Ansem (@blknoiz06) on Solana, Altcoins, $BONK, and 2024 Trading Strategies | Ep. 290

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Ansem aka @blknoiz06, king of retail trading on twitter/X, talks about Solana airdrops + altcoins, how to find trends and capital allocation.

About Ansem

Zion aka Ansem aka @blknoiz06 is the king of retail trading on Twitter.

Ansem gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• SOL thesis
• SOL altcoins + airdrops
• SOL airdrops – Marginfi, Jupiter, drift, zeta markets
• How can the average Joe take their USD and onboard to SOL altcoins
• Trading strategies and capital allocation

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always, it’s your host, Matt Zahab, still coming in hot from the one and only Mexico, and I am a little more pumped than usual for today’s pod. I’ve had the pleasure to meet this lad in person. We have the one and only, and we’ll get to him in a second. We have the shortest man on Crypto Twitter on the show today. The king of retail trading. You might know him as the Sultan of Solana or the Chief BONK Officer. His takes are hot, and he brings the thunder, but when he parties, he’s a one beard wonder, a professional degen who pulls straight tens. Without further ado, I am very pleased to welcome the king of Crypto Twitter, Zion, aka Zee, aka Ansem, aka B-L-K-NOIZ, to the Cryptonews Podcast Zee. Welcome to the show, my friend. How you doing?

Zion Ansem
What’s good, brody? How you doing, man? Thanks for having me on.

Matt Zahab
Pumped to have you, man. It was a treat meeting you back in, what was that, end of July, early August of this year at Blockchain Futurist in Toronto. Shout out Tracy La Perulo and the whole Untraceable Team. That was a banger of a conference. And I feel like one of the things you always get when people meet you in person is your height. I obviously, I just knew you from Crypto Twitter. I just knew, you know, thankfully making me some bags shout out to you, and then I meet you in person. I’m like, damn, this guy’s tall. What’s it like when people one recognize you on the streets and be like, yo, are you Ansem? Are you B-L-K-NOIZ? And what are some of the few first things they comment on every time they see you?

Zion Ansem
Yeah, every time. They’re like, dude, you’re tall. I didn’t know you was tall. I knew you were tall, but I know you were this tall. That happens every single time. But it’s been funny, man, the past, I guess, two years now. My account before the last bull run was only, like, 3K. 3 or 5K followers. So I really didn’t have that much. But I was always posting crypto shit. And then I did well that cycle, and a lot of people that tailed me on some trades, just like, I kept getting more and more followers. And then 2022 is when I went to actually, it was the Avalanche conference. I was like, 100K followers. I was like, fuck it. I got to go somewhere. I got to go on vacation. I’ve been trading nonstop for, like, twelve months. Fucking I’m going to go to the Barcelona for the Avax conference. And that was the first time where anybody in person recognized me from Twitter and was like, you’re Ansem. I was like, this shit is weird. I’m walking around the conference and people are coming up to me like, yo, can I take a picture with you? Like, yo, you’re answering. Yo, you made me so much money. Like, yo, what’s good? So that caught me off guard. I didn’t expect that to happen. It never really translates in your head how much having followers online can actually be real people in real life. That was the first time. At that point, I was really caught off guard. But since then it’s been pretty cool. It’s getting more and more frequent now. I don’t know, because I’ve just been active on Twitter so people see my face and my abbey a lot more. You’re tall and they’re like, dude, okay, I made money off this. And they’re like, what’s the next coin to buy? What do I buy next?

Matt Zahab
Of course, everyone wants you to pad their bags. Did twelve year old Zee in? I guess you would have been grade six or grade seven, dunking on kids in the schoolyard, flirting with little young girls. Did you ever think that you’d be, one Twitter famous and two have the ability to literally move markets? That’s got to be something wild that you can tweet out a coin and after you make a tweet, the price rises. That’s got to be some crazy shit right there.

Zion Ansem
I never even thought about trading, really. When I was younger, I was always good at math and science. That was what I was good at in school growing up. And I was like, I’m going to do engineering. So I did engineering for college. I went to Georgia Tech and I started studying computer science, but I didn’t really learn about crypto until senior year. That’s why I learned about Bitcoin. And then when I graduated is when I picked up trading. Yeah, dude, like that cycle. So a lot of people do post their public ideas on Twitter, and a lot of people do, like the blogs and everything. It’s typically the VC guys, though, that are writing all their on the market. So they’re writing out their thesis and it’s like what they think about this? What do you think about that? What they think is going to happen for the next year. But it’s not really that often that you have just like regular retail people writing out coherent long pieces on the market. And I started doing that in late 2021 because I had my trade journal, which is consumpt and it only had like 100 or so followers on there. And I was tweeting out all my trades. It was just my journal. I was like, what I’m looking at this month, what my core bags are, what I’m looking at for the next month. What did I fuck up on? What did I do wrong? What did I do right? And I would just do it every week. And a lot of people were like, yo, you need to share this with more people. This is really helping me trade. It’s not like you’re claiming to be right all the time, but your thought process is helping me grow as a trader. So when I was doing that, was it late 2021? That’s why I started writing Substack. Somebody was like, dude, make a blog. Like write a longer form blog.

Matt Zahab
Those were fire when those first came out. It was easy because when a lot of the VCs write their thesis, it’s long, it’s a lot of big paragraphs. Yours was like point form, almost like an elongated tweet. It was just like, it was a little bit more than a tweet. Very easily digestible.

