GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that once a week switches from talking about things like where to find the next Bike Tyson to dishing out streamlined macro alpha.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ Hold on to your butts.

• ✍️ What does this mean for crypto?

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Raoul Pal: This Is the Setup Investors Wait Decades For.

• 🍪 In-kind redemptions and voting rights are coming for tokenized stocks on Robinhood.

Nexo is a premier digital asset platform that helps clients build, manage, and preserve their wealth. Get started with Nexo today.

Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.

HOLD ON TO YOUR BUTTS

This week’s Fed FOMC rate decision was expected to be the "fulcrum" that the markets would hinge on.

A hold would continue momentum, a hike would slow momentum.

Instead, that market momentum was shut down on Monday before the Fed moved at all.

Dario Amodei's AI capability essay triggered a semiconductor-led rout that pushed market momentum from -0.48 to -0.61 and drove the headline allocation posture from -0.74 to -0.86.

Source: Milk Road Macro Index

The posture is now firmly in RISK OFF, and not just barely through the line.

The 0.36 gap to get back to RISK ON and the 0.12 gap back to CAUTION are both wider than anything a single session of stabilization can close.

The economy and the market pillars are notably pulling against each other.

The market pillar has deteriorated sharply, with financial conditions collapsing from +0.20 to +0.07 as the VIX jumped and growth impulses slid to -0.69. Copper weakness and the persistent Strait of Hormuz freight disruption also contributed to the drop on the market side.

Meanwhile, the economy pillar's macro buffer holds full at +0.50, and stress stays benign at +0.06 because the framework's inflation direction measure is still negative over six months even as each monthly print runs hot.

I know that sounds confusing, but that’s where we are with inflation these days.

With hike odds now above 85%, up from roughly 56% ten days ago, the September 16 announcement no longer determines whether the Milk Road Macro Index slips into RISK OFF, but it might help determine how deep into RISK OFF the index goes and how long it stays there.

A hold with credible forward guidance is the minimum condition to arrest the breadth and financial conditions decay and begin rebuilding toward CAUTION.

A hike into a GDPNow reading of +1.17% would push both breadth and financial conditions lower with no cushion remaining.

If a third consecutive 0.3% monthly core Consumer Price Index print follows in October, the six-month inflation direction would finally start turning upward, which would not be good.

That sequence could drag stress off the floor and erode the economy pillar's only remaining support for the posture.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR CRYPTO?

Well, it depends.

You could take some risk off the table and watch for a pullback. It seems like we might be heading into a period where the market is weak and waiting. There’s so much uncertainty right now. The Fed. The Iran conflict. The midterms. The Clarity Act.

I think it makes sense to get defensive and get into CASH.

However, personally, I think that a lot of these things are short-term headwinds that may or may not actually hold the market down for a bit.

The longer term view on the market and on crypto specifically, I think, looks very strong. My strategy for the moment is going to just be to HODL through all of this noise. I might have to stomach some volatility. I might miss some dips.

But I think the overall bear market lows for crypto are behind us now, and my bias is that eventually these macro factors will pass, and the bull market will come back to crypto.

That said, the way I play this does not have to be the way that you play it.

Come up with a strategy that makes sense for you and your capital.

And in the meantime, stay safe, stay educated, and stay bullish.

LISTEN TO THIS MAN 🎙️

I want to give you a heads up that today’s podcast is with the legendary Raoul Pal of Real Vision. 

We spent almost an hour talking about why crypto has struggled this year, what needs to happen for it to finally move, and why he thinks crypto will become the financial infrastructure for the entire AI economy.

After I interviewed Raoul, I actually sat down with LG and Kyle to record a bonus episode of Milk Road PRO After Hours, to give my personal thoughts on Raoul's investment thesis and how investors could express that in their portfolios.

Especially on a day like today, where the market is a major decision point, I think it's important to take a long term view. You can see that right here for just $1. 

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In-kind redemptions and voting rights are coming for tokenized stocks on Robinhood.

Permissionless prediction markets are exploding on Hyperliquid.

Balancer: One of the OG Ethereum AMM’s is winding down.

*this is sponsored content.

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MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @boldleonidas

Source: @ToolySOL

ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛

VITALIK PIC OF THE DAY

GM. This is Milk Road, the newsletter that always brings clarity to noise.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ Will CLARITY kick off the bull run?

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Dan Tapiero: Crypto Is Entering a Much Bigger Bull Market.

• 🍪 Jordi Visser: BTC, ETH, and SOL are the three horsemen of crypto.

Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.

WILL CLARITY KICK THE BULL RUN INTO GEAR? 📈

The CLARITY bill has had one helluva ride so far, and it looks like the gods are finally shining their grace upon it. 

But before diving into all the gossip from the Capitol, let’s talk BTC. 

Last Monday, Milk Road’s in-house crypto-whiz, John Gillen, was hoping for a BTC close above $79K by Sunday, which he would have seen as a vote in favor of the crypto bull market's return.

Well… Sunday happened, and we didn't get it. Bitcoin fell from ~$80K to ~$76.5K over the weekend and is trading at ~$78.4K as of this writing.

So right out of the gates in this morning's meeting, we asked him: is the bull run on pause?

John told us that we’d gotten a little too black and white with our interpretation of his price targets - $79K was a ‘nice to have,’ in the near term, but just because we didn’t finish the week above it, doesn’t mean he’s all of a sudden bearish. 

The level that he’s focused on (outside of a fixed price) is the 50-week moving average, and it's coming down to meet us. 

As of this writing, the 50W SMA is ~$78.7K, about $300 above the current price.

The 50W SMA smooths the daily noise and is a line traders treat as one of the strongest indicators of price action, marking the break from a bear trend to a bull rally. 

Source: TradingView

John says, when in doubt, zoom out. BTC’s recent price action has been one violent move up, then sideways action for the last four weeks straight.

This is what we in the biz call ‘a bull flag.’ A sharp rally up, followed by a sideways grind while the market digests everything - before it breaks up or down decisively. 

(For bull flags in established uptrends, there’s typically a ~55-65% chance that break is to the upside.)

"It's a chop," John says. "But that's not bearish."

While technicals alone can’t explain the full story. What was missing in the market was a reason to really break out. 

This week hands us two of those required reasons...

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WILL CLARITY KICK THE BULL RUN INTO GEAR? (P2) 📈

Tomorrow at 2:15 pm ET, the Senate is going to a cloture vote on the CLARITY Act.

To be clear: the cloture vote, in and of itself, doesn’t mean CLARITY will pass. It decides whether the bill moves forward to the Senate for formal debate. 

