company that can IPO is now going to IPO and then um how much investment dollars is about to flow into crypto companies and how many people are going to start building crypto companies and again people are underestimating the value in crypto. They see the scams and the griffs and they say ah this is just nonsense. But now people are trying to say okay but wait a minute this this stable coin thing that seems to be working. Why is this Tether company like the like most profitable company on the planet per employee? Yeah. What what what is what's actually going on here?

And so I think people are starting to see like okay wait uh there is a lot of grift just like the early internet was a lot of grift but there's also a lot of value like digital assets is actually like really use it's it's cool we went from metal money to paper money to digital money that actually maybe makes a little bit of sense and uh crypto as like a fundraising mechanism seems to kind of make you know a little bit of sense and uh so uh in tokenization like tokeniza an ETF is basically kind of like a a primitive tokenization and it's basically taking things that are illiquid and and making them really liquid and easy to move around, right?

And so, um, I think you're going to see a rotation, especially if as the SEC loosens guide guidelines. We have Paul Atkins, Hester Pierce is leading it up and there like Paul Atkins is like a full-on libertarian. He's like, "Freedom to the people." Like, it's your money. Do whatever you want. Like, uh, just don't come crying to us. And, and Hester Pierce is kind of like that, too. And I love that. And so, imagine where you have clear regulations and you're like, "Hey, you want to do a tokenized security? Cool. Don't scam people. I'll abide by these really simple rules. do it, experiment, have fun, go crazy. What do What do you think is going to happen when that happens? I I think you're going to see a lot more experimentation.

And I think you're going to see a renewed like focus on like, oh, actual companies building in the space, actual utility in the space, and you're going to see a lot of these tokens turn into basically stocks where there's like you have now ownership in this protocol. You now get dividends and revenue. Um, floodgates open. Floodgates open. like you want to launch a startup, hey, you launch a startup on chain because uh you you could go through this crazy VC process and you got to know the right people, you know, rub the right elbows or whatever. Or you could launch on chain and launch to a global marketplace and raise a crazy amount of capital and I think a lot of people are going to choose to do that and I think it's going to uh open up the floodgates for for what crypto could become and and that's

where we're headed. So, coming back to my question, alt season, same as in the past for those 1,00 to 2,000 tokens, you think? Yes, same as in the past for those 1,00 to 2,000 tokens. Maybe it'll be it depends on how much liquidity is. You know, I don't know if it'll be bigger or smaller than in 2021. Uh, you know, that was a crazy amount of money printing, but like the same catamania, the the the re retail audience, they crave the the casino. They crave the trenches. Okay? no matter how much they say it's a scam, no matter how much they say they're never coming back. As soon as it gets even slightly bullish, they're like, "Let's go life savings."

And and they're they're right in. They're ready to buy the top every single time. And the reason is because uh fundamentally in the US because we are a debt debt based society, there isn't like the same path there there always has been to like live this awesome life. And so a lot of people do feel very motivated like, "Okay, the only way I'm going to get here is through some something like this. I I got to hit the casino. When I say casino, I mean I got to take some risk. I I cannot play it safe and get to my goals. I have to take some risk. And uh fundamentally once cryptos, you know, when it offers that opportunity and you see everyone start to making money, you're going to say, "Hey, this happened in 2021. This happened in 2017. I I've seen this show.

I'm getting in early this time." And self-fulfilling prophecy pumps everything up. And you know, they're not gonna, yes, they'll do some memecoins, but like when you have like millions of meme coins, like how do you how do you differentiate? Like, how are you like, which memecoin do I pick? Utility, revenue, those things are like they separate the the wheat from the chaff, right? And so, I I think for a lot of people, they're they're not going to want to touch memes. Some people will, some people won't. They're going to want to say, I've done the scam thing in crypto. I want to stay with this safe stuff. And and that's where you're going to see those things really pump. So, yeah. Yeah. certainly feels feels like it's it's a great take. Uh it feels like there's there's a real movement from pumpamentals to fundamentals. And I

think you nailed it though when you said like it is it's so our our our memory is so short term and one thing that you're so good at is looking back at history and like zooming out and seeing the bigger picture and it's so easy in moments like this to the sentiment is not the same as it was. I mean, just six months ago, look at December, November, sentiment was so high. We were all like, here we go to the moon and then we had this pullback, right? 30%. It lasted a long time because of tariffs and macro. Uh, but the sentiment is not the same right now, but we're basically at the exact same place that we were at six months ago, except we actually have a better setup because we have a pro crypto administration, we have the SEC,

like all these things. And so I think yeah really not to mention the liquidity that is definitely going to come. I mean it's already coming in China and Japan and in Europe. There is already printing happening not on a mass and they're waiting and they're waiting. So the China and these other countries they they have to wait for the dollar to weaken too. And that's like one of their big things is like it's something like 40% of all debt in the world is ba is based in US dollars. And so we need that dollar to weaken and so that they can basically like we're kind of Bitcoin in the in the fiat world. We're the Bitcoin of them. And um you know because we're this p I mean we're not great but because compared to everything else we're like this pristine capital. You know when other people devalue like if

