January 2025 - Monthly Market Update
Monthly Update || January 2025
Opening Remarks
Greetings from Ikigai Asset Management¹. We welcome the opportunity to bring to you our seventy-sixth Monthly Update and hope these are helpful in better understanding some of what we’re doing and what we’re seeing. We have the privilege of deploying capital on behalf of our investors into a new technology and asset class that has tremendous potential to make the world a better place and create trillions of dollars of value in the process.
We believe we are obligated to be shepherds of this technology – to do our part to push crypto towards fulfilling its potential. We strive to be an objective, reasonable, well-intentioned voice of truth amongst a chorus of biased, fallacious, pernicious opportunists. It’s an honor that we take seriously.
To that end, December was a very strong ending to a very strong year for crypto. Prices were down slightly on the month, but read the highlights below – it was a big month and it sets up for an exciting 2025. It’s not an exaggeration at all to say crypto had a step change in 2024. The spot BTC and ETH ETFs, along with the strong alignment of crypto with the GOP and the subsequent red wave victory in November, puts 2024 as one of the best years ever for crypto and sets up for an exciting and prosperous 2025.
As I look back over each month’s highlights from 2024 (which you can see here), I’m struck by how MUCH happened to crypto EXTERNALLY while simultaneously how LITTLE happened to crypto INTERNALLY. The ETFs; MSTR buying $23.9bn of BTC; SAB 121; FIT 21; BTC options; all the political stuff; public companies buying BTC – these are all things that happened TO crypto, not things that crypto did itself. When I look back on 2024, crypto really didn’t do all that much ITSELF.
A year ago today, in the closing remarks of my Jan 1, 2024 letter I said –
“It appears to me that this cycle is starting off with less pretense than prior cycles. I actually think there is LESS expectation this time around that any of this shit does anything or will EVER do anything. That’s not to say there’s not an expectation for much higher prices. That’s not true at all. The general expectation is for BTC to hit ATH in the next year or so and a bunch of Alts to massively outperform.”
That came true in spades in 2024. Prices went much higher and crypto didn’t really do much... Lol. Let me break it down further for you, lest you think I’m glossing over some stuff. Let’s think about the most successful crypto products of 2024-
Pump.fun, HyperLedger, Ethena, Echo – These are “meta use cases”. Use cases that are entirely self-contained within crypto.
Polymarket – Objectively a huge success. But I am wary they can maintain high levels of volume post-elections (we shall see).
Base – Tons of transaction volume, but very little actual underlying usage of the projects launched on the chain. Also, a large portion of the transaction volume is likely airdrop farming.
Helium Mobile – Great project. Incentivizing a 5G Wifi mesh network. That’s legit. But AFAIK, they currently have ~500,000 subscribers (I could be wrong on that). That’s a good start. If that number is 10mm a year from now, we’ll be talking about a real success.
Virtuals, ai16z – Hugely successful agent launching platforms. Yet, when you drill down into the actual agents themselves, they have very little to show for themselves at this point (it is still very early).
Terminal of Truths/GOAT – IMO the most fascinating thing that happened in crypto in 2024 by far. Spawned an entirely new sector and opened up imaginations to crazy new possibilities down the road. But at time of writing, ToT is a twitter account with an LLM writing the tweets and a human approving them, and GOAT is a $600mm market cap memecoin and really not much else. TBD what happens there.
So that’s the point I’m trying to make. Total crypto market cap went from $1.8tn to $3.4tn in 2024, an increase of ONE POINT SIX TRILLION DOLLARS, and we really didn’t do all that much new. Bitcoin accounted for $1tn of that $1.6tn increase, and Bitcoin didn’t do anything at all other than the same thing it’s been doing since Jan 3 2009 – spitting out new blocks every 15 minutes. It’s just the world around Bitcoin that changed so much in 2024.
So how do we feel about that? Especially how do we feel about that going into 2025? I’ll give some detail on that in the Closing Remarks. For now, I don’t want to end this on a sour note. I have so much to be thankful for in 2024 and I hope you do too. Crypto has a lot to be thankful for as well. Crypto is walking into 2025 with a level of political support that would have been completely unimaginable two years ago. It’s going to be a gamechanger.