All it needs is 60 votes. Republicans hold 53 seats, so at least seven Democrats need to cross the aisle and vote in favor. 

John feels this is tremendously bullish. Chatter on the Hill suggests Democrats are aligned with the revised bill draft submitted by Sens. Lummis, Boozman, and Scott. 

Long story short, the amended copy introduces: 

1. A Treasury oversight via a “circuit-breaker” to step in and pause any deposit flight from community banks to payment-stablecoin providers doling out rewards.

2. Amendments to the ethics provisions that keep Trump, other elected officials, and Judges from engaging in crypto activities while holding office.  

The thing is - sixty votes to start talking is a higher bar than the 51 needed to pass the thing.

So John believes that clearing the cloture vote tomorrow could be an indicator that votes to pass the final bill in the Senate are already in place.

Source: Yahoo Finance

The second date to watch is Wednesday, when the Fed meets.

John doesn’t think we get a rate hike, but acknowledges that the market indicators are against him.

CME FedWatch now puts a 25bps hike near 86%, up from 69% on Friday. That would lift the target range from 3.50-3.75% to 3.75-4.00%.

But despite the odds flipping, John’s primary argument still holds true: 

Monetary policy is no longer the main lever to drive markets into a rally. 

We're in a phase of fiscal dominance, which means deficit spending and the bond market push the economy around more than the Fed's rate decisions do.

Don’t believe us? Just look at the BTC chart. An 86% hike is staring Bitcoin in the face, and Bitcoin is still holding green while equity futures are red.

If both dates break in our favor, John believes we’re poised for a close above ~$83K - aka: the “we’re back baaaaby!” level.

On top of that, if CLARITY passes and ETH holds ~$2.5K, John believes alts could catch a major rally too.  

Hell yeah!

If anyone needs us, we’ll be making a blood sacrifice at the altar of the crypto gods.

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Kalshi traders price the odds of CLARITY passing this year at ~44%, up 30% W/W.

Jordi Visser: BTC, ETH, and SOL are the three horsemen of crypto.

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MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @ToolySOL

Source: @ToolySOL

ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛

VITALIK PIC OF THE DAY

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that comes in hotter than a maxi defending their bags on Twitter.

Here’s a taste of this week’s menu:

• 🔥 BTC is the purest AI trade you can buy.

• 🥵 Crypto OGs are annoyed that BTC got too corporate.

• 🌶️ Stock certificates are truly archaic.

2022 killed crypto lending. Nexo survived - and is now the 3rd-largest crypto lender in the world. We asked their US COO how. Watch here.

HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK 🔥

HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK (P2) 🔥

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Question: If you had $10k to invest ANYWHERE right now, where would you put it?

Wholesale inflation is up: PPI reaccelerated in August, year-on-year we're at +5.4%.

Jordi Visser: "When you get all mad and say this house of cards is going to crumble down... it's not. The governments can't allow it to."

*this is sponsored content.

👉 Watch the full episode here!

MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @ToolySOL

Source: @ToolySOL

GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that's the trusty compass when Crypto Twitter spins you in circles.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ BTC needs to hold this level.

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Wall Street Could Be the Catalyst DeFi Is Waiting For.

• 🍪 Coinbase is changing the name of the Base App back to Coinbase Wallet.

Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.

BTC NEEDS TO HOLD THIS LEVEL BY SUNDAY 😬

On Monday, we asked the market gods for two things:

1. Keep the stock/meme pairing craze on Robinhood Chain going.

2. Have Bitcoin hold $79-80K and confirm the bull run.

We're one for two right now.

DEX volumes on Robinhood Chain hit an all-time high twice this week, while chain fees dropped to their lowest since August.

I.e. There’s more trading than ever on Robinhood Chain, and folks are paying less to do it. It’s a beautiful combo. 👇

Source: DefiLlama

And remember - memecoins are just the beginning here…

Ish Asad from Bitwise made the point on The Milk Road Show yesterday: the memecoins themselves are throwaway trades, but real businesses are forming on Robinhood Chain and pulling in real fee revenue.

Which is exactly what we like to see.

It’s the BTC price where we’re left wanting right now…

Bitcoin's just shy of our desired ~$79K level at the time of this writing ($78.5K, up from its $76.5K low yesterday) - but as John mentioned on Monday, he needs it to close the week at or above $79K before he'll call the bull run confirmed, and weekend trading is famously volatile.

… so why all the uncertainty in price?

In a word: Macro.

New PPI data (which tracks wholesale inflation) was released yesterday, showing it reaccelerated in August to +0.4% for the month, after just +0.1% in July.

And then this morning, CPI landed…

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BTC NEEDS TO HOLD THIS LEVEL BY SUNDAY (P2) 😬 

Here's what August's inflation data looked like:

• Headline CPI: +0.4% for the month, +3.4% over the year. Matching expectations.

• Core CPI (strips out food and energy to show the trend underneath): +0.3% against +0.2% expected.

That 0.3% is (sadly) the more important of the two numbers - and it’s actually something John highlighted three days ago.

In his Tuesday macro brief, he wrote that a core monthly figure at or above 0.3% would flip the inflation axis positive, erode the macro buffer, and drag market momentum back toward zero.

His words: that would "point the posture of the index [Milk Road Macro Index / MRMI] back towards a RISK OFF" signal.

And wouldn’t you know it - we got +0.3% exactly in today’s release.

The cool part: our MRMI (which scores how friendly the macro backdrop is to taking risk) put its omniscience on full display and actually moved ahead of the CPI release, sitting at -0.60 and saying RISK OFF as of yesterday morning.

(Bravo to M0xt, the nerd who built it.) 👇

Source: Milk Road Macro Index

The MRMI was dragged down by sector breadth (how many parts of the market are actually participating in price movement, versus a handful of names carrying the whole thing).

Growth impulses and financial conditions are still holding though - which is a saving grace.

M0xt's now watching where SPY (the fund that tracks the S&P 500) closes today.

If it finishes below $760 (and below its 50-day moving average), he thinks equities will go further down - and if equities are struggling, crypto often follows.

But before you go and panic…

The worry driving all of this is a potential rate hike (odds of a September one have been hovering around 60% for a few weeks now).

But John's been saying all year that the new Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, will do everything he can NOT to pull that trigger.

The way he sees it, Warsh is paddling the boat toward holding steady, and then cutting.

And he wrote Tuesday's brief knowing this exact scenario was on the table.

He laid out the hot-CPI path, then signed off saying he's not concerned about inflation, rate hikes, or the setup for the market right now. He's expecting plenty of volatility and thinner volume heading into the midterms. But he still thinks the bull market recovers and stays strong.