Zion Ansem
Yeah, because it was really an extension of my trade journal. And that was basically like point form, like a little bit of theses, but it was in tweet format, so it was easy for people to read before. And I was like, let me just make this a little bit longer. But yeah, so I shared it on consumpt and then somebody reposted it on their public Twitter and was like, yo, z just posted this on his trade journal. People read this, it blew up a ton. I was like, fuck it, I’ll just repost it for my main account. I don’t know how many followers I had then wasn’t at 100K yet, but I just reposted on Main and was like, got a ton of engagement. My substack went crazy, so I was like, fucking, I guess I got to keep going. I mean after that I wrote some more and I had some VC guys that I met just from Twitter and like, yeah, dude, our funds are reading what you write about the market. I never really expected it to happen. I was just sharing, really was just sharing my trade journal because I needed somewhere to put it. And I was like, if it’s online, I can look back at it and see where I fucked up at. And I still have that entire tweet thread. It’s like almost 18 months long where I was, like, every month. This is what I’m looking at. So that’s how that happened.

Matt Zahab
So cool to see, man. I mean, there’s so many different angles. We can take this. I think we have to go present day. Give the listeners some absolute gold here. And that is good old Solana. You have been pumping. The shadow is the wrong word, but I love on Twitter when people chirp you and they’re like, oh, SOL’s rising. And now, you know, telling no. When I met you for the first time in the summer, when I was like, yo, dude, pleasure to meet you. Thanks for making me a little coin. You’re in my city, right know. Let me take you out. Let me show you the good bars. We went to Paris, Texas, absolute talent factory for those in Toronto who know what I’m talking about, too. That’s when you first told me about Sol. Give us the TLDR on Sol. Why are you so bullish on it? Tell us about your thesis on it. And I’d love if you could sort of reiterate a couple of the things you told me back in late July, early August, when we first met.

Zion Ansem
Yeah, man. So Solana has always been interesting to me, even when early last cycle. So I bought it super low. I think it was like a $1.50 or something. But the reason I was looking for that trade was because I missed the first chunk of DeFi Summer. So, like, early 2020, I was actually watching my daughter. She was, like, young, and I wasn’t really trading all that much early 2020. And then COVID happened, and I ended up. I was short Boeing into that COVID crash. Like, dude, if this shit spreads to New York. All the airlines are fucked like, I gotta get short is we’re, like, way ahead. So I made some money off that, and I was still on Crypto Twitter, but not, like, actively trading how I was. My first cycle started looking at stuff, and I started learning about DeFi Summer. I was, like, looking at the AAVE chart and I was like, what the fuck? How did I miss a fucking whatever it was 50X from the bottom, literally. Yeah. So I started trading on Uniswap. That was when Jeremy and crew trading. But, yeah, so trade on Uniswap. And I was like, that was when ETH gas fees started spiking. And I was like, how the fuck is anybody going to be able to trade on these markets if gas fees are this expensive for everybody? So in my head, I’m like, well, if these Alt L1 come up with some alternative where it’s like cheaper and faster people to trade, they’re going to fucking rip. So that’s when I found Solana, I found SBF, and I was like, well, this dude is backing this. And a ton of other people were smart on it was like, yeah, this is one of the options that could be differentiated from ETH. So that was the original thesis. It was just like something. Another L1 where Defi could be more performant. I read up on Anatoly. I was like, this dude, super smart, listened off his Podcast. His background is like an engineer at Qualcomm, I think it was. He was really good with distributed systems. I was reading up on him and so on. I was like, okay, this makes sense. So I bought it like a $1.50. I was like, whatever. And then it outperformed a ton of stuff in early 2021. And then basically for the rest of the year, it was just fucking ripping. It outperformed basically on every pullback. That and RUNE were ripping really hard, but it didn’t really have any apps on it. So back then there was just Raydium, and we had Solid the wallet and not really that many other applications. So NFTs didn’t pop off on Solana until late that year, and there weren’t really that many use cases where it made sense. It was proving what Solana was made for, why it was important. So that was back then. Tracked it from 150, like close to 200. Ended up selling it just based off of TA, somewhat close to the top, and just kept up to date with the entire ecosystem. So in late 2022 is when I went to breakpoint. And at breakpoint, I talked to a lot of the Solana founders and teams, and there was just a lot more activity in the ecosystem then than there was in early 2021. And I was like, well, if we have another cycle or next cycle, it’s probably going to be do way better than it did last cycle, because now there’s a lot more actual, real activity on chain. In 2021, they had some issues with congestion because it went down a few times because people were spamming the NFT mints when they happened, and there was no mechanism for guarding against that spam because every transaction was basically free. So after that happened, they had to make a few upgrades to the chain, and in mid 2022, they pushed those through, and that was like the priority fees. So that’s like, if you want to spam transactions on a hotspot of Solana’s state, you’re going to have to pay more to get your transactions through, which already exists on ETH by default. But the important thing on Solana is when that happens, it only happens in one area of the state. So the rest of applications on Solana aren’t affected because there’s paralyzed transactions instead of sequential transactions on Ethereum, you can have multiple things happening in parallel that aren’t touching the same area of Solana state. One of the reasons why it’s so much more performant than ETH. Yeah, generally, I was like, dude, there’s way more teams now. It’s the same thesis. They’ve upgraded the chain to get rid of some of the issues that they had prior to in 2021. And then it got crushed by FTX. It was at 38. I remember I was at Breakpoint, they announced their partnership with Google Cloud, and price was at like $38. Like $39. I was like, oh, yeah, this looks good. It’s about to break out. And then we get on a plan.

Matt Zahab
Sub ten, right?

Zion Ansem
Fucking FTX happened, and that shit SOLd off like 80% in a week. Went literally to $8. So after that happened, and then I was like, the recovery early that year, I was like, dude, this is way mispriced, because at breakpoint, nobody was talking about SBF, nobody cared about him. It was like, we are focused on building for the chain in the future. In crypto, nobody was really concerned with him. So I was like, this price dislocation is going to fix itself eventually whenever we have a bull market. So I was like, you have a combination of things where the sentiment was super low on the chain, but the progress that they’d made, technicals wise and also team wise, developer activity wise, were on the opposite side. So it was a combination of those two things. Why I thought it was like a really good trade. And then comparably, if you know what happened to DeFi Summer. I missed the first DeFi summer on ETH. I mean I still got the Uniswap airdrop because I was active enough, but I wasn’t early to, like, what was, like, the yield. Like, Wifi missed, like, that farming. Like, farming on compound. I miss.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, I missed all those too.