they flow out of they're printing new tokens the money flows out of there and into into the dollar but when the dollar is going down it's not as much of a escape hatch and so they can devalue more without worrying about hey all of our capital is going to come out. Plus, you know, when you owe a bunch of debt in US dollars and the US dollars going down, the numbers in your bank account like just systematically go up in comparison as far as like your head like, oh, my money was worth1 billion because US dollar is going down, it's worth, you know, 1 billion, whatever. And so, uh, yeah, and the US dollar has been weakening like we've been seeing that play out and and that that thing seems like if that was a chart, it's like the Bitcoin chart 2021 where it's just collapsing. Boom, boom, boom. Yeah.

But that's good. That's good. That's what that's I mean that's that's what it seems like everybody's on board for that. Everybody wants that right now. Yeah. Trump wants it worlds wants it. The rest of the world wants it. Like everybody wants it. So okay I want to shift to some new predictions that you have um for for this the rest of this year the rest of this cycle. Uh let's start with um high conviction trades. What are your high conviction trades right now? high conviction trades right now. I think I mentioned it last time. Um, but I really think DI is one of those sectors where I think a lot of people can see well okay AI obviously is like one of those sectors where everyone knows hey uh when when retail shows up if we have an all season. Maybe you

don't believe in all season. Maybe you do. But I bet if you believe that if an alt season happened AI tokens would skyrocket you. Retail is going to get in here and be like I I couldn't buy Nvidia. I couldn't buy all this other stuff. It's too high. I'm not going to make lifechanging money. But this AI crypto token, you know, that sounds interesting. And so AI is going to skyrocket. But I think kind of adjacent to AI. Do do you have do you have an AI token that you like though because that's the thing I can't figure out. What's the AI token to pick? Oh, there's a lot of AI tokens that So, okay, for one, my tokens are always like like I'm trying to maximize like a a 100x play. Okay. So, this is like max to generate like Yeah. You're not buying Bit Tensor

like you know, you're not going after that type of token. I'm not looking for a 5x. I'm looking for 100x. And so, um, think of it like seed investing. Like, I invest in really early tokens and I'm like, if we see an all season, this token could do 100x. If all if we had a 2021 like conditions or 2017 like conditions, this token would would do really well. And so, um, as far as an AI token right now, one of the tokens I'm watching is called UNA. Um, and the reason I like it is, okay, so Virtuals was originally a gaming uh project. They were like trying to build crypto games and they pivoted to AI. Una is also a crypto gaming project, but they've been leaning hard into AI. So, they have some AI games coming out. They just released this AI studio that um you can like

generate a bunch of videos and images. It's pretty cool. It's called Hannah Studios. They have a their own uh AI agent called Hannah that has its own token. What I'm really bullish on is the token's like six million in market cap. It's like stupid small. So, you know, is this right here? Let me let me pull it up on screen right here to make sure I got the right one and everybody can I can see what you're talking about. Uh, is it this one? Unagi token. Unagi. Yeah. So, what's the market cap? Uh, 9 mill. Okay. Is this coin gecko? 10. Go to coin market cap. Coin market cap's got the like coin gecko and coin market cap have different uh market caps, but yeah, but the correct one's on the coin market cap, but um I don't know what it's at right now. Let's see. Uh

no, it's 9 million. Yeah. Okay, cool. Okay, so 9 million in market cap. Super small. Okay. as far as a token goes, they're they're leaning into AI. Even even like I think the narrative of AI given an allseason will do good. So like I don't even think a project has to be like doing anything useful in AI. If they're good at branding, they're good at marketing and the token is like, "Hey, we're doing AI stuff, go to their website. Click on their website." Uh I don't know if you can click on the website. Yeah, it's on the bottom there somewhere. Yeah. Um okay. So yeah, look, look at this. Their website. So I love a good website. And so if you kind of scroll down, you can see you can see like how good their website is, like their branding and the way they like do

things. Yeah, it's really good. And so um yeah, they have this uh AI agent stuff that they're building. They're building some AI games uh that are kind of like Tamagotchi, um around AI. They got so many so many things. Uh so they're good at execution and they're they they're tapping into AI like virtuals. They're sitting at 9 million in market cap. So for me, I'm like, dang. I don't think they're going to do good now. It's not like I think they're going to skyrocket in the next five months. I think if we have alt season like conditions, that's when they could do good. That's when they could really start to skyrocket. And so, yeah, that's that that's one of them. That's uh Unagi. And then the DI, I think, is kind of adjacent, right? Like, uh it's like science, decentralized science. Um

I think it's got the same kind of sci-fi level vibes. Um we've already seen it gained. Every time crypto gets any sort of action, uh DI starts to take off. And so Researchcoin, as I mentioned last time, I'm really bullish on RSC, Researchcoin. That was at like 50 million in market cap. It's gone up a little bit. I think it was 20 million last time, but it's it's or 30 what is it? 36 million. 36. Okay. 36 million. Yeah. So it's gone up a little bit. Um, Researchcoin is actually co-founded by Brian Armstrong. And so um Brian Brian Armstrong is one of the co-founders. Some other guy is the other co-founder.