On top of that, the economy underneath all this is also doing just fine. Payrolls came in at 162K against a 53K consensus, and GDPNow (the Atlanta Fed's running growth estimate) has Q3 at 4.7%.

Which puts three things on the scoreboard this week and next:

1. FOMC next Wednesday. The Fed announces its rate decision at 2pm ET on the 16th.

2. SPY holding $760. Lose that and the 50-day, and M0xt expects more downside in equities.

3. Bitcoin at $79K on Sunday's close. John's bull market confirmation level.

As a result, we'll be setting multiple alarms over the next 5 days.

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The SEC x Solana: SEC Chair Paul Atkins will give a keynote address at the Solana Summit on Sep 14.

RIP Base App: Coinbase is changing the name of the Base App back to Coinbase Wallet.

Breakdown: Here are the top 5 crypto projects by buybacks (spoiler, Hyperliquid leads the pack by $150M+).

*this is sponsored content.

MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @boldleonidas

Source: @naiivememe

ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛

VITALIK PIC OF THE DAY

GM. This is Milk Road, your friend in crypto - the kinda friend whose mom lets you stay up late playing video games.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ Buying a coffee with home equity.

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Bitwise: Tokenization Could Be the Biggest Crypto Trade of the Decade.

• 🍪 NEAR is up 32% against BTC this past week.

Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.

TOKENIZATION: WHERE WE ARE VS. WHERE WE'RE HEADED 🗺️

Robinhood Chain hit a new all-time high in DEX trading volume on Tuesday ($1.92B) - and Vlad Tenev (Robinhood's CEO) is just as surprised as anyone.

He got on a Goldman Sachs stage this week and admitted the first version of stock tokens flopped in Europe.

They lived inside the Robinhood app, so you could buy them, sell them, and that was about it.

Or in his words: they sat in "this messy middle of not having any credible differentiators versus traditional stocks."

Robinhood's solution: let 'em out of their cage - allow tokens to become fully composable on Robinhood Chain.

This meant any developer could plug them into their own code without asking Robinhood for permission - putting tokenized stocks into DeFi pools, pairing them with other crypto assets, or wiring them into smart contracts.

Around 200 U.S. stocks now trade this way on Robinhood Chain, across 120+ countries - pulling in $8.2M of Real Economic Value (i.e. the total fees users paid to use the chain) in a single day last week! 👇

Source: BlockWorks

In short - Robinhood handed the same set of assets over to strangers, let them build whatever they liked with them, and the demand turned up on its own.

Kyle (our Head of Research) has a great explanation of why this works:

Hold Tesla in your Schwab account and the only thing you can do with it is buy it or sell it. You can't send it to a friend, you can't pay with it, and you can't swap it into Nvidia without cashing out to dollars first.

Tokenize it, and all of those doors open at once.

Now apply that to something that isn't a share…

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TOKENIZATION: WHERE WE ARE VS. WHERE WE'RE HEADED 🗺️ (P2)

Every listed stock on the planet adds up to roughly $160T, which sounds enormous right up until you put it next to everything else.

As Jordi Visser told us on the pod yesterday, there's about $700T of fiat assets in the world (property, gold, private credit, venture stakes, all of it). 

And two-thirds of it is illiquid! Meaning it can't be sold quickly without taking a painful discount.

Jordi calls it ‘dormant wealth’ - assets that show up in your net worth, but do nothing else. 👇

Source: Milk Road/YouTube

Still struggling to visualize what tokenizing the full $700T of global wealth could lead to?

Lemme paint a picture for you…

Imagine buying a house, then using your equity in said house to buy a coffee.

Right now, that would mean filling out a bunch of paperwork and getting a home equity loan to cover a $6.48 double shot latte from Starbies... who's doing that??

Tokenization makes that dormant wealth spendable, and has the potential to enable crazy sh*t - like buying a coffee with your home equity.

The takeaway here:

Stocks were the easiest asset in the pile. Already liquid, already priced by the second, and already sitting in an app on your phone.

Robinhood Chain isn’t even Act 1, Scene 1 of the adoption curve - it's the previews before the movie.

The tokenization of the other $467T worth of global assets is still yet to come, and is promising to unlock financial tools & products most people have never even conceived of before.

Say it with me now: “we’re still so early.”

YOU CAN NEVER GET ENOUGH VISSER. I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL

The Jordi Visser episode that went out on The Milk Road Show yesterday was only half of what we recorded.

The conversation was too good to cut short in the moment, so we let it run long and split it in two.

Part 1 covers all things crypto (that's the one you saw yesterday). 

While Part 2 digs into the equities and AI side of Jordi’s thinking, with a 20 minute breakdown of the whole conversation with John and LG.

Whether or not you’re familiar with Jordi’s work/thinking - you’re going to want to watch this one. 👇

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Movement detected: NEAR is up 32% against BTC this past week. The move was driven by a cluster of NEAR-specific catalysts.

Huh? The recent stock/meme pairing boom hit memecoins, launchpads, and AMMs. So why are all three down anywhere from ~12-22% over the last 24hrs?

New hire: Polymarket just brought in Amazon's former finance chief Warren Jenson as its first CFO.

MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @ToolySOL

Source: @naiivememe

ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛

VITALIK PIC OF THE DAY

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that has never left anything at a Delaware repair shop.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ Hunter Biden launched a memecoin?

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Jordi Visser: The Biggest Bull Market Ever Will Come From AI + Crypto.

• 🍪 Solana has now been #1 in x402 transactions and volume.

Nexo is a premier digital asset platform that helps clients build, manage, and preserve their wealth. Get started with Nexo today.

Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.

HUNTER BIDEN LAUNCHED A MEMECOIN? 💻

Hunter Biden launched a memecoin today. No, seriously. It’s a real thing.

If you've missed the six-year-long story that led us to this point, here’s a speedrun of everything you missed:

Hunter Biden left a laptop at a Delaware repair shop in 2019 → its contents leaked ahead of the 2020 election → it became one of the larger political scandals in recent memory.

On Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported Hunter was turning the meme into a crypto token. Hours later he posted this, with a montage of Fox News clips referencing the scandal. 👇

Source: @HunterBiden

It went live today on Base, and the pitch is aimed squarely at people who got burned by the TRUMP token.

Two percent of the supply is set aside for wallets that lost money on Trump's coin, with exchanges deciding how to hand it out. Another 8% goes to subscribers of Hunter's Substack.

They’ve got 30 days to claim it, and any unclaimed tokens get destroyed.