December Highlights
Trump Nominates Noted Libertarian Paul Atkins for SEC Chair
Trump Nominates David Sacks as AI & Crypto Czar
Trump Names Bo Hines Executive Director of Crypto Council
Crypto Supporter US Rep French Hill Wins Chair of House Financial Services Committee
BTC and ETH ETFs See $4.6bn and $2.1bn of Net Inflows
MSTR Buys 57,800 Total Bitcoin in Five Tranches Totaling $5.9bn
MSTR Joins NASDAQ 100
Publicly Traded MARA Raises $850mm of Zero-Coupon Convertible Notes, Buys $1.5bn of BTC
Publicly Traded Riot Platforms Issues 0.75% Convertible Bonds to Buy $525mm of BTC
Publicly Traded Hut 8 Issues Equity to Buy $100mm of BTC
Publicly Traded Semler Scientific Buys Additional $29mm of BTC
Publicly Traded KULR Buys $21mm of BTC with Excess Cash
Tether Purchases $700mm of BTC
BitcoinPolicy.org Drafts Executive Order for BTC Strategic Reserve, Only Requires Trump’s Signature
BlackRock Partners with DeFi Protocols Curve and Elixir on BUIDL Funds
Circle and Binance Enter Strategic Partnership to Accelerate Global USDC Adoption
Vivek’s Strive Capital Files for “Bitcoin Bond” ETF, To Hold MSTR Converts
Apple Pay Launches on Coinbase
IMF Forces El Salvador to Change Bitcoin Laws in Order to Receive Loan
Texas State Representative Files Legislation for Strategic Bitcoin Reserve of Texas
Ohio State Representative Files Legislation for Strategic Bitcoin Reserve of Ohio
Grayscale Files for SOL ETF
Fed Chair Powell Says BTC Is a Competitor with Gold, Not the US Dollar
Saylor Releases Proposed Crypto Industry Standards, Including Bitcoin Strategic Reserve
Tether Recognized as Accepted Virtual Asset in Abu Dhabi
NYDIG to Launch Bitcoin-Backed Loans Funded with Insurance Float
Ripple Receives NYDFS Approval to Launch Stablecoin
Avalanche Raises $250mm in Locked Token Sale Led by Galaxy, Dragonfly and ParaFi
BitGo Sues Coinbase for Delisting wBTC
Ethena Launches Stablecoin Backed by BlackRock’s BUIDL Token
FTX Estate Announces January 3 Effective Date, Distributions to Commence within 60 Days After
FalconX to Acquire Arbelos Markets
Tether Invests $775mm in YouTube Competitor Rumble
ALL THE PUBLIC COMPANIES WITH BTC
Jump Trading Settles with SEC for $123mm Over Luna Insider Trading Collapse
Alex Machinsky Enters into Plea Agreement, Sentencing in 2025
SOURCE: TRADING VIEW. AS OF 12/31/24.
SOURCE: COINMARKETCAP AND COINGECKO. AS OF 12/31/24. BCH INCLUDES SV.
A Look Back At 2024
For the past five Januarys, I’ve written re-caps of some of my calls during the prior year, with the benefit of hindsight. You can read them here, here, here, here, and here. In keeping with that tradition, what follows is one Good Call, Bad Call, Interesting Call and TBD Call from each month in 2024.
[Good Call] “Which brings me to my final thought about how 2024 might unfold. It appears to me that this cycle is starting off with less pretense than prior cycles. I actually think there is LESS expectation this time around that any of this shit does anything or will EVER do anything. That’s not to say there’s not an expectation for much higher prices. That’s not true at all. The general expectation is for BTC to hit ATH in the next year or so and a bunch of Alts to massively outperform. The market is mostly taking that as a GIVEN at this point. But it’s making that assumption while also assuming it will happen without actual mass adoption. People want to gamble on vaporware and next year looks like a good year to be in the casino… The mindset is a sort of offshoot of financial nihilism. There seems to be a much larger collective embrace of a lack of pretense within crypto going into this cycle. Said differently, the ratio of expectations to market cap feels like the lowest its been in six years. The root cause of this will take time to unpack, which I will do next month. But suffice it to say, if I’m right, this cycle will get truly wacky.”
