1000x

Avi sits down with Illia Polosukhin at Token2049 in Singapore — co-author of “Attention Is All You Need,” the paper every modern AI model is built on, and co-founder of NEAR. Illia starts with his grandparents’ Sberbank savings book going worthless overnight and bread going up a hundredfold in a year in post-Soviet Ukraine, then walks through how transformers actually work: why recurrent models were too slow, what the attention mechanism really does, and why the aliens in Arrival are the right analogy. He left Google while the paper was being written to build a company that would let computers write code. What stopped him wasn’t the compute — it was that he couldn’t pay the students labeling his training data. That detour became NEAR.

From there: the consensus protocols they broke on camera, a standing bounty for fixing Solana, how NEAR went from blockchain to fintech app running four billion a month, why Illia says you should not give your AI agent a private key, the twenty trillion dollar agent commerce thesis, and the full story of the $3.8M exploit — including how they found the attacker, got all the money back, and got an apology on chain.

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Timestamps:

00:00 Coming Up on 1000x...

01:01 Ukraine, Hyperinflation, And Science Fiction

02:59 “A Machine Should Write This Code”

07:30 Joining Google, And Inventing The Transformer

16:07 Leaving Google, And Stumbling Into Crypto

20:35 The Protocols They Broke On A Whiteboard

23:29 Chain Abstraction, And Building NEAR.com

33:15 What AI x Blockchain Actually Means

39:42 The $3.8M Exploit, And The Apology

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Disclaimer: Nothing said on 1000x is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Avi, Jonah and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

The whole market de-risked into the Anthropic S-1. Then it bottomed the day the filing dropped.

Avi is back in New York after a month that ran from Token2049 in Singapore to a wedding in Iraq, and he opens on why that trade keeps working — the market as a weighing machine, the perception of reality getting so bad that there’s nowhere left to go, and the short blowout that followed. Intel at 85 back to 94, SanDisk up six percent, Nasdaq up two. Same trade as the tariffs. Same trade as Iran.

Then Jonah on the filing itself. A hundred and thirty-two billion in cash against forward compute commitments north of half a trillion, which leaves exponential growth, death, or a bailout — and he thinks he knows which. Founders holding 50.1% voting control is the detail he’s most bearish on. But the broader read is constructive: SK Hynix sold out through 2030, a DRAM shortage with a long runway, another two hundred billion of equity capital entering the system, and an AI trade still in the first or second inning. The thing to avoid is uncreditworthy neo clouds whose creditors end up subsidizing Meta’s buildout.

From there, the risk that actually matters before the midterms, which Jonah argues is a single Polymarket chart. Avi pushes back hard on the affordability narrative, on who’s really struggling, and on why housing supply is the whole ballgame. And they land somewhere counterintuitive: a Democratic administration probably can’t stop AI, but it can do almost anything it wants to crypto.

Plus: why shorting altcoins may be the cleanest hedge in the book, million dollar Bitcoin, Jason Calacanis being annoyingly right, and why giving up on nuclear after Three Mile Island was the worst own goal in modern economic history.

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Timestamps:

00:00 Coming Up on 1000x...

00:36 Why The Market Bottomed On The S-1

07:57 “Israel Is A Third World Country”

12:50 $132B In Cash, Half A Trillion In Commitments

16:39 The Only Chart That Matters

20:37 Affordability, The DSA, And What Actually Breaks

30:22 Crypto Is The Real Political Risk, Not AI

33:27 Million Dollar Bitcoin

41:16 You Only Need One Token

44:05 Three Mile Island, And The Worst Own Goal In Modern History

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Disclaimer: Nothing said on 1000x is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Avi, Jonah and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Avi is back from two weeks on the road — Singapore, Istanbul, and Iraq — and Jonah has spent that time doing actual work on the credit problem nobody wants to look at.

They open on risk: the donut chain in Iraq pulling ten million a year because nobody else bothered to show up, Paul Tudor Jones’s “losers average losers,” why wealth is self-reinforcing, and the adverse selection problem that explains why the deal in your DMs is still open.