And they uh they founded it to like uh help o like an open science movement. They want to accelerate scientific research. They do it's like a publishing journal. So the publishing industry is like 10 billion a year. Um so they do publishing, they do peer review. They have like an AI peerreview uh process. And then um they have uh they do funding for scientific projects. And scientific funding is like a trillion dollar a year industry. And so they're trying to tap into that every time a project is funded through researchcoin. And and they have pretty low liquidity. So like you could do like a couple like $20,000 buy will kind of pump up the price. Every time somebody does funding through Researchcoin, they have to buy RSC to fund. And so, and they've had like 600,000 worth of funding, they have more

coming. I I talked to the president of their foundation recently, and he's talking about like somebody's donated a million to like fund scientific research. A lot of this is donations and grants, think kind of things. Every time they do that, they have to buy research coin in order to fund it, and that's what's given to the people. So, that's like an automatic kind of action to buy, push up the token, but uh 9% of that goes to the foundation. So if they buy, so say they spend a million, they'd have to spend a million plus 9%. The 9% goes to the foundation and they just hold that research coin. And so uh co-founded by Brian Armstrong, I think is the most important point. It's DII. So kind of that sci-fi vibe. Co-founded by Brian Armstrong. So all the DJ's retail, they're going to be like, hm, this

project's sitting small and it's co-ounded by Brian Armstrong. That is that's kind of my bull case summed up. I mean, look at this. Look at this token in in the in the oat season of uh the end of 2024. Like it was sitting at early November. It was at 20 mil market cap and it exploded to 140 mil market cap during that just very quickly. It's always a reminder of how fast all seasons happen when they happen. Uh so it's it's proven that it has caught the bid previously. Yes. And so I like to look at projects not as like when this when the market's dead, you know, I don't care. But when alts start to gain some action, what are those what do they

do? Are they a front runner? Do they gain traction or are they kind of lagging behind? And this is one every time you see the market like alts gain any sort of bid, this thing starts heading higher. And so I I like that. Obviously though, I do really really high-risisky stuff. So it's like I'm I'm positioned for alt season. Like I said, this is more like seed investing. You mentioned at the start like I've I've done like small amounts of money and turned it into large amounts. And it's because I do stuff like this and basically I'll do like maybe I'll do 10 plays, maybe eight of them will like either go down, do nothing or, you know, not do well. Maybe one of them does good and then maybe one of them is like exceptional and makes up for any losses and then makes a fortune on top of that.

That's kind of how I invest and it's not for everyone because it's like super adrenaline filled, edge of your seat. But yeah, I'm I'm heavily betting on all seasonason and if that all season doesn't hit, I'm screwed. I'm going to lose a ton of money. So uh yeah, that's that's how I'm positioning. Well, I appreciate your I mean, you're you're as you said, you're not just a a creator that's pumping out content for the sake of a creator business. You're doing you're doing this because you're all all in. All you got all the skin in the game and you are here and you're showing up every day. Uh yeah, for for for our audience who wants to get some more of your tokens and likes your style of investing, where can they uh where can they get more access to Jesse's

portfolio? access to my port. Well, I talk about on my channel. So, if if you go to my channel, Jesse Eckle, um I talk about what I'm buying. I talk about macro. I talk about uh where we are in the cycle and all that kind of stuff on my channel, but yeah, that'd be the main place to go, my YouTube channel, Jesse Eckle. Uh and and I dive a lot more into all this stuff. Great. We'll we'll link to that in the show notes because I know some of the guys listening are going to be hyped up on Jesse today. Jesse, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate the chat as always. Thank you. I love being on the air. Yeah, that's great. I love to hear it. Love to hear it. I got to remind y'all, none of today's episode was financial advice. I

am not your financial adviser. Jesse is not your financial adviser. Investing is risky and you should always do your own research and take some time to think. If you need help with your own research, you can check out Jesse's YouTube channel as you mentioned. You should also subscribe to the Milk Road newsletter. As always, thanks for listening in folks. Have yourselves wicked awesome day. We'll see you back again soon. Hey all, the Milkro team is going to be at Permissionless in New York at the end of the month and we would love to meet you there. We've got a meetup happening on June 23rd. Hit the link in the show notes to register. It's free plus free drinks. Woohoo. Would love to hang with you. And get a chance to meet others in the community. As well, if you still need a ticket to permissionless, you can get $100 off

your ticket if you hit the link in the show notes. Hope to see you there. As always, if you liked today's episode, please hit subscribe and make sure you follow us so you don't miss out on the next one. There's also a link in the description to our free 5-minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh. And if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game, we're going to also leave a link for Milk Road Pro. You get access to our portfolio where you can see exactly what we are buying. This is your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto. One final note, this show is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice. Investing in crypto or

any asset is risky and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose. Thanks so much for listening in my friends.