[Bad Call] “DePIN (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks) should be a bright spot and potentially the brightest spot.”
[Interesting Call] “I am not optimistic about crypto use cases gaining mass adoption in 2024. I wish I saw it differently. It’s certainly not a barren wasteland, but I don’t think we’re on the precipice of finally nailing the product-market fit problem that has ailed crypto for as long as I’ve been in it (stablecoins aside, which are the most successful products in crypto history and are the closest thing we have to mass adoption).”
[TBD Call] “We are unlikely to get legislation in 2024 and 2025 might even be a stretch. We’ll have to see what we get from elections in November. But a year from now Gary is unlikely to be running the SEC, and that will be a welcome reprieve.”
[Good Call] “If you’re reading this, I kinda doubt you don’t own ANY crypto, but if that’s the case, I think now’s a good time to “get off zero”. If you own some but you’re thinking of owning more, the same applies – I think now is a pretty good time. There’s always risk to investing, even more so in crypto, but I’d be quite surprised if prices are lower a year from now than they are today.”
[Bad Call] “It would be my base case that a basket of DePIN names will outperform crypto broadly this year.”
[Interesting Call] “A Lack of Pretense That Any of This Shit Does Anything or Will Ever Do Anything”
[TBD Call] ”The biggest pushback against my assessment of the silliness of leading with infrastructure with such a dearth of end user use cases that will drive adoption is the adage from Field of Dreams “if you build it, they will come”. So maybe that’s what’s going on here. Maybe we just need to get “parallelized EVMs hooked up to a data availability layer enabled by restaking” and the use cases are just going to magically appear like Shoeless Joe Jackson in a corn field in Iowa. I wouldn’t bet on it though. Not this cycle.”
[Good Call] “You can wish that weren’t the case. You can wish the crypto market would be more sound-minded. More sober. More focused on providing solutions to real problems. More rooted in reasonable valuation methodologies. Less bubble-ish. But I believe those wishes will be left ungranted. At least this cycle.”
[Bad Call] “…from a purely TA cycle analysis, the first attempt to break prior ATH monthly close has always failed”
[Interesting Call] “That’s the setup. The Boomers have all the money. The rich have been getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. The American Dream of upward mobility has been slipping out of reach for increasingly more people. Why do you think Oliver Anthony exploded out of nowhere into such popularity? That is Financial Nihilism. So if you’re like the large majority of Americans and you’re on the wrong end of this, what do you do about it?
You take bigger risks. You feel driven to take bigger risks to try and leapfrog from your current financial position (mostly paycheck to paycheck; buying a home feels nearly impossible; saddled with student loans; salary increases not keeping up expense increases) to something more tenable. More comfortable. More baller.“
[TBD Call] ”So that’s the setup we are facing. Blow another bubble – bigger than ever. Collapse another bubble – bigger than ever. Maybe the real “making the world a better place” is the friends you met along the way?”
[Good Call] “…dips are for buying”
[Bad Call] “That feels like higher to me to April. $80k+ wouldn’t surprise me for April.”
[Interesting Call] “They say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he doesn’t exist. If I were the powers that be and I was worried about crypto’s potential to disrupt the status quo, how would I go about preventing that potential from coming to fruition? There are front door ways of approaching that sort of thing and then there are side door ways. The front door is Operation Chokepoint 2.0 type of stuff. The side door would be to allow (facilitate?) a grassroots movement of hyper-gambling mania on absolute dogshit ponzi vaporware to proliferate to a degree that it chokes out that actual innovation that will lead to a disrupting of the status quo. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that a disruptive technology with a ton of potential was just a shitcoin casino.”
[TBD Call] ”At some point in the coming quarters, I think we will experience something akin to the purple box – a proper Shitcoin Bonanza. Were that to be the case, it would make the current shitcoining look like a Treasury bond portfolio. We shall see.”