Then Jonah walks through CoreWeave. The bonds are in distressed territory, the CDS trades sixteen points up front, and six-year paper is at seventy-nine cents. He models the company burning more than thirty billion in free cash flow a year, every year, with all of it having to come from public markets. Zoom out and it’s roughly a trillion dollars of AI CapEx this year against a free cash flow deficit of a hundred and sixty-five billion, going to three hundred and thirty-four billion next year.

Then a full monologue on why compute futures are never going to work — no enduring benchmark, a fragmenting chip universe, physical delivery that’s far too bespoke, and incumbents who benefit from exactly the opacity a futures market would destroy. Jonah respectfully disagrees with Don Wilson on this one.

And at the end, the first time this decade Jonah has been worried about Bitcoin — and it has nothing to do with quantum.

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Timestamps:

00:00 Coming Up on 1000x...

00:48 Singapore, Istanbul, And Iraq

02:24 Donut World: $10M A Year Selling Donuts In Iraq

04:22 Losers Average Losers

13:09 CoreWeave’s Bonds Are In Distress

21:05 A Trillion In CapEx, And Who Has To Fund It

22:49 The Shale Playbook: Why The Neo Clouds Get Eaten

30:49 Why Compute Futures Won’t Happen

40:46 Jonah’s New Bitcoin Worry — And It Isn’t Quantum

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Disclaimer: Nothing said on 1000x is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Avi, Jonah and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Avi sits down with Arthur Hayes at Token2049 in Singapore — the co-founder of BitMEX, the man who invented the perpetual swap, and now the founder of FLOP Network.

Arthur traces the whole arc: growing up in Buffalo with parents who worked for General Motors, reading a book in high school that convinced him to learn Chinese and move to Asia, and starting his first day on a trading desk the morning Lehman Brothers failed. Then getting fired from Citibank in 2013, finding Bitcoin, and building the exchange that would go on to invent the product every venue in crypto now runs on — including why the first version of the perp failed, and what the funding rate was actually designed to fix.

Then the hard part: why shutting BitMEX down was a relief, what it does to you to be the bearer of billions in customer assets, and what happens to the insurance fund.

Arthur argues the AI buildout is a global misallocation of capital — that none of the frontier labs make money, that the unit economics get worse rather than better as data centers get more expensive and compute gets cheaper, and that he puts 75% odds on the labs needing a government bailout to honor their compute commitments. Which, in his view, is the most bullish thing in the world for crypto.

Plus: why both political parties always print, why China can’t assign its losses either, Zcash and the privacy narrative, and the case for a cryptocurrency pegged directly to compute and designed for AI agents rather than people.

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Timestamps:

00:00 Coming Up on 1000x...

00:39 Buffalo, General Motors, And The Book That Sent Him To Asia

04:29 His First Day On The Desk Was The Day Lehman Failed

09:14 Building BitMEX, And The 100x Leverage Unlock

15:26 Inventing The Perp

18:57 Shutting Down BitMEX, And The 30,000 BTC Question

26:16 “We’re Wasting Trillions On AI”

29:22 Why The Bailout Is Inevitable

40:47 FLOP: A Currency For AI Agents

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Disclaimer: Nothing said on 1000x is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Avi, Jonah and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

Avi opens with the story of the last week — the RuneScape Gold allegations, what actually happened onchain, and a promise to the people who scammed his audience. Then he and Jonah get into why memecoin culture is a tax on your attention, and what separates a scam from a trade.

From there it's markets. Jonah makes the case that Iran is a cornered animal with nothing left to escalate with, that the Strait of Hormuz is losing its relevance in real time, and that the deflation coming out of it is enormously bullish for risk assets. Avi calls macro "astrology for men." Jonah takes that personally and defends macro as a game of common sense played over a long enough timeframe.

The back half is megatrends: how to spot one, why institutions structurally can't ride them, and why that's retail's biggest edge. Plus copper, uranium, AI drug discovery, the case against buying the index, and Jonah's term for the fastest-growing job in business — the meat proxy.

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Timestamps:

00:00 Coming Up on 1000x...