Thirty percent of the 1B tokens are tied to 30 real-world outcomes, most of them with live betting markets on Polymarket. If the event happens, those tokens get burned (shrinking the supply). If it doesn't, they go to charity and stay in circulation.

The list includes Trump being impeached, a Democrat winning in 2028, and Bitcoin setting a new record.

Source: Laptoptoken

The founders, Hunter included, take 30%. They get nothing on day one, then a six-month lock followed by two years of gradual unlocks.

And buried in the disclosure document is a clause about where the money ends up. Any profit the Cayman Islands foundation makes, after expenses, goes to TTM Media Group LLC, a company the founders own and control.

If that's giving you déjà vu, you're not imagining it...

HUNTER BIDEN LAUNCHED A MEMECOIN? (P2) 💻

Twenty months ago a similar playbook ran with a certain sitting president attached to it.

TRUMP launched in January 2025 at $1.20 (according to Yahoo Finance), hit ~$78 in two days, and trades at ~$2.17 today. A ~97% drawdown.

Source: TradingView

Blockchain data firm Nansen counted 1.48M wallets that bought it, and by the end of June, ~66% of them were underwater to the tune of $3.81B, while 33% made money (mostly trading bots and first-hour buyers).

Meanwhile Trump's own financial disclosure shows $636M in royalties from the coin.

His entities took a cut of every trade, so the payday tracked volume rather than price. And affiliates sat on roughly 80% of the supply, releasing it slowly.

LAPTOP is a softer version of that: 30% instead of 80%, nothing at launch, and paperwork that’s clear about the structure. That said… 

65% of the supply is locked and vesting, which the disclosure itself warns could create heavy selling pressure. 

The foundation gets sole say on any event outcome that isn't clear-cut, holders get no ownership, vote or revenue, and any lawsuit happens in the British Virgin Islands.

Ok… so how’d the launch go?

Let me just open CoinGecko to see where we’re… aaaaand it’s gone.

Source: CoinGecko

LAPTOP lost *counts fingers* $98M within an hour of launch.

Yikes.

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Want to reach 88,000 crypto and AI investors a day? Milk Road is booking Q4 sponsorships now so book a call now.

Agents be spendin’: Solana has now been #1 in x402 transactions and volume for two weeks running.

Are we back? Venice just burned $391K of its own token, one of the biggest buybacks it has run yet, and VVV ripped ~58% to $28!

Lennix Lai (OKX): Memecoins might accidentally be the killer use case that drives demand for tokenized stocks.

Get started with Nexo today.

MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @boldleonidas

Source: @ToolySOL

ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛

VITALIK PIC OF THE DAY

GM. This is Milk Road, the newsletter that knows that Scott Bessent just won a fistfight with the Yen, and no matter how you look at it, that’s pretty impressive.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ Get a job.

• ✍️ Barely bullish.

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: “We’re at the End of the Beginning” - Tokenization Is About to Get Much Bigger.

• 🍪 Is Robinhood a buy, hold, or sell? Our analysts gave their takes.

Milk Road is booking Q4 sponsorships now. If you want to reach 88,000 crypto and AI investors a day, book a call now.

Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.

GET A JOB

The headline allocation posture for the Milk Road Macro Index moved up to -0.17. Not quite out of CAUTION yet, but the good news is that both the economy and the market pillars are pulling in the same direction.

Source: Milk Road Macro Index

Let’s break it down.

Friday's payrolls beat expectations like Bessent beat the Japanese Yen. 162,000 against a 53,000 consensus. Yuge.

This drove growth impulses to spike so much higher that it single-handedly nudged the real economy score to -0.05. This means that the economy's underlying strength is beginning to register in market signals too. Bullish!

The macro buffer remains at its maximum at +0.50 with stress at +0.04, and it is still the primary reason the posture is CAUTION rather than RISK OFF. A labor market that keeps surprising to the upside, GDPNow holding third-quarter growth at 4.7%, and services activity near multi-year highs collectively give the economy pillar its full backstop even as questions about interest rate hikes still loom over the markets.

Now, let’s actually talk about the markets.

BARELY BULLISH

Market momentum climbed to +0.08, but the market pillar remains fragile. Kind of like the Yen proved to be fragile when Bessent started throwing hands.

Sorry, we’re doing Bessent vs. Yen jokes in this one. I promise I will write new material next week.

Anyway, market breadth is at -0.33 and financial conditions at +0.62, with the VIX now at 15.30. I know this is just a bunch of numbers, so let me explain what this means.

It means the jobs-driven improvement in market momentum could easily reverse if Thursday's CPI release cracks the credit-and-volatility calm that financial conditions depend on. If the CPI print shows a surprise in the inflation data, it could crush the recent market momentum we’ve seen.

The unresolved question of whether ISM services prices paid at 72.6 would pass through to consumers in the CPI remains unresolved.

Right now, the inflation direction axis is holding at 0.00 because the core Consumer Price Index has not yet moved, but September hike odds are now near 60% and Hormuz-linked energy costs are still a concern. This means that a hot CPI print would likely carry more weight than it would in a calmer environment. 

A core monthly print at or above 0.3% would flip the inflation axis positive, begin eroding the macro buffer, and likely drag market momentum back toward zero. That would point the posture of the index back toward a RISK OFF print.

A soft CPI number leaves the full backstop in place and clears the framework's path back toward full RISK ON.

What do I think?

I’m not concerned about inflation, rate hikes, or the setup for the market for the moment. I think there is going to be a lot of volatility and lower volume ahead of the midterm, but overall, I do think the bull market will recover and remain strong.

See you there, but in the meantime, stay safe, stay educated, and stay bullish!

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Do you trade options? Optionality is a free trading community with 14 active traders averaging 80% per call.*

Privacy is winning: Privacy is the only sector that's up since Bitcoin topped last October.

Question: Is Robinhood a buy, hold, or sell? Our analysts gave their takes. Drop yours here…

Lyn Alden: The fiscal dominance era will likely be measured in decades rather than years.

*this is sponsored content.

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MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @boldleonidas

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ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛

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GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that's the pit crew tightening the bolts on your portfolio.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ The pullback that never came.

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Crypto’s Next Big Rotation Is Already Underway.

• 🍪 Raoul Pal: "Markets look like they absolutely want to rip."

On Sept 23, Milk Road's Martin sits down with Alumni Ventures to talk about blockchain and private markets. Save your free seat here.

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THE PULLBACK THAT NEVER CAME

As you know, every Monday, we get on a call to argue about markets in the week ahead. 