[Good Call] “I think that would be my base case at this point – BTC ranges this summer $50’s to $70’s.”
[Bad Call] N/A
[Interesting Call] “I think the overall picture being painted in macro right now is one where the current high interest rate regime is actually stimulating the US economy to a fair degree, due to the enormous amount of debt relative to GDP and the enormous budget deficits the government runs. This leads to the dominance of fiscal policies over monetary policies in the current environment. This is a drum Lyn Alden has been banging for over a year now, and it appears to be coming to fruition.”
[TBD Call] ”A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.” – Alexander Tytler”
[Good Call] “So how much anchoring to that number is appropriate when thinking about ETH ETF inflows?
It's a tough call. I think 10% of that $5.1bn, call it $500mm, in the first 30 trading days would be a disappointment for ETH ETFs. Price would be flat-to-down in that scenario I think.”
[Bad Call] “ETHBTC on Coinbase had its largest weekly volume candle since the very top of the range three years ago. The chart is now on the precipice of breaking out of its 18-month downtrend. I think it’s a safe assumption that breakout will likely occur in June due to the ETH ETFs.”
[Interesting Call] “Either right before or right after the House SAB 121 vote, someone got in Trump’s ear (Selkis is that you?) that crypto was a real opportunity for him to raise money and get votes. Someone told Trump that crypto folks are rich. Someone told Trump that supporting crypto was all upside and no downside- no one was going to vote against him for being pro-crypto, but many would vote for him just because he was pro-crypto. Trump ran with it.
My guess is this shift from Trump pressured Democrats further and additional unraveling ensued. Trump is leading in the polls and leading on the betting sites. Someone must have pulled the fire alarm internally in the Democratic party. Dems had already mostly lost faith in Gensler. Gensler had a BAD year last year. You could imagine a message going around internally with Dems –
“We’re getting killed in the polls. Trump is supporting crypto. This moron Gensler is picking fights he can’t win with crypto, and now even Wall Street is pissed about it. He already lost BTC ETFs and he’s about to lose ETH ETFs publicly and shamefully. All he’s doing with crypto is driving dollars and votes away. He’s not getting any more dollars or any more votes. Stop this madness now.”
[TBD Call] ”If the ETH community can figure out a way to drive mainchain transaction volume and get the burn up to say 5% annualized, I think that’s a narrative the market will grab hold of. The burn mechanism is inherently reflexive, and ETH ETF inflows are inherently reflexive. You get both of them going at the same time and it’s… reflexively reflexive! And that sounds like number go up. TBD on where that required use case is going to come from in the near term.”
[Good Call] “One thing that I think we can say with confidence is that the BTC ETFs have a lot of arb flow in them. We discussed this last month – you can look at the 13Fs and see arb guys in size and I have heard about it from multiple folks. There’s NAV arb that gets laid off into futures and spot markets and then there’s the same basis trade that’s always been present in this market. At this point I don’t get the sense you can glean ALL that much from just looking at daily ETF flows. The trend matters, but there’s just a lot of other stuff going on under the hood.”
[Bad Call] “If the first couple weeks of inflows are weak, I would expect ETH to trade off, but it could end up being a good buying opportunity.”
[Interesting Call] “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” - Nietzsche”
[TBD Call] “So if you care a lot about crypto, you should want Trump to win. That’s a tough pill to swallow for the crypto bulls who loathe Trump, of which there are plenty. I’m certainly not a fan, but he’s absolutely better than the alternative. Watching the debates last week was a reminder of how sad and strange our political process is at the moment. How did we end up here? How do we move on from this to something better and then make sure our political process never gets this broken again?
Those are important questions. The kind of thing that will have you reading Nietzsche and Dostoevsky.”
[Good Call] “The one potential shining light, depending on your politics, is that Trump is probably now more likely to be elected president than he was a month ago.”
[Bad Call] “Given where we are in the Bitcoin cycle (four months post-halving) and where we are in the monetary policy cycle (entire world starting to ease, including the Fed), my take on this range is to call this consolidation bullish and poised to breakout to the upside. Could be August or could be closer to the election, but that’s my base case.”