00:59 Avi Responds To The Allegations

10:20 What Actually Counts As A Scam

12:32 Twitter Beef, Posers, And Getting Back To Builders

22:10 Iran Is Cornered: The Strait Of Hormuz Trade

26:47 "Macro Is Astrology For Men"

32:07 Megatrends, And Retail's Edge Over The Pros

44:44 Why Deflation Is Bullish

47:13 Meat Proxies: Doing What AI Can't

56:41 Done With Indices

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Disclaimer: Nothing said on 1000x is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Avi, Jonah and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

#Crypto #Altcoins #StockMarket #Bitcoin #Altseason #1000xPodcast #Stocks #Macro #Trading #Investing #Ethereum #Solana #Fed #CryptoScam #Q4

Avi Felman sits down with Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs, to talk about what happens when the largest institutions in finance start building on crypto rails.

Bryan traces LayerZero's path from an MEV shop and a shockingly bad bridge to a protocol that has moved over $300 billion lifetime across roughly 170 chains, with $150 billion in assets built on top and $10–15 billion moving every month. Then he gets into what's next: ZERO, a ZK-first chain built from the ground up at multiple millions of transactions per second, and Atlas, a trading environment with roughly 10-millisecond block times that folds settlement, clearing, matching and credit into a single stack — with DTCC, ICE and Citadel among the announced partners, and four to five of the world's largest exchanges already live on testnet.

They also cover the standards war LayerZero won, why a meaningful chain still rolls back every three to four months, DTCC's mandate to tokenize $100 trillion in assets, the fee switch, and how 75% of Atlas trading fees flow into buying and burning ZERO.

Plus: dropping out of computer science to play poker professionally, losing his career overnight to the 2011 online poker ban, and selling machine learning models to Billy Beane.

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Coming Up on 1000x...

(01:32) Poker, Bitcoin, And Selling Models To Billy Beane

(07:19) MEV, Broken Bridges, And Building LayerZero

(16:37 Winning The Standards War: Tether, PayPal, Ondo

(26:51) When Chains Roll Back

(30:54) Two Million Transactions Per Second

(36:07) Atlas, And TradFi's $100M Checks

(44:53) The Fee Switch, And Burning ZERO

(48:30) Tokenizing $100 Trillion

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Disclaimer: Nothing said on 1000x is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Avi, Jonah and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

This week, Avi sits down with Scott Shay, co-founder and former chairman of Signature Bank and now founder of N3XT. Scott started at Salomon Brothers in the Liar's Poker era, taught the training class Michael Lewis was in, and went on to build Bank United of Texas from a distressed shell into a $20 billion bank alongside Lew Ranieri. He then founded Signature Bank, growing it to $110 billion in assets without ever making a single acquisition, and launched Signet in 2019, the first 24/7 blockchain-enabled payment system, which moved close to a trillion dollars. We discuss what Wall Street was actually like in the 1980s, why the most important decision you'll ever make is your business partner, why he became a blockchain maximalist back in 2013, his first-hand account of the weekend Signature was seized despite being mark-to-market positive and raising $20 billion, the personal toll of testifying before Congress, and why he's now building a full-reserve bank that removes fractional banking entirely. Enjoy!

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Coming Up on 1000x...

(00:40) Salomon Brothers & Teaching Michael Lewis

(03:51) The Partner Who Gave The Money Back

(06:46) Buying A Dead Texas Bank For Zero

(09:33) You Can't Survive A Bad Partner

(11:02) Signature: $110 Billion, Zero Acquisitions

(14:32) Signet & Becoming A Blockchain Maximalist In 2013

(16:35) The Numbers Don't Add Up: How Signature Was Taken

(22:57) Killing Fractional Banking

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Disclaimer: Nothing said on 1000x is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Avi, Jonah and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

This week, with Meta, Bitcoin, crude and the broader economy all ripping, we ask how long it can last? We discuss why diamond prices are collapsing. Jonah explains the anatomy of a bad commodity and why you should always trade demand squeezes rather than supply squeezes, why copper just hit all-time highs, and why higher rates are counterintuitively bullish for Bitcoin and gold. We get into Meta's Muse assistant finally making AI useful for normal people, why AI agents may be what actually saves crypto, the chart showing artificial intelligence depreciating faster than any frontier technology in history, why real estate is getting torpedoed while luxury demand goes vertical, the barbell economy and the vanishing middle class, and Avi's case that income inequality is a fake issue. Enjoy!