Here's where we landed on today’s call:

Three weeks ago, Bitcoin ripped from the low $60K range, up to ~$82K on a short squeeze.

We all assumed we'd hand some back (the talk was $72K, and maybe a retest of the old lows before grinding higher).

But it never came.

John spent three weeks waiting for a dip that refused to show up, and it forced him to change his view of things:

"If people were going to sell, they would have sold by now," he told me.

The line he's been watching is the 50-week moving average - the average of Bitcoin's last 50 weekly closing prices, and the crude dividing line between a bull market and a bear.

Source: TradingView

Bitcoin closed right on it Sunday night (in fact, slightly above depending on what exchange you were pulling prices from).

That changed what John needs to see. He's stopped caring about breaking $82K and has flipped to just needing one more week of not collapsing.

Hold this level without falling apart and he'll call it a bull market. None of it's guaranteed, but the levels overhead matter far less now the 50-week has been reclaimed.

So I asked what actually drives us higher once next week’s FOMC and CLARITY Act vote are out of the way…

His answer: the market being awake is the catalyst.

The total crypto market cap has gone from $2.3T in February to $2.82T last Thursday - a seven-month high.

And almost all of the new momentum in alts over the last week or so is coming from one place…

THE PULLBACK THAT NEVER CAME (P2)

Memes have been running north of 80% of Robinhood Chain's volume since launch, and have been inspiring people to download apps again and bridge fresh cash into their wallets.

It's silly, and funny, and noisy - yes.

But outside of the carnival, something is happening…

You might remember BONER coin from last week's issue - the meme that absorbed most of the tokenized HIMS supply and briefly sent the token four times above the real share price.

John reckons that was just the opening act. 

When traders lock tokenized shares inside meme liquidity pools, market makers have to mint more onchain stocks to replace them - creating a flywheel effect that forces more and more stocks to be minted onchain.

Source: RWA

Which is why (long term) John's more interested in Coinbase than Robinhood, despite Robinhood being the one with all the attention right now…

Coinbase is issuing genuine tokenized stocks onchain rather than wrappers and IOUs (like Robinhood). 

A real claim on the share, not just a token that tracks its price (slower, less entertaining, yes - but a better product at the end of the day).

That said, whichever one gets the attention day-to-day/month-to-month - it doesn’t really matter as far as the broader crypto market is concerned.

Remember, the market being awake is the catalyst.

So to wrap up - this week, we want to see two things happen: 

First, we want to see the memecoin-stock pairing craze to continue and grow.

Second, and more importantly, we want to see Bitcoin hold $79-80K and confirm the bull run.

If it holds, John's expecting the same winners to keep winning. 

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Do you trade options? Optionality is a free trading community with 14 active traders averaging 80% per call.*

Madness: Vlad Tenev's recent follow of the AMC memecoin account on X pushed its token (MEME) 6x, from a $36.2-239.5M. All within 5 mins.

Lyn Alden: The Treasury is drawing more attention to the bond market issue than the intervention is actually solving.

Raoul Pal: "Markets look like they absolutely want to rip." Speculative positioning in markets right now is flat. Nobody is long. That's a setup.

*this is sponsored content.

Save your free seat here.

MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @naiivememe

Source: @ToolySOL

ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛

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GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that makes Flamin' Hot Cheetos taste like plain, un-salted popcorn.

Here’s a taste of this week’s menu:

• 🔥 We're not out of the bear market yet.

• 🥵 Central banks fear stablecoins more than AI.

• 🌶️ SpaceX might just buy Tesla outright.

Nexo is a premier digital asset platform that helps clients build, manage, and preserve their wealth. Get started with Nexo today.

HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK 🔥

HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK (P2) 🔥

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

TradFi’s coming for stables: 21 financial institutions are coming after Tether and Circle with their own stablecoin.

OKX General Manager: Traditional exchanges are copying crypto, and crypto exchanges are copying TradFi. One giant market is forming…

Get me my popcorn: Robinhood’s Chief Legal Officer (and former SEC commissioner) just responded to AMC’s cease and desist, publicly.

Get started with Nexo today.

MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @boldleonidas

Source: @naiivememe

GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that's your extra set of eyes in crypto.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ AMC's CEO hit Robinhood w/ a cease n’ desist.

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: The Crypto Bull Market May Be Starting Earlier Than Anyone Expected.

• 🍪 OKX just launched an onchain operating system for AI agents.

On Sept 23, Milk Road's Martin sits down with Alumni Ventures to talk about blockchain and private markets. Save your free seat here.

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AMC'S CEO HIT ROBINHOOD W/ A CEASE N’ DESIST 🎬

AMC's CEO Adam Aron spent yesterday publicly demanding that Robinhood kill its AMC tokenized stock.

Right now, AMC is worth about $2.6B, while its tokenized equivalent on Robinhood Chain is worth ~$2.8M (essentially a rounding error).

Yet Adam is calling his list of concerns "almost existential."

So what’s all the hubbub about? Let’s start with the mechanics…

Robinhood's stock tokens aren't actually shares in anything.

They're tokenized debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited, an offshore affiliate parked on a small island off the coast of France.

Each one tracks the price of a stock - but that’s about it. It gives the holder no ownership in the underlying company, no voting rights, no dividends…

And as we mentioned up top, they’re (currently) tiny by comparison:

Sources: AMC market cap at Friday's premarket price, token value per onchain data.

They're also unregistered under U.S. securities law, which is why they can't be sold to U.S., Canadian, U.K. or Swiss residents.

And that comes straight from Robinhood's own website, which is exactly where Aron got his ammunition.

His first argument is about the cost. AMC spends millions every year complying with those investor-protection rules, while Robinhood issues its version ~3,000 miles offshore and skirts that same compliance requirement.

But compliance isn't the part keeping him up at night...

AMC'S CEO HIT ROBINHOOD W/ A CEASE N’ DESIST (P2) 🎬

Issuing new stock is how AMC has been patching up its balance sheet for a while now.

Adam says synthetic AMC stock tokens floating around in wallets nobody can see make that job harder to pull off, calling the whole setup a "quasi-fake market" that seeds public distrust of financial markets.

He asked Robinhood to voluntarily cease and desist, said his "high-priced securities counsel" has been asked whether they can force it, and said he'll be taking it to the SEC. 

(Though no letter has actually been filed… yet.)

Vlad Tenev's entire reply: "What's the concern?"

He made the longer version of his case last year, when OpenAI disowned its own Robinhood token. Vlad's position is that these are derivatives rather than equity, and that tokenizing a company shouldn't require that company's permission.

But there's a reason these kinds of critiques keep landing on Robinhood in particular...

Two versions of tokenized stocks are being built at the same time.

Kyle (our Head of Research) wrote this up for PRO members last week. Kraken and Robinhood got there first with wrappers, while Coinbase launched the actual asset on Base with full rights for whoever holds it.

Aron is attacking the wrapper model specifically - which are faster/easier to launch compared to legit onchain equities, and contributing to the massive growth of stock-based RWAs.

(E.g. Robinhood added 100 wrapped stock tokens in a single batch on August 13, while Coinbase has launched a total of 4 legit tokenized stocks to date.)

Source: The Block

So where does this all shake out?

In short: We’re in limbo right now.

The SEC may or may not pick this up, and Robinhood may or may not bow to AMC’s cease-and-desist.

Either way, public pressure like this will likely push future players toward taking the Coinbase route (legit 1:1 issuance) over the quick-n-easy wrapper route.

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Damn dawg! A relatively obscure launchpad is now producing more daily revenue than some of crypto's most established protocols.

Big call. Saylor frames Strategy's current moment like Amazon building Prime: painful short term, dominant long term.

This is cool: OKX just launched an onchain operating system for AI agents.

Save your free seat here.

MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @boldleonidas

Source: @ToolySOL

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GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that reads the terms and conditions of crypto, so you don't have to.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ Uniswap got its 40% week. Is Aerodrome next?

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Nexo’s Big U.S. Comeback: Why Crypto Lending Is Booming Again.

• 🍪 Over the past 24 hours Robinhood Chain collected a record $4.45M in fees.

14,000 traders. 14 pros. One free Discord where every trade gets recapped at the close. Join the Optionality community for free.

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UNISWAP GOT ITS 40% WEEK. IS AERODROME NEXT? 📈

We've been talking a lot about tokenized stocks on Robinhood Chain, and how all of that Uniswap-hosted trading has been pushing the UNI token up…

It's worked out nicely, too.

Our PRO analyst John Gillen bought UNI on August 28 at ~$4.45, and it's traded above $6 since (+40%).

But Robinhood and Uniswap aren't the only games in town.

On August 24, Coinbase launched its own tokenized stocks on Base, with its own DEX of choice: Aerodrome.

Before we get to Aerodrome though, we should cover why the UNI trade worked in the first place - because it isn’t JUST about the stock-memecoin pairings we covered yesterday…

The U.S. stock market is open 6.5 hours a day, 5 days a week, which leaves over 80% of the week with no market at all (even though news keeps breaking through all of it).

Tokenized stocks fill in those hours.

About 60% of Robinhood Chain's stock token trading now happens outside regular market hours, when no traditional market maker is quoting a price at all.

Source: Token Terminal

That's an entirely new trading session, and whoever hosts the liquidity for it collects the fees.

Uniswap ended up holding 99% of the stock token liquidity on Robinhood Chain, and the volume running through it has tripled in a fortnight, from $1B cumulative on August 21 to over $3B by September 2.

And as we covered yesterday - those fees feed a mechanism that buys UNI on the open market and burns it (hence the +40% week).

Then Coinbase turned up.

Its version put tokenized Nvidia, Apple, Meta and Alphabet shares on Base, each backed 1:1 by real shares sitting in regulated custody (not a synthetic proxy tracking a price).

Aerodrome got day-one liquidity, and roughly $103M flowed through its pools in the first few days, peaking near $27M in a single day.

That's off four stocks, in week one.

Uniswap has been doing closer to $127M a day, but it's had a two-month head start - plus, a much longer list of stocks and ETFs to trade against.

… and Coinbase says more tokenized stocks are landing in the coming weeks.

UNISWAP GOT ITS 40% WEEK. IS AERODROME NEXT? (P2) 📈

Aerodrome is already the dominant DEX on Base, typically handling 50%+ of the chain's trading volume.

100% of the revenue it generates goes to holders who lock their tokens up (which converts them into veAERO).

That's running at roughly $60M a year against a market cap under $500M, so about 13% of the protocol's entire value reaches lockers annually, with roughly half the supply locked at an average of 3.8 years.

The downside being, if you hold AERO without locking it, you're handing your cut of revenue to everyone who staked.

There's also this…

Source: Blockworks

Those new tokens pay liquidity providers to park capital in Aerodrome's pools, which is what keeps trading there cheap. It's the cost of being Base's liquidity hub.

Unfortunately, for those of you that hold AERO, it means the protocol has been shrinking your slice of the pie faster than it's been paying you.

But this isn’t permanent. Issuance is down ~61% from a year ago, so that cost is falling.

The proper fix is Aero, an upgrade that merges Aerodrome with sister protocol Velodrome and ties new issuance to actual revenue instead of a preset schedule (it was slated for Q2, but still hasn't shipped).

All told, we've got a pretty clean setup here.

AERO sits ~9% lower over the past week while UNI ran 40%:

• Similar story to UNI (capturing the tokenized stock trade).

• One-eighth of the market cap.

• No re-rating yet.

The bull case needs Coinbase's next batch of stocks to arrive and trade in size, so revenue grows into the issuance.

John's take is that the volume is coming for Aerodrome, and with it, gains (hopefully). 

In fact, he's already started buying in preparation. 😉

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

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Woah! Over the past 24 hours Robinhood Chain collected a record $4.45M in fees. That's more than three times Solana, Ethereum, Base and Hyperliquid COMBINED.

Alex Cutler: "Market making" is one of the most exclusive clubs in finance. But on Aerodrome, anyone can come onchain and be the market maker.

Kyle Reidhead: Crypto equities are better than raw tokens, because when crypto chops sideways, the businesses of these companies keep compounding anyway.

Join the Optionality community for free, here!

MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @ToolySOL

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ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛

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GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter delivering an artful blend of crypto insights and d*ck jokes.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ Uniswap found its cash machine in a weird place.

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: First ICOs, Then ETFs… This Could Be Crypto’s Next Capital Wave.

• 🍪 Tom Lee: Traditional financial rails weren't built for agents.

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UNISWAP FOUND ITS CASH MACHINE IN A VERY WEIRD PLACE 🍆

Since 2020, the UNI token did pretty much one thing, and one thing only: it let you vote on stuff.

Every dollar of Uniswap's trading fees went to the people supplying liquidity (cash) to its pools, while holders got the opportunity to vote on protocol changes.

But that changed in December after holders passed a proposal called UNIfication.

Now the protocol takes a slice of those trading fees → uses that money to buy UNI on the open market → and destroys it.

(A buyback, basically.)

Except the shares get shredded instead of stuffed in a vault somewhere.

That engine has been live since December... but the fuel for said engine only turned up in July, with the launch of Robinhood Chain (the Ethereum L2 built for 24/7 onchain stock trading).

Uniswap deployed there a day after it launched and became the DEX that nearly everything on the chain traded through, now handling 86% of its daily volume.

And in late July, UNI holders voted to switch protocol fees on for Robinhood Chain trades…

Source: DefiLlama

Revenue went from ~$100k a day to ~$244k a day, with Robinhood Chain alone now making up 60% of the burn.

That shakes out to roughly $90M of UNI destroyed per year against a ~$3.5B market cap, or ~2.5% of the supply retired annually (better than the average S&P 500 buyback yield).

Standard Chartered's Geoff Kendrick set a $100 UNI target for the end of 2030 back in June - then last month, said it might be too low.

Which raises the question: are people really that interested in tokenized stocks?

In a sense, yes.

Uniswap did ~$130M of tokenized stock volume in a single day, roughly 10x where it sat a month earlier. But a big slice of those fees isn't coming from anyone trading tokenized NVDA. It's coming from memecoins. 

And what people are doing with them is... creative.

See, there’re these two launchpads, Bankr and long(dot)xyz, that let anyone mint a memecoin whose trading pair is a stock token instead of a stablecoin.

I.e. To buy the memecoin, you pay in tokenized shares. And in an automated market maker, whatever you pay in, stays in the pool. So every purchase pulls stock tokens out of circulation.

So, hypothetically… say you were to spot a stock with heavy short interest, meaning plenty of people are betting it falls. And say that stock is HIMS, the company selling men's hair and 'bedroom performance' pills, with 58.7M shares sold short.

… so you mint a memecoin called BONER, point its trading pair at tokenized HIMS stock, and start posting about how “a big green BONER candle will take HIMS to the moon.”

Yeah, well - someone did pretty much exactly that on August 20th…

Source: MEXC

By last weekend, the BONER pool held 31,198 of the 58,714 tokenized HIMS shares in existence.

(Yuh. More than half the float is sitting inside a joke coin's liquidity pool!)

But then the NYSE shut for the weekend, which meant no live share price to arbitrage against and no way for the issuer to mint more tokens.

As a result, BONER ran 1,000% in 24 hours to a ~$40M market cap, with a few thousand dollars of buying pushing tokenized HIMS to $132.64, while the actual TradFi share had closed Friday at $28.84. 👇

Source: DEX Screener

Then Monday hit.

The NYSE opened, the issuer minted fresh tokens into the premium, and the whole thing collapsed inside of two hours.

Real HIMS barely moved, finishing the day at $29.41 - because the squeeze happened inside the tokenized wrapper rather than the stock itself, and those 58,714 tokenized shares are about 0.1% of the shares sold short.

Nowhere near enough to force a single short seller to cover (but you can see how, down the line, this sort of thing could lead to another GameStop).

And the theme is spreading...

Nine memecoins now trade in HIMS-quoted pools, SAYLORMOON holds 26% of tokenized Strategy stock, and memecoin pools have swallowed roughly 11% of tokenized Tesla.

Every one of those trades settles on Uniswap. And every one burns UNI.

Long story longer: the animal spirits are returning to crypto, and they've got a hard on for stock/memecoin pairings.

The beauty of all this? You don’t have to pick the right memecoin to win, you can just buy the picks and shovels.

(E.g. Uniswap.)

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Selling out: Fed Chair Warsh disclosed 30 crypto positions back in April. By August he'd sold them all in to meet the ethics requirements at the Fed. Here’s what he sold…

Tom Lee: Traditional financial rails weren't built for agents. A card swipe moves through 24 different systems to get validated - useless for microtransactions.

Raoul Pal: The doom narrative about the dollar collapsing has cost people more money than anything else in financial history.

MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @naiivememe

Source: @Ministerr

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GM. This is Milk Road, the newsletter that drops macro alpha into your inbox every Tuesday to blow you away with government bond buybacks, ballooning deficits, and foreign exchange interventions, and most of all, what does all of this have to do with crypto?

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ The yield cap trap.

• ✍️ Intervention epidemic.

• ✍️ The debasement trade strikes back.

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Bitcoin at $79K: Bottom Confirmed or One More Crash Coming?

• 🍪 Capital vs labor has always been the defining political battle, but we're about to replace that entirely.

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THE YIELD CAP TRAP

When governments run massive primary deficits, debt servicing costs skyrocket. 

That is a nice way of saying that we’ve been spending way more than we have for so many decades that the interest payments are getting so expensive we’re struggling to pay them.

As a result, people are doubting that the governments that have been doing this will be able to pay back their debts. This means they are less interested in buying government bonds.

This dynamic has been pushing bond yields up. Higher yields attract buyers, but buyers aren’t stepping in, so the yields keep rising.

Enter U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. He has aggressively doubled long-end Treasury buybacks (10- to 30-year bonds) to keep borrowing costs artificially suppressed.

As Brookings economist Robin Brooks warns, trying to cap long-term yields without fixing underlying fiscal deficits is "playing with fire".

Source: @robin_j_brooks

• Mechanism: If bond prices aren't allowed to clear naturally, macroeconomic pressure spills straight into foreign exchange markets.

• Result: Instead of bond yields spiking, the U.S. Dollar takes the hit. The dollar has dropped about 10% on a broad trade-weighted basis.

• Blueprint: This mirrors Japan’s Yield Curve Control (YCC) playbook, where strict bond yield caps triggered a multi-year slide in the Yen.

So, how do governments stop their currencies from collapsing?

Great questions, I’m so glad I asked it.

INTERVENTION EPIDEMIC

You may have noticed how a lot of governments are getting a lot more involved in bond and currency markets these days.

The fancy central banker word for this is an “intervention.”

The more honest word for it is “panic.”

Recent interventions highlight just how constrained policy authorities have become:

• The Euro-Yen Twist: During joint U.S.-Japan operations to support the Yen, the U.S. Treasury used Euro reserves to buy Yen instead of liquidating U.S. Dollar assets. Why? Selling Treasuries would have pushed U.S. yields up. Proving Bessent prioritized bond market insulation over standard FX defense mechanics.

• Undervalued renminbi: China's Real Effective Renminbi (RMB) remains 10% to 20% undervalued, driving non-commodity trade surpluses toward 3.5% of GDP.

• Argentine swap line: The U.S. Treasury launched a $20B swap facility with Argentina, a rare intervention outside a global financial crisis for a sovereign issuer with a history of defaults.