[Interesting Call] “From my perspective, it was easy to characterize the events of July 13th as something like a miracle. We can have a conversation about what a miracle even is, but it sure SEEMS like Trump should have had his head blown off and he turned his head a bit and got nicked in the ear and lived. Many people have experienced all sorts of near-death experiences (great YouTube rabbit hole if you’ve never done it), and most of the time, it changes those people profoundly. Most, or at least many, people that have NDE’s have a wholesale change in their relationship with God on the back end of that. It would make sense Trump would be the same.
So that’s a big part of what had me so optimistic in the wake of July 13th. Looking at Trump at the RNC. Looking at his demeanor. His facial expressions. His gate. The way he interacted with others. His tweets. His words. It seemed like a man that just had a serious conversation with his Maker. I won’t pretend to know Donald Trump’s relationship with God, far be it for me to even begin to pass judgement on such a thing. But my KNEEJERK thought is that Trump and God have probably been pretty…uhh...dicey over the course of his 78 years. And my assessment was that he almost got his head blown off and that’s the kind of thing that will help you approach God with a bit more humility, which has certainly never been Trump’s strong point.”
[TBD Call] “Questions/accusations/rumors swirled aggressively around both Trump’s assassination attempt and the replacement of Joe Biden as presidential candidate. And for good reason. There is still not - in any way - a clear, evidenced explanation for exactly what happened on July 13th. I’m not sure we’ll ever get one. And there is still not a clear, evidenced explanation of Biden stepping down from re-election. Not sure we’ll ever get one there either.”
[Good Call] “If I had written this monthly on August 6th, I probably would have spent most of the letter unpacking the Yen carry trade unwind contagion in depth. But like I said, it came and went incredibly quickly, and I’m not expecting the situation to reappear in the near-term (although it certainly could).”
[Bad Call] “I know that Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, 2020 and he is highly likely to lose the popular vote again this year.”
[Interesting Call] “The sentiment we’re currently dealing with is something different IMO (and many seem to agree). The curtain has been pulled back on how utterly pointless and ridiculously overvalued so much of all this is, while the potential of the existing projects is simultaneously getting LESS believable. The points-to-airdrops daisy chain was an embarrassing and ill-advised failed attempt to drive adoption. The memecoin mania was embarrassing and ill-advised further still. For many multicycle crypto participants, the realization is sinking in that we’ve simultaneously come so far while accomplishing so little. This realization is jarring for those of us who have dedicated a tremendous amount of time and effort to this space for years. All of a sudden, your life’s work starts to feel like mostly a waste. You don’t like what crypto has to show for itself and you don’t like the direction that it’s headed.”
[TBD Call] “And crypto IS ripe for change and thus ripe with opportunity. There remains an obvious leadership vacuum in the ecosystem – a topic I’ve discussed plenty here over the last 12+ months. Well, it’s still here. So many of the most powerful and influential people in crypto blew up so catastrophically in 2022, and so many of the leaders that remained are Quiet Quitting, what’s left is a notable insufficiency of identifiable trustworthy captains to steer this crypto ship. That seems like an opportunity – one that could be seized by good actors, or we could get another cohort of SBF’s, Su Zhu’s, Alex Mashinksy’s and the like. That’s a fight worth fighting.
Regardless, and in spite of, our ails, Bitcoin and crypto ARE a real part of financial markets and now a real part of the political landscape. And they are set to get bigger on both of those fronts. That all appears to be happening with a backdrop of “A Lack of Pretense That Any of This Shit Does Anything or Will Ever Do Anything”, “Financial Nihilism” and “Pervasive Quiet Quitting”. Isn’t that odd? It’s like we’ve come so far while accomplishing so little.”
[Good Call] “It all makes it pretty easy to be bullish BTC near-term. I’ve written at length here previously how consequential the elections should be for BTC and crypto, and how the price action will likely diverge significantly in a Trump vs Harris win. Maybe Trump is just going to win, and all the supportive macro and seasonality bullishness I mentioned above will just dovetail together with a Trump win.”
[Bad Call] “The narrative and general vibe around ETH is absolutely atrocious – the worst I’ve ever seen it since I’ve been in crypto. The ETH community is in shambles and a Trump win is the only identifiable positive catalyst on the horizon. ETH has been hated and oversold for months and keeps getting more hated and more oversold as the next month passes. Brutal. Historically, you want to be buying that kind of sentiment with both hands – but things change in crypto and perhaps things have changed with ETH and its relative market cap is in inexorable long-term decline vs BTC. But over the next month, it’s a Trump trade.”
[Interesting Call] “A Trump win will almost certainly reinvigorate the space in a significant way. The vibes have been pretty off all year for crypto considering BTC is +50% YTD, so a big pickup in excitement from a Trump win would be coming off of pretty low levels. That excitement will carry sentiment well into next year as we get to see exactly how supportive a Trump administration is for crypto and over what timeframe are they getting things done. The firing of Gary Gensler alone will likely warrant a parade.
Through that period, there will likely remain an undercurrent of crypto needing to “put up or shut up”. Stablecoins have product-market-fit and Bitcoin has product-market-fit and all the rest of it is a ton of question marks at best, at least at valuations anywhere near here. This attitude of “put up or shut up” is healthy for the crypto ecosystem, even if it doesn’t generate positive returns for Alts. We need more of this attitude, not less.
I write these pieces like “Pervasive Quiet Quitting” (and a bunch of others over the last ~2 years) to be a call to action. Crypto NEEDS to change – the current structure of this ecosystem is unlikely to be sufficient to deliver on the technology’s potential to change the world. We need change in order to put up, or we’re at risk of shutting up.”
[TBD Call] “Parts of Jeff’s post I agree with – I do agree that IBIT options will likely be transformative. Other parts I disagree with. I think a “negative vanna gamma squeeze” is unlikely (although not impossible) because Jeff mischaracterizes BTC’s scarcity. BTC has had cash collateralized perps for years, and these unequivocally reduce/remove BTC’s inherent scarcity. The same is true for cash- settled CME futures. I think Jeff also misjudges how the crypto derivatives market would dynamically respond to a gamma squeeze should one occur – I doubt we get a GME-style squeeze on a >$1tn asset.
My guess is that IBIT options will allow for significant amounts of new capital to enter into BTC (by way of the ETFs) that previously was unable or unwilling to do so. Boomers LOVE yield. And you can generate a lot of yield by selling IBIT calls against an IBIT long. Boomers HATE BTC’s big drawdowns – they’re terrified of them. Boomers will buy puts to protect downside. All kinds of structured products will be introduced in the coming years, offering many different payout profiles to fit various investors’ needs. My guess is it will all add up to higher BTC prices and lower realized volatility.”
[Good Call] “I don’t want to tell you what ToT and GOAT are. I want to tell you why it strikes me as one of the most interesting things I’ve ever seen in crypto.”
[Bad Call] “I don’t trade Polymarket but 67% feels expensive to me relative to the way this all looks right now. 55ish feels like fair value for Trump in my subjective opinion.”
[Interesting Call] “Stories Are Human. Humans Create Culture. Culture Drives Progress… For Now”
[TBD Call] “ToT and GOAT now take AI mania (specifically LLM and Agent mania) and combine it with memecoin mania in a way that has the POTENTIAL to revolutionize humans’ relationships with LLMs. To be clear, ToT and GOAT are not that yet, and they may never be. Right now, GOAT is simply a memecoin, 1.9mm of which was sent to ToT’s wallet and is currently worth $1mm. The question is, “What is ToT going to do with this $1mm in GOAT, plus a HUGE amount of attention?” And I find that to be a VERY interesting question. It is especially interesting when you take time to dig into Infinite Backrooms and start reading some of the conversations between LLMs, which are then used to train ToT. If you believe we eventually create Artificial Superintelligence, what do you suppose the path to that destination will look like? ToT and GOAT look like part of that path to me. At the very least, a failed experiment that we can learn from and iterate on. At most, something akin to a step-change.”