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Coming Up on 1000x...

(03:02) Diamonds Are Collapsing (And Might Become Chips)

(13:28) The Anatomy Of A Bad Commodity

(17:35) Why Higher Rates Are Bullish For Bitcoin

(26:09) AI Will Save Crypto

(28:23) The Most Bullish Chart We've Ever Seen

(33:30) Real Estate Is Getting Torpedoed

(39:14) Barbell America & The Vanishing Middle

(43:37) "Income Inequality Is A Fake Issue"

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Disclaimer: Nothing said on 1000x is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Avi, Jonah and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

#Bitcoin #Meta #StockMarket #Crypto #META #Stocks #Oil #AI #Macro #Trading #1000xPodcast #Investing #Fed #BTC #MetaConnect

This week, we break down the Financial Times exposé on how Poland lost $230 million trying to buy Venezuelan oil with crypto, and why Avi thinks it's actually the most bullish crypto story in a long time. Jonah explains how oil scams really work from seven years at Vitol, why the minimum ticket size makes street-corner deals impossible, and the $100 million wired for Indonesian coal mines that didn't exist. We also discuss the new oil barons of Venezuela and whether there's room for an individual to get in, treasury yields at highs we haven't seen since 2008, Canada and the EU suddenly getting competitive, why copper is the next meme coin, how Zuckerberg's latest blog post killed the idea of pacing the frontier, why AI doomerism is just the oldest sales pitch in the book, and why Avi believes a rate hike is counterintuitively bullish for Bitcoin and gold. Enjoy!

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Coming Up on 1000x...

(00:55) Poland Lost $230M Buying Oil With Thumb Drives

(07:44) How Oil Scams Actually Work

(20:22) The New Oil Barons Of Venezuela

(27:43) Treasury Carnage & The Canada Surprise

(31:18) Copper Is The Next Meme Coin

(34:37) Zuck Just Killed "Pacing The Frontier"

(39:53) AI Doomerism Is A Sales Pitch

(50:37) Why A Rate Hike Is Bullish For Bitcoin

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Disclaimer: Nothing said on 1000x is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Avi, Jonah and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.

#FOMC #Crypto #StockMarket #Fed #Bitcoin #Stablecoins #RateHike #1000xPodcast #Tether #Macro #Oil #Trading #Investing #KevinWarsh #Stocks

This week, Avi is joined live by GMoney, a trader who ran a desk for over a decade before becoming one of the most recognized collectors and investors in crypto, and who now hosts Full Port. We discuss whether NFTs are ever coming back and why Pokemon cards are just physical NFTs, why the last month has been the most exciting stretch on-chain since DeFi summer, the rise of MemeFi and tokenized stocks, why there is no way to diligence a meme coin, why the PVP mentality would get you kicked off a real trading desk, the Luna trade that worked despite being built on fake data, why both of them give away their thesis publicly, GMoney's framework that AI is a matter of national defense so any hike cycle will be short, why Avi thinks the CDS spreads on hyperscalers are fake, and why getting Americans invested is becoming a national security issue. Enjoy!

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Coming Up on 1000x...

(00:54) The $3 Million Ether Rock & Are NFTs Coming Back?

(06:09) The Best Month Onchain Since DeFi Summer

(10:43) There's No Way To Diligence A Meme Coin

(14:18) Why Give Away Your Alpha?

(18:04) AI Is National Defense: Why The Hike Won't Last

(23:44) The CDS Spreads Are Fake

(27:13) Be The House: Inside Fake World Assets

(33:00) Investing Is A National Security Issue

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Disclaimer: Nothing said on 1000x is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely our opinions, not financial advice. Avi, Jonah and our guests may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed.