The Signal
Ansem maps a still-young bull market, the Solana recovery that became his defining trade, and the attention economy that turned him from a trader into a character people tokenized without permission. His practical edge is less prediction than intensity: arrive first in every new ecosystem, build a small research network, look beyond the timeline, and preserve enough of a life outside crypto that you can actually stop when the cycle ends.
Key Takeaways
- 01
The cycle has not broadened yet
Solana, memecoins, and pockets of AI have run, but DeFi, L2s, DePIN, and gaming have not had full sector rotations. Ansem places the market around inning two or three, while admitting that expecting every prior-cycle pattern to repeat is itself a risk.
- 02
New categories carry no ceiling
The most explosive trade tends to be the thing without a historical comparison — DeFi in 2020, NFTs in 2021, perhaps a new consumer or social primitive now. With no established valuation anchor, speculation can expand far beyond familiar sectors.
- 03
Solana was the hated survivor
After watching FTX collapse while returning from Breakpoint, Ansem focused on the builders who stayed and the chain that continued working. Buying the asset everybody considered dead became his best trade of the cycle.
- 04
Pump.fun proves the platform
The launchpad's revenue and transaction load demonstrate Solana product-market fit, even if individual launches have become brutally competitive. Ansem sees it as one successful minigame among many consumer apps the chain can support.
- 05
Outwork the public feed
Finding a 100x from a small bankroll means being early to new chains, reading team pages and Discords, contacting people directly, and trading research with a trusted group. By the time a thesis is obvious on Crypto Twitter, much of the edge is gone.
On the Record
“The new thing is always the stuff that goes the craziest.”
“I do still think the meme coin super cycle is a thing.”
“Research doesn't just mean scroll in the timeline.”
“Don't get fully, fully sucked into the Matrix, bro.”
The Breakdown
Inning two, with an asterisk
Ansem's follower count rose from roughly 100,000 to almost 500,000, a rough proxy for new retail entering crypto. Yet the market still lacks the broad mania of prior peaks: last cycle delivered six-figure Bored Apes, celebrity profile pictures, DeFi, games, and layer-one rotations. This time, only Solana, memecoins, and parts of AI have truly broken out.
ETFs complicate the old top signals. BlackRock and other traditional managers can supply steady allocations rather than one burst of public attention, and Bitcoin remains a fraction of gold's market value. Ansem expects passive flows to persist even when social-media growth pauses.
Good news that could not move price
His clearest bearish turn came after approval odds for a spot Ether ETF jumped from 20% to 80%. Ether immediately moved from roughly $3,300 to $3,900, then stalled near yearly highs despite favorable regulation, presidential attention, Bitcoin ETF inflows, and constant institutional promotion. When the best possible news could not force a breakout, he reduced risk.
He later bought dips and changed direction again, but the episode captures his process: compare price response with the information arriving. A market that refuses to rise on a powerful catalyst may be revealing more than the catalyst itself.
The post-FTX Solana bet
Ansem was flying home from Breakpoint when passengers began saying CZ had bought FTX; by landing, the exchange was collapsing. Solana traded down toward single digits and was broadly treated as finished. He instead watched the developers who remained committed and reasoned that any future bull market would reprice a functioning ecosystem whose reputation had been destroyed.
That became his best trade and the center of his portfolio. He remains bullish on SOL against Ether as well as against dollars, and points to under-owned second-order plays — Helium, Metaplex, Kamino, alternative-VM L2s, and onchain exchanges — that benefit if the ecosystem expands beyond memes.
Memecoins cool without dying
A grotesque Pump.fun livestream and months of failed launches trigger claims that the platform killed memecoins. Ansem sees a normal cooldown after assets ran from six figures to multibillion-dollar values in a few months. Dogecoin followed a similar pattern in 2021: a violent first rally, months sideways, then another expansion.
Pump.fun does make the lowest-cap game harder. Millions of launches, faster bots, and constant imitation compress the edge, just as NFT and sports-card supply exploded after early success. But the platform's daily revenue proves something larger: cheap, high-throughput rails can support consumer applications with real demand.
When the influencer becomes the token
At peak Ansem attention, strangers tokenized his cat, relatives, and any association they could find; one cat coin reached roughly $100 million. He then became a conduit for celebrity launches, initially supporting Iggy Azalea because she rejected a dubious intermediary and committed to running her own project. The flood that followed was much worse: celebrities sold names into low-cap launches where insiders could dominate supply.
Ansem says public perception collapsed all those events into a story that he personally launched every coin. An AI deepfake and invented narratives showed how little control the subject retains once attention, capital, and social media begin reinforcing one another.
The trench strategy and its hidden cost
For a trader starting near zero, Ansem's prescription is relentless: bridge early to every new chain, join team communities, research beyond the public feed, reply intelligently where skilled people will see it, and maintain a small circle whose members catch what the others miss. He found traders such as Rhino when they had only dozens of followers by watching that work in public.
The cost is that constant participation becomes impossible to switch off. Ansem sold near the 2021 top but stayed mentally attached through a DeFi Kingdoms position, bought back in 2022, and lost money he could have preserved. Real relationships and recurring offline commitments are not distractions; they are the exit infrastructure that lets a trader leave the screen when the edge disappears.
Distilled from the episode transcript · Counterparty Recap Desk