Zion Ansem
Yeah, dude. Like, all those early protocols, I missed them. And I’m like, now we have on Solana all these DeFi teams that don’t have tokens. They’ve been building for the past year and a half. And very active in all the hackathons, active on Twitter, active at Breakpoint, talking to people. And I was like, well, if Solana is going to have a resurgence. I’m assuming all these DeFi teams are going to end up dropping tokens eventually, and they’re probably going to drop these tokens to all the people who have been like, die hard Solana community members the entire time. And using their protocols while everybody’s like, no, Solana is dead. So I’m like, this is obvious trade. Even if you’re sitting in Solana spot and I don’t know how long it’s going to take, I remember I was like, I don’t know if it’s going to happen next year, six months, whatever, nine months. But in that time period, the longer that you’re farming all of these protocols, the longer that happens and nobody is paying attention. You’re so far ahead of everybody else. So if a DeFi summer happens on Solana, you’re going to fucking print.

Matt Zahab
Zee, let me jump in here. You got to give some gold to the listeners. So assume that Solana Summer is not over and you and I are in the same yacht here. I don’t think it is. We got a lot of people tuning in right now who follow you on Twitter, and they’re going to want to be like, yo, Zee, how can I actually make this happen? I’d love if you could give your workflow. We’ll use USA for an example. Let’s say we’re talking about going USD, onboarding USD onto a tier one exchange like Coinbase, and then what are the best protocols, practices, exchanges, bridges, you name it. How would you tell people to go from USD to Sol to then farming on all of these different protocols, buying shit coins. Give us the workflow there.

Zion Ansem
Got you. Yeah. If you have USD. So if you have a Coinbase account or whatever other exchange that you’re on, you can buy Solana on there, and then you can set up either a Phantom Wallet or a Backpack wallet. Those are two of the main wallets on Solana. You’re going to have to write down, obviously, to write down your seed phrase. Make sure you store it somewhere or in multiple places, don’t lose that. And then you’ll get a public address with your Solana address. So you’re going to send your Solana from Coinbase to your wallet, and then once you have that, you can interact with all of the different protocols on Solana. So lending and borrowing, which is basically the equivalent of AAVE on ETH, is called marginfi. They’re currently doing a points program. It’s not confirmed whether they’ll have a token or not. But if they do, you probably will benefit from farming those points. One of the biggest liquid staking protocols, which is JTO SOL, just did their airdrop actually today. So people who farm that got a nice airdrop, it’s coming in. I think it was like close to like 1 billion FDV. So similar to Lido and flashbots on ETH, because they also do MEV. And then what else? Like Jupiter, that’s the main aggregator, so it aggregates, swaps across all the different Dexes on Solana, and they also just enabled perps. So that’s actually a pretty big one. I think Jupiter is going to be pretty significant. The first airdrop already got announced, but they’re going to do it in multiple rounds. So even if you miss the first one, you still have possibility to get the further ones. And that’s just from volume on Jupiter. The good thing about these Solana Airdrops is it doesn’t cost a lot to test out all these protocols because the chain is so cheap to use. I was trying to tell people all year, it’s just a time thing, really. If you have $100, you can’t do a ton of transactions on ETH when the chain is congested. Like right now, the chain is like $40 per swap on Uniswap. But on Solana, you can literally test out every single protocol on the chain, and all you need is time. You just have to be active and doing it before everybody else is so marginfi. Jupiter JTO just did theirs. PIF just did their airdrop. They’re like probably like the Oracle for SOL, comparable to chain link. A lot of the perp dex don’t have tokens yet also. So that’s like Drift protocol, Zeta markets. All of those also don’t have tokens. So if literally you’re just active on SOL like save like a $100, $50, maybe you put in JTO SOL, deposit that in marginfi. So now you’re getting points there. Other $50, maybe you’re trading on Drift Zeta, whatever else, it’s like the same thing, whether you have 100 or 1000 or 10,000, and you can spread across all those different protocols. And then there’s Camino, which is like yield farming with LP pools, and there’s also Meteora, which is similar like AMM and also like liquidity pools. So there’s a few different things you can do. I think the. Oh, okay, the Tensor is another good one. Tensor is the NFT exchange. So it’s like similar to BLUR on ETH, you can trade NFTs and they have these Tensorians, which is their NFT collection. You can stake them and get points and also trade on the exchange and get points. I think Tensor is actually going to be a pretty big one because BLUR is massive and they basically killed OpenSea. So if you assume that Tensor is also the number one NFT exchange on Solana, and you think Solana is going to do really well this cycle, then it’s like, OK, you’re mapping valuations between the biggest protocols on SOL and the biggest protocols on ETH, and what that’s going to look.

Matt Zahab
That was Alpha City there population us. Another thing we got to talk about on SOL is BONK. That has been insane. You called BONK a couple months ago. This has been absolute bananas. And again, folks, before we get into BONK, I’m just going to reiterate what Zee said here. Open up a Coinbase account, throw in some USD, open up a Phantom wallet. It’s similar to MetaMask. It’s a Chrome extension. It is the purple little ghost looking dude. Transfer your SOL to that. As Zee said, make sure you write down your seed phrase. Keep that in multiple places. Do not put that in your notes on your iPhone or anything else. Write that on paper. Maybe give it to one person you love and trust, and make sure you keep that very close to the heart and somewhere in some place that you trust. So that is realistically the workflow. And then check out the show notes and get on marginfi Jupiter, Drift, Zeta markets and everything else that Zee just mentioned. But let’s get into shitcoins here. How the hell did you find BONK? Was this just like a Twitter madness? Did you get tipped off? Give me the TLDR. What was the official story on BONK? And are you still bullish on it after it’s gone up like multiple thousand percent over the last couple of months?