Source: Milk Road

Things are getting way out of whack, and these governments are running out of options to maintain normalcy.

So, what happens next?

Capital fleeing these sinking ships is looking for a hard asset that is safe from debasement.

If only there were a peer-to-peer electronic cash system… 😀

THE DEBASEMENT TRADE STRIKES BACK

With fiat currencies taking the strain of fiscal doom, institutional capital is pivoting into non-sovereign hard assets and low-debt havens:

1. Gold: Gold has surged over 65% past $4,500/oz. Uniquely, gold is rallying alongside high nominal yields as central banks and funds hedge against debt growth and currency weaponization.

2. Bitcoin (my favorite): Derivatives markets reflect heavy call option open interest across $80,000 to $100,000 strikes, signaling structural demand as a non-sovereign macro hedge.

3. Low-Debt havens: Capital is accelerating out of high-deficit nations into fiscally conservative economies like Switzerland (CHF) and Denmark (DKK).

The Bitcoin bear market may not be totally over yet, but the bottom is certainly forming.

All of this sets up the foundations of a long and sustained increase in demand for Bitcoin, or, in other words, a new bull market.

Stay patient and make your plans now. The bulls are coming.

In the meantime, stay safe, stay educated, and stay bullish!

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Want to reach 88,000 crypto and AI investors a day? Milk Road is booking Q4 sponsorships now so book a call now.

Breakdown: Dan Tapiero manages $1.4B across 22 crypto companies, and we just broke down the spread…

Tom Lee: The current financial system has $150T in liquid assets driven by just two asset classes (bonds and stocks). Tokenization expands the addressable market.

Raoul Pal: Capital vs labor has always been the defining political battle, but we're about to replace that entirely.

MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @boldleonidas

Source: @naiivememe

ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛

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GM. This is Milk Road, your trusty toolbox for building crypto know-how.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ If BTC breaks this level, we’re so back.

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: How Aerodrome Plans to Win the Race to Tokenize Everything.

• 🍪 Tom Lee: AI agents are already buying more tokens than humans.

Nexo is a premier digital asset platform that helps clients build, manage, and preserve their wealth. Get started with Nexo today.

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IF BTC BREAKS THIS LEVEL, WE’RE SO BACK 🤝

Every Monday our team gets on a call to argue about the market - and as always, you get to listen in.

Today, one number was the star of our conversation: $82K on the BTC chart.

Get a weekly close above that level, and the bull market is back on.

Fail to reclaim it on the weekly, and we could be looking at more near-term pain.

Bitcoin teased us by running to roughly $81.4K last week, before pulling back to $77K - and now sits near $78K, with the daily candles compressing (which usually precedes a bigger move). 👇

Source: TradingView

… but which way will this ‘bigger move’ go?

If you’re hoping we move up, there are some hurdles you should be aware of.

Between $81K and $83K there’s a pile-up of resistance - aka: levels where sellers keep showing up and dumping BTC.

That’s also close to where the 50-week moving average (the average weekly close over the past year or so) sits at ~$81.5k.

As John put it: Bitcoin has been range-bound since late January, and this rally is a failed attempt to climb back into that range from underneath.

If that same green candle had pushed through to $82K and gone quiet above it, he'd have called the setup wildly bullish (as consolidating above support would indicate that we’re coiling for the next leg up). 

But because it stalled below resistance, it reads as a failed test.

So we went looking for the floor…

John has three levels mapped: $74K, $71K and $65K. 

His bids already sit at $71K, but it’s $74K that matters the most here - if we go below that, you're buying Bitcoin roughly below where it has averaged all year (aka: at a discount).

Weirdly enough, the thing most likely to drag us down toward that level has nothing to do with crypto…

IF BTC BREAKS THIS LEVEL, WE’RE SO BACK (P2) 🤝

John's biggest worry isn't on the BTC chart.

It's the S&P 500, aka: one of the best gauges of how much risk investors are willing to hold.

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh gave a hawkish speech at Jackson Hole on Friday and Bitcoin dropped 2.5% on it. If stocks roll over, crypto usually goes with them.

Markets are now near a coin flip on whether the Fed hikes rates in September. Before Warsh spoke, a rate hold was priced around 70%.

John doesn't buy it though. His view is that Warsh and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have a plan, and that Warsh will hold (better for crypto) rather than hike rates (worse for crypto).

The date to circle in bold red permanent marker is September 15. 

That’s when the Fed's two-day meeting opens and the Senate votes on whether to even start debating the CLARITY Act.

Right now, CLARITY sits at a 14% chance of passing. Which (as John keeps reminding me) is bullish - in that, if it gets passed, it’s going to surprise the market and likely see an outsized bullish reaction.

Source: Polymarket

So with all of that, where does John stand, and what is he doing with his money right now?

A weekly close above $82K for BTC and he deploys hard, possibly running his cash pile to zero. 

Below $70K and he does something similar off the assumption that the July 1st low of $57.7K won’t be broken, and the worst is behind us.

Anywhere between, he’s mostly sitting on his hands. Or as he put it: you wait and make the market prove to you that it's out of this bear trend. Either by breaking resistance at $82k, or making a higher low (anywhere above $57.7K) before moving up again.

Outside of that, he's nibbling at alts based on fundamentals rather than charts. 

I watched the dude place a trade on Uniswap at the breakfast table when we were on our retreat last week, and thought to myself: 

“If I had my cold wallet with me, I’d copy trade him right now. But it’s all good - he’s famously early to most trades. It can wait till I’m home.”

Unfortunately for me, that thought was misguided. 

The mf’er is already up 15% on the trade - and that’s on top of the 30%+ gains he’s recently seen across his ETH, SOL, and SKY positions.

(Lesson learned: listen to Mr. Gillen.)

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Tom Lee: AI agents are already buying more tokens than humans inside some models.

Saylor: "We were very good at selling STRC at 100 and we’re very good at buying BTC, but now we’ve illustrated to the market that we can sell BTC and we can buy STRC."

Novogratz: The U.S. debt situation, described with one word? 'Pray.' "Annualized interest just crossed $1T. The average coupon went from 2% to 3.3% in 3 years."

Get started with Nexo today.

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ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛

VITALIK PIC OF THE DAY

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that runs hotter than the Treasury's ink budget.

Here’s a taste of this week’s menu:

• 🔥 AI might invent its own currency.

• 🥵 Trump said "Hyperliquid" and just like that, the printer's back on.

• 🌶️ Oracle’s bull case is basically just Larry Ellison's friend group.

Milk