[Good Call] “Outside of the AI Agent x Memecoin vertical, you also have some platform-type plays that are also interesting. Virtuals on Base is the headline name here with a $1.4bn market cap, up 335% in November. It is a launchpad and marketplace for AI Agents on Base. Ai16z (not to be confused with a16z) is perhaps the most interesting platform play – a DAO holding the memecoins of many AI Agents launched on its associated Eliza open-source platform.”
[Bad Call] N/A
[Interesting Call] “Hope is SUCH a better emotion than fear. I won’t say that fear doesn’t have its place because that emotion was forged through billions of years of evolution and it certainly does have its place. But hope. HOPE. Hope is what makes the world go round. A belief in a better tomorrow, serving as the fuel for today to go do our own little part in that effort. I am so hopeful.”
[TBD Call] “We’ll get into more detail on what this Trump administration means for Bitcoin and crypto here shortly. And I don’t want to spend a bunch of time here banging the drum on why this election was tremendously positive for America, Americans and humanity in general. But I do want to say that I am enormously hopeful for the future of this country – in the near term and the long term. Put crypto to the side for the moment. Put your pumping bags to the side.
THE DIRECTION OF THIS COUNTRY JUST TOOK A TREMENDOUSLY POSITIVE TURN. Probably half of you reading this strongly agree with that statement. Another quarter or so somewhat cautiously hope that to be true. And maybe a quarter of you completely disagree with that statement. I’m not going to argue the points here. But if you have been so brainwashed by mainstream media, or allowed a loved one who was brainwashed by mainstream media to in turn convince you that Trump is a fascist dictator – I invite you to write down your fears in a Google Doc. Write down that you’re scared for women’s rights; freedom of speech; the sanctity of our democratic ideals. Whatever your fears are about a Trump presidency – write them down now and set a calendar alarm to look at them once a year for the next four years. Go back and read your fears that you feel now. See how it works out.”
Closing Remarks
And now for some predictions (NFA. I am wrong often) –
Crypto in 2025 will likely be defined by a MUCH more favorable regulatory environment and political backdrop. This will be THE headline factor in 2025 and many of the current events will stem from this in one way or another.
Trump will sign an Executive Order that will be announced within the first 30 days of his administration that establishes a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve from the government’s seized BTC. The EO will also state the government will never sell seized BTC again.
The Lummis bill to buy BTC by selling gold will not pass in 2025. Trump will not issue an EO to buy more Bitcoin. The BSR will just be seized BTC.
The SEC will approve at least 5 new types of spot crypto ETFs.
Bitcoin’s price will reach $150k but not $200k in 2025.
Bitcoin’s largest peak-to-trough drawdown in 2025 will be ~35%
Spot BTC ETFs will see $50bn of new net inflows (2024 was $35bn)
Spot ETH ETFs will see $10bn of new net inflows $2.7bn)
Aggregate crypto market cap will reach $7tn but not $9tn in 2025 (currently $3.5tn)
The AI Agent aggregate market cap will reach $40bn in 1H-25 (as measured by sentient.market, currently $12bn)
Crypto use cases will continue to struggle to find product market fit in providing solutions to real world problems that lead to significant mass adoption.
Thanks for taking the time out of your month to read these. I wish you a great 2025!
"Good things come to families that laugh."
-Japanese Proverb
Travis Kling
Founder & Chief Investment Officer
Ikigai Asset Management
P.S.
Included below is an incomplete list of memorable tweets from the last month. Twitter is not investment advice and my views could easily be wrong. That being said, like it or not, Twitter matters for crypto. I have no interest in being a talking head for a living and babbling about on Twitter is a long way away from being a good steward of investor capital. However, this is a community with open-source software in its DNA, and participants want to crowd-source the truth. We are shepherds of this technology. Answers to fundamental questions about this asset class are not currently clear, so having a public platform to share your views with the community is important. After all, you’re helping shape the future :)
1. Ikigai Asset Management is the trade name for a collection of advisory and consulting businesses operated by Travis Kling, Anthony Emtman, and their team.
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