Zion Ansem
Yeah, it’s fucking ripping bro. BONK is a meme coin on Solana, like Doge is on ETH. But BONK is cool because it launched at the very pico lows of SOL. Like when SOL was around $10 or $8 or whatever it was. And it was Christmas of 2022. And some of the biggest guys on Solana, like developers, I don’t know if it was VCs. I think some VCs were involved. But basically a team of people on Solana launched a meme coin and they airdropped it to a lot of Solana developers, like active traders. So airdropped a good. A bit of the supply launched in December of 2022, and it fucking ripped. It went to like 400 mil, 500 mil, whatever market cap. And that was rare for Solana, but also rare because everybody thought Solana was dead at the time. So they launched BONK. And I was like, fuck. Okay, Alto and Solana aren’t fully dead, and that was December 2022. So this entire year, it’s basically been chopped down, basically sideways. But it’s the same thing that happens with Doge. So if you look at the Doge chart, it really only goes vertical for very short periods of time. And the rest of the time, it’s just chilling. But it’s like whenever retail comes back, or like, bull markets come back, people start buying Doge again. Like, oh, crypto is back. I’m going to buy Doge this cheapest coin I can get, whatever million of it, like, whatever. So doge always pumps before Altcoin cycles and last bull cycle, we had the same thing happen across all these different chains where it was like, there’s was a meme coin in every chain, just like there was a meme coin on the ETH. So last cycle was really, I think, the biggest one. We had DeFi, but then we also had this bridging meta where it was like, okay, I’m going to bridge this L1. I’m going to buy the dex, buy the meme coin, I’m going to buy whatever lending, borrowing protocol, and test everything out. So high risk, high reward type thing. But the meme coins are always funny because it’s kind of like representative of the culture of a chain similar to NFTs. People usually punt a small percentage of their core, whatever core, Ether core, whatever, SOL holdings into it. But it’s funny because this stuff can go vertical, as we saw with Doge last cycle. Nobody expected that shit to go to fucking 70 bill market cap or whatever ridiculous number it went to, but it did, because it was just like retail buying in crypto. So BONK started moving right after SOL, I think, broke out.

Matt Zahab
No, BONK started moving after you started tweeting about it. No one ever even heard of that. That was 100% you. No one ever even heard of BONK.

Zion Ansem
That wasn’t me, man. I didn’t buy the bottom of BONK. I really didn’t, because I saw it moving and I knew what it was. I was focused on the SOL breakout. I’m like, okay, farming all these DeFi protocols. I know SOL. Eventually, when it breaks that whatever, 25, 27, whatever that level range high was, I knew it was going to fly and it broke out. And then I saw BONK moving. I was like, oh, shit. Well, I know it’s going to be the beta to Solana because there’s no other alts on the chain at that point. It was like, it was just BONK and maybe like, whatever, marinade a few other ones, like hero a few other Solana alts. But really it was just BONK. And I’m like, well, how are people going to get Beta to Sol? I know what happens with the meme coins. When people bridge over, they’ll buy Solana and I’m going to buy whatever the meme coin is. You can’t buy anything else. So I know it’s going to be reflexive in that way. And then you also have that pattern matching where people saw Doge and Shib go to whatever multibillion dollar. I think Shib went to 40 billion. So, yeah. I’m like, well, if people are bridging over to Sol, they’re going to be buying Bach. And it was already listed on some major exchanges, like Bybit. So that’s just like the general thesis. The meme coins is always pump on the chain. That gets more attention and activity. But I don’t know, I think it’s going to rally into the end of the year. It’s already up a ton. I got some of my voice to buy it.

Matt Zahab
It’s up another ten ticks today, too.

Zion Ansem
Like 25% today. But, yeah, I think it’s going to go multibillion. What I think is going to happen is probably something similar to doge. So Doge went from like 700 mil to ten bill. I don’t know if it’s going to go to ten bill, but then it went sideways for like, two, three months. And then in April it pumped again and had, like, a second wind rally when people thought it was done already. So I think, similarly, if you have Solana do really well, the cycle, it breaks all time high. Maybe bank tops out this month or in January, but it goes sideways and you still see Solana doing well. So activity increases whatever TVL increases. People start using these DeFi protocols who have tokens now, and you just get more influx of attention to the chain and BONK doesn’t die out. I don’t think it will. But you’ll probably get a second rally at some point. Next year is kind of what I’m thinking. But I’m thinking sometime towards the end of this year or January is when you rotate whatever ten X you’re up on BONK back in the Sol.

Matt Zahab
Yeah. Chill it in SOL for a bit. I love that. Let’s jump into Cosmos. You also have a really good thesis on Cosmos. I mean, I got into Cosmos. ADAM also got into near shout out, near wearing the near shirt. Shout out. The near team. Got into both of those guys. I want to say mid to late 2021. I think I got in just a little bit before you started really tweeting about it as well. But I understand you’re still very bullish on both those. We’ve had some incredible guests on the show from the Cosmos ecosystem. A lot of room to grow there. Give us the $0.02, give us the elevator pitch on Cosmos and why it has so much room to grow and why it has such a high ceiling.

Zion Ansem
Yeah. Cosmos is interesting because they are usually first to a lot of ideas in crypto, how to do thIngs. They’re the first to proof of stake before E switched to proof of stake. The general idea on having application specific. Well, they have application specific chains with their idea, but that idea where you’re separating execution into what specific things that you need to do, kind of similarly to how we’re now, Ethan is, like, on the roll up roadmap, we’re going to have to have certain roll ups that you want to do certain things on. So we’re not congesting the main chain. Cosmos is cool because they never get a lot of attention on the BD side of things. They really only care about the tech side of things. They build out things the right way. So, like, the Cosmos SDK, which is an SDK for making your own chain on app chain, it’s very customizable to whatever the tailor needs you need specifically for your chain. Like, say, is one of the newer Cosmos chains that launched, and they were able to implement parallelized transactions, as well as tweaking Cosmos consensus in a way that time to finality is a lot quicker than a lot of the other chains. But that’s like, one of the cooler projects. Say they’re trying to be similar with the speed and cheap fees as SOL is, and not like a purely EVM chain. But I think the biggest narrative for Cosmos this cycle is going to be the modular one. So Celestia, which is, like, one of the best projects that’s launched this year, has done well. It’s like a five X up from what it launched at, like two to ten. But they’re purely focused on being the first modular data availability layer. So when you have roll ups, you need to post your data to some chain, and then you need to settle your proofs on another chain or the same chain. So what? Celestia’s goal is to be the cheapest way to post that data for roll ups, and then you’ll settle on either ETh or another settlement layer. And the guy, whatever his name is, Adler, was the dude who wrote the first paper on optimistic roll ups, and he’s like one of the founders of Celestia. So him and Mustafa, super smart guys, but are trying to do things the right way in crypto technicals wise, while also being focused on what makes the most sense long term. Because I think with the modular thesis is the reason that ETH is pivoting to being, like, a settlement and DA layer is because you literally don’t have the option of doing everything on ETH main net. Like, it’s just not possible. You only do, like, ten to 13 TPS. So you have to use roll ups to push all the execution off chain. It’s the only way it’s going to survive long term. But if you were to design a system from the ground up, you would probably do it in a way similar to how celestial is designed, where you have one chain specifically focused on DA, one chain specifically focused on settlement, and then maybe you have different roll ups that have their own application specific needs, which is really how they’re thinking about things. It’s like you’re going to have a ton of different roll ups. Some are generalizable, some are application specific, but they’re going to use Celestia for DA because it’s cheaper than what it currently is on ETH and other chains, and then that’s their go to market there. So I think Cosmos is in an interesting position because similarly to Solana, where the sentiment is super poor, but you have all this technical innovation happening underneath, behind the building. Right. Everybody’s constantly building. It’s similar in that way. And injective is another team that’s done really well this year. Actually been like, leading the market. But there’s a ton of different projects in the Cosmos ecosystem that just don’t get a lot of love because it’s very hard to rally people around an ecosystem when you don’t have one coin that’s representative of the entire thing. So the ETH community is super strong because it’s just we’re trying to drive as much value back to ETH as possible. It’s very simple thesis to get people all rallied around. But with Cosmos, it’s like, is it ADAM? Is it this other Cosmos chain.

Matt Zahab
And that’s one of your thesis you had a while ago, which was because Cosmos is so B2B focused. Right. It’s a lot of back end stuff that really moves the needle. It’s different where you got a lot of forward consumer facing products on ETH. And then furthermore, I believe you also said, don’t just throw De Niro’s, don’t just throw cake at ADAM, throw it at the things that are building with ADAM. And on the Cosmos ecosystem.

Zion Ansem
Exactly. It’s very different from ETH where it’s like, if I’m bullish ETH and roll ups, I want to buy ETH, but ADAM is not. It’s not as simple as just buy ADAM. You get exposure to all the Cosmos ecosystem. There’s a ton of different teams over there building some cool stuff, like Sommelier. There’s another cool team. They’re kind of similar to yearn on ETH, where they have these different farming strategies for yield. And they’re also cross chain. So they have some strategies on ETH and some strategies, I think, in the Cosmos, but that’s another really smart team. There’s a ton of cool stuff happening in Cosmos. There’s a lot of chains that haven’t even launched yet that are still pre mainnet that are also coming out next year. And some of those will be interesting also. But it’s definitely an area where if you’re early to it and paying attention, it’s like one of those other spots where it’s like you’re ahead of everybody.

Matt Zahab
Zee, you’re on a roll. We got to take a quick break here, mate. Huge shout out to our sponsor, the show, PrimeXBT. Everyone loves PrimeXBT as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders that demand highly reliable market data and performance. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promo for listeners of the Cryptonews Pod. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. That’s CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And now back to the show with Zee. Let’s get into some of your trading strategies and capital allocation. How the heck do you look forward, whether it’s a three month, six month, twelve month cycle, give us some of your workflows. Give us some of the secret sauce here. You always talk about capital allocation and how people are always rotating bags. Different trends, different hypotheses. And again, you’ve obviously had many kicks at the can. You’ve put your 10,000 hours in. I mean, when I met you in person, you were telling me you’re like a friggin ten hour a day Twitter guy. You’re always on the loop, you’re always trading. You’ve had reps, you’ve been in the trenches. But how does one become a good trader? Learn how to develop these thesis and learn how to see forward looking trends.

Zion Ansem
I’ll say it’s a combination of things. So first, for me, I’m a TA trader. Before anything else. Fundamentals are important, but the timing of everything is based on TA. So I’ll say, if you’re trying to learn technical analysis, I would probably start with that’s called technical analysis of financial markets by John J. Murphy. And it will cover all the basics you need to know. Just if you have no clue what TA is, just read that book, and then you’ll have a foundation to build everything else off of. And that’s like where you kind of start just with learning how to trade markets. And I’ll say from there, personally, I learned how to trade from Twitter. So when I was on Twitter back in 2017, I was following dudes like Kobe, like Loomdart, like Trader Mayne, like Bitcoin, Conan Corral, FS, Crypt, a ton of really good Twitter traders who were there and sharing how their thought process was for navigating crypto markets and how TA works. Some of the different strategies that they use there. I would say typically in crypto, you have really strong trends. So the way to capitalize on them is either by positioning before these trends happening or getting really good at identifying when the trend is about to shift from bear to bull or bull to bear, and you have consolidation and then you have impulsion. That’s the two things the markets do. So either they’re going sideways or they’re trending up or they’re trending down. Simplest thing you need to know about markets, they only do three things. So in bear markets, when everybody’s like screaming, oh, my God, crypto is going to zero, she’s down 90%. And that’s all you’re going to hear on the news. If you’re just a pure retail, have no idea what you’re doing trader. So doing those when the sentiment is really poor on crypto, that’s when you typically have the low volume periods, prices going sideways, and it’s just going to stay around the same prices for several months at a time. So with Bitcoin this past year, we were at what, like, I think 17K FTX, we did like 15K, but we’re trading in the range for several months. And if you have these ranges, you can kind of like bracket them. It’s the same thing on alts. You either want to be positioned when that range high breaks out and you want to already have been like dollar cost averaging in, or you want to be able to identify when that trend is going to shift. Typically, just TA wise why I tell people you try either dollar cost averaging in bear markets when stuff is down 80, 90%, or figure out have some signal for when the breakout is going to happen. But as far as capital allocation, it depends a little bit on what size kind of you’re moving. I would say if you’re super small size, you probably want to find some really high conviction plays and focus the majority of your portfolio in those, and then try and play a lot of different airdrops. So like I said, with Solana this year, people who played the JTO airdrop, even if they only had a few Solana right now, they’re getting over 5K just from the airdrop, which is crazy, but it was because there was not a ton of people focusing on using the protocol. And then it came out at a pretty decent valuation. Once people were like, oh, this is a good team on Solana, reflective of their importance to the chain. And you have a ton of that in crypto where it’s like farm these airdrops that a lot of people are not looking at all that VC Capital that these companies raise. Some of that’s going to go to the community, and you want to be a part of the community that’s getting that capital. So if you’re small size, I would say focus on whatever your highest conviction plays and then focus on airdrops. If you’re a slightly larger size, you kind of want to separate your portfolio into two different things. So you have your long term bags. For me, that’s stuff like Solana, Coinbase, stock, Bitcoin, like I like prime, parallel the game, and just like keep 70% of your portfolio in those. So that I’m trying to buy the bottom and I’m not really trying to trade in month to month in between, and I’m trying to sell when I think the cycle is close to ending and try and scale out that way. And that’s like portfolio you keep whatever in your hardware wallet. Don’t really touch it. Keep in a separate place. And then with 30% of your portfolio, you can do all the degen shit. So it’s like, I’m trying to hit every rotation. I’m like, I’m aping micro caps on this chain. I’m farming whatever you’re doing, your perps, whatever, all that shit. So it’s like 30% of your portfolio. That’s the part where you’re more active and searching for whatever, the flavor of the month type shit. So when we had the AI pump earlier this year, I did not see any of that coming at all. Like, dude, I saw chat GPT drop, and I was like, damn, that’s kind of cool. But everybody else in crypto was like, now we’re buying AI coins. So it’s like stuff like, like, what’s another one? Like OLAS, like an AGIX. A ton of these altcoins that were just tangentially related to AI went fucking like 5X plus. And you always want to have some of your portfolio either in cash or like, if it’s in cash ETH, SOL, whatever. But you want to have some part of your portfolio that’s like your ape stack. So it’s like, whatever, ready, deploy new. That pops up, and it’s like, yeah, I’m ready. All right, I got this. I already got this money set aside. I’m not thinking like, oh, shit, I got to sell some of this. Should I sell this? Because a lot of times when you’re in those positions, if you can move like that extremely fast before everybody else, you’re going to make way more than people. So if you have a portion of your whatever portfolio set aside to do stuff like that, it’s like, really advantageous. And also in bull markets, you’ll have these leverage wipeouts because everybody who didn’t buy the bottom is like, damn, I only got $500. I’m going to use 20X leverage, middle of a trend, and then a ton of people do that. Oh, it’s working. Stuff’s going up. And then you’ll get a flash crash of like 20%, 30%, wipe out all the longs. And if you’re one of the people who has capital aside, you’re like, oh, now I can get my entry into something. Yeah, you look for those, like, 20%, 30% dips. As far as strategies for doing that, honestly, last cycle I did a lot of it just on my own, really. So as I said before, I’m like, I’m on Twitter online all the time. I have lists of all these different ecosystems, like devs traders, that I look at pretty frequently. So I’m pretty in tune with everything that’s going on in crypto on a day to day basis. And then what I try to do is journal my thoughts a lot. So I tweeted this, I think, yesterday, but I was like, you should have a list of alts for all the different sectors in crypto. And then you should have a general idea of what are the most popular alts out of those different sectors. So it’s like, okay, nobody’s talking about L2s right now, but I know ARB, Base, whatever other L2s, I know what they are. So it’s like, when I think attention is about to shift back to L2s, I’m like, okay, I can just buy these. Instead of having to think through, like, damn, what do I buy? L2s are pumping. Then you got to go look and do research on all the L2s. But if you already have that and you’re already taking notes on those different sectors and what fundamental catalysts they have coming up, you’re more ready to shift your capital around. So I think that’s generally how I like operating crypto. It’s also good to have a small group of friends that you can bounce stuff off of and really easy to find them on Twitter, even if you don’t know anybody. Just, like, be a reply guy. If you don’t know anybody in Crypto Twitter during bull markets, you can make a lot of friends simply by being a reply guy, because all the interactions happen under a lot of the bigger guys posts. And that used to be me. I would comment on people’s stuff, like, start talking to people. And that’s how I got into some group chats, just from sharing ideas. And people used to see things the same way I was seeing them. And I see that a lot with people who comment under my tweets. I’m like, oh, this dude knew what he was talking about. The last time he commented, he commented this time he knows what he’s talking about. This time he knows what he’s talking about. Let me follow this guy back. Let’s see what he says. Yeah, so it’s like in crypto, you can build your reputation really easily by just interacting with people and sharing your ideas in a way that’s not really possible in a lot of different areas, just generally in life, because you can become an expert on crypto with no background knowledge of anything else. Just by studying markets and how these cycles work, because it’s such a new asset class.

Matt Zahab
100%. That was a little master class. Thank you for that. We are getting a little tight for time. A couple more questions. The Coinbase thesis, I love this. Obviously, this is not an investing advice Podcast. Mind you, Zee has dropped some absolute fire. But I do have to say that I do own Coinbase as well. And guys, before I ask Zee this question, if you guys want exposure and you don’t want to open up a crypto wallet, you don’t want to open up a Coinbase account, but you own a bank account or you have a trading account, whatever the case may be, Robinhood, whatever. You can get exposure to crypto in a tax free way. And you can buy Coinbase stock, which I and Zee’s believes that there is still a lot of room for growth. Or you can buy any of the Bitcoin mining stocks. You have your Marathon, you have your Hut 8, you have Michael Saylor, the sickest puppy in all of crypto, just stacking Bitcoin with microstrategy. There’s tons of ways to do this. Zee, what are some of your favorites here if people want exposure to crypto without actually buying crypto?

Zion Ansem
Yeah,  Coinbase is, I think, far and away the easiest bet that you can make in traditional markets if you’re trying to bet on crypto. And it’s funny because I think this is what a lot of the boomers are going to do. They’re like, I don’t want to buy. I don’t want to buy crypto. I don’t want to have to think through all these different altcoins, go to CoinGecko, and it’s like a list of 100 alts. If you don’t know crypto, you’re like, how am I supposed to know which one to buy? People telling you to buy, like Cardano and all this random shit. So I think a lot of the people who already have stocks, already have their fidelity. They got real estate, got gold, got all that shit. They’re like, oh, I want to get exposure to crypto. Coinbase is the obviously biggest company in the US to get exposure to crypto. Like, they’re the biggest retail trading venue. They’re probably going to be the custodian for these Bitcoin ETFs to get approved next year. They also do like, they have Coinbase Ventures, they have cloud. Like, they’re pretty active in a lot of different parts of the crypto ecosystem. And really, I think it’s the left curve, like, oh, I want to get exposure to crypto. I’m going to buy Coinbase. And they’ve also never had a bull market, which is a really big thing for me. It’s like the chart has been down since their IPO. So when you have those situations where it’s like the general consensus is that, oh, this stock has been down, only crypto is dead. FTX just happened. Whatever, SBF blew up the industry, this isn’t coming back and it’s just down and it goes sideways. And then when it starts going up again, you have a ton of people who are like, oh, maybe I’m wrong. I need to get exposure to this. And I think that’s going to happen a lot next year. If the BlackRock Bitcoin ETF goes through, which is likely to happen, all these people who thought crypto was dead are going to be like, okay, how do I get exposure to crypto? And Coinbase is going to be one of the easiest ways, I think. But also, miners are interesting, the companies who mine Bitcoin. And the reason they’re interesting this cycle is because a lot of the discourse around Bitcoin’s block space the past few years, it’s been concerning because there’s not a ton of activity with transaction volume, and miners get paid, the more activity that’s going on on chain. So this year we’ve had Ordinals. And Ordinals are like when people are, they call them inscriptions, but they’re basically similar to NFTs, but they’re directly inscribed with the number Satoshi in each block on Bitcoin. So that’s been a ton of a huge increase in activity that people are paying transaction fees on Bitcoin this year. And I know for a fact none of these TradFi analysts expected that to happen and are pricing that into any of their models for how much money these Bitcoin miners are going to be making. Because every time the halving happens, Bitcoin miners are going to make more money because the emissions are less than they were previously. So if you have that counterbalanced by all this Ordinals activity, it’s going to be like, wait. The whole pricing situation for these companies changes, and I don’t think it’s priced in. So stuff like, what’s one like CLSK.

Matt Zahab
Marathon, Hut 8.

Zion Ansem
Mara, Riot, those different miners could also do well. And it’s probably another way people are going to get exposure without having to buy crypto directly.

Matt Zahab
And it’s tax free. That’s like a huge, you throw that in your IRA, your Roth account for us Canadians, TFSA, the home run as well, RSP, you name it. So, Ansem, you’ve absolutely crushed this, man. Last question, and I know that you tweeted this out a couple of days ago. This episode is going to air on Monday the 11th, and we are getting close to that. But Monday the 12th, Monday the 11th, you and DFK, that was one of your biggest takes back in the day, baby bro. JEWEL, that was one of your big takes. I remember the heydays. I would wake up in the morning, literally before I would take a pee or wash my face or even do anything. I would whip open the phone and I would check the price, and I’d be like, I just made $500 today. I was making $500 a day doing nothing. You were probably making like 5K a day. You’re back on it. Do we have room to grow here? Is it going to get back to the highs? And, folks, the listeners at home, if you’ve seen the chart, it literally ripped, came all the way down, and it has been sideways until this guy tweeted about it two days ago. And we got legs again, last take, and then we’re off the pod. What’s happening with JEWEL?

Zion Ansem
So, bro, I used to love JEWEL. So, DeFi Kingdoms was one of my favorite trades last cycle, bro, because it launched in, it was August or September of 2021. And at the time, I was one of the guys bridging to every single chain. I was bridging, literally, AVAx, whatever, Harmony, Solana, any chain that had new stuff launching on it. I was there like one of the first people there that was like the meta, like, bridge to whatever. L1, test out all the new shit, be the first one there. And DFK was the first Dex that had fucking music in a game. And I was like, what the fuck? I’m testing out all think every other Dex is a Uniswap fork. Every single other decks, like, pure Uniswap fork. Same UI, same whatever. I’m like, okay, fuck it. I’ll buy the Dex coin, buy the chain coin. And then I bridge to Harmony, and I’m looking at DFK, and I’m reading through the docs, and there’s whatever, all the different hero types, all the different classes, the different skills that they do. And I used to be a big World of Warcraft guy. Like, Back in the day, I played World of Warcraft. I played League of Legends. I was a computer nerd. I used to play all the video games, and I never found anything crypto that was like, damn. I would play this, I would look at this, and I’m reading through the docs. I’m like, this is something that is at least is different from everything else that exists in crypto. And people laughed at me a lot back when I said it. I was like, dude, in my head. But that was the first thing that happened in my head. I was like, World of Warcraft, the different heroes, different classes, different skills, because I used to have whatever, herbalism, blacksmithing or the other, tailoring all that shit in World of Warcraft. I’m like, dude, this is the same shit. This is my NFT. So I was hyped. I was like, dude, I threw some extra cash at it. And the way the unlocked schedule worked, it was like a ton of it is locked on the back end. But if you throw money in the LPs early, your APR is extremely high. And I’m like, okay, well, it’s going to be locked for a while, but they’re incentivizing users in a really good way. So I’m like, if people are going to bridge over to here, and then it’s like, the game is decent, this is going to rip. So I minted the Gen Zeros when they dropped. I was like one of the first people in all the LP pools. I shared it in a discord. I still have the screenshot of it. I was like, bro, I just found the craziest APR on this game on Harmony. And people were like, fucking Harmony? Nobody’s going to fucking Harmony. Nobody’s bringing the Harmony. And then it was right around the time the market also topped. So it happened in September. I was farming it all September, October, and then in November, I was like, damn, market looks like it’s topping. So I started telling people like, yo, I’m going in the stables. I’m going cash. I think markets top, but I’m looking at DFK, and it doesn’t trade on any centralized exchanges. It’s purely on a Dex, and I’m still farming it, and I’m still playing with all these fucking heroes that I’m buying and fucking summoning new heroes, like, whatever, level them up and shit. So I was like, I’m just going to play DFK because there’s purely trading on a Dex. There’s no perps or anything. It’s a new launch. So if attention keeps increasing and going in that direction, the coin can keep going up even while other stuff is going down because it’s still small. It’s like, it’s not that big of a market cap. And that was my whole thesis for why I thought it was going to continue to do well.

Matt Zahab
What about present day? Do we got some legs on this or what?

Zion Ansem
Yeah. Okay, so back then, it was super inflationary. Inflation was extremely high. The APR was how they incentivized all the LPs. And that’s one of the reason that it crashed so hard, is because it was super inflationary, and it also went straight up. So it was like a parabola breaking, plus all the inflationary rewards hitting at the same time. People took profit a lot. So right now, JEWEL is on. It’s not on Harmony anymore. It’s on Clayton, which is the main chain, and then it’s also on an AVAX subnet. So there’s two different realms and there’s three tokens, but JEWEL is no longer inflationary. They burned all the locked JEWEL, like most of it, and converted that into Crystal and Jade, and then that’s unlocking now. But JEWEL is purely deflationary. So you spend it in game. It’s the gas token on the AVAX subnet, its own subnet, and basically you need to spend it to do a lot of the things in game. So now it’s deflationary, whereas before it was inflationary. And they also have implemented all the combat systems, the PvP, PvE, all of that that didn’t exist back in the early stage of the game. They’ve been building it out this entire time. So now you actually have a game that people can play rather than just summoning heroes and doing the quest. It’s actually like PvP versus other people, and you have a deflationary coin instead of inflationary. So, dude, I don’t know if it’s going to go back to all time high, but there is absolutely no way I wasn’t at least getting some of it just because of how much I was on it early on.

Matt Zahab
100%.

Zion Ansem
I think it’s a decent spot. It just broke out. It just broke out of its range. It’s been sideways for like a year.

Matt Zahab
I got to go check it out. I haven’t checked since. I want to say, god, probably April or March of 2022. Like, legit. I haven’t checked in a hot minute. Zee on fire. Really appreciate your time, dude. This has been an absolute treat. One last question before you go. When my dolphins and your Eagles meet in the Super bowl, and we absolutely trounce you guys, Tua throws for 550. Tyreek has 220 yards. Mostert is running all over you. How are you going to feel? How shitty are you going to feel?

Zion Ansem
Bro we got to go to the game. We should go to Vegas, dude. It’s in Vegas this year.

Matt Zahab
Yeah, you guys might be there. I’m not going to be there. I can’t see the fins getting through. Our defense is too weak. I don’t think we have the legs. I don’t know if we can beat the Chiefs in our conference. Really, my only worry is the Chiefs. I don’t think we got to worry about anybody else but you guys. You got a couple of wagons in that conference. San Fran just beat you like they smacked us, bro.

Zion Ansem
Smacked us.

Matt Zahab
That was bad. You were at that game too, right?

Zion Ansem
I was at the game. I was mad as fuck.

Matt Zahab
Give me last question prediction. You guys going to win it or what? Who’s going to win the Super Bowl?

Zion Ansem
Eagles, bro. I think it’s going to be okay. Eagles. Eagles 49 ers in the NFC Championship. I think the Cowboys are going to lose first round Eagles in the Super Bowl. I think we’re going to play the Ravens.

Matt Zahab
Lamar?

Zion Ansem
Eh, Ravens.

Matt Zahab
I love it. Appreciate you, bro. Great Pod. Really appreciate this and hopefully we’ll have you on for round two in the near future. Before you go, even though everyone already knows, but you got to plug yourself. Where can our listeners find you on Twitter?

Zion Ansem
Yeah, I’m @blknoiz06 on Twitter and then my other account is @conzimp that’s me on Twitter.

Matt Zahab
Love it. Folks what an episode. The one and only Zion aka Ansem aka B-L-K-NOIZ coming on the show, dropping knowledge bombs left, right and center. Super pumped to have him on and always appreciate his time. Folks if you guys enjoyed this one and hope you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I speaking to the team. Love you guys so much. Thank you for everything. Justas, my amazing sound editor, you are the GOAT. Appreciate you, my man. And back to the listeners. Love you guys. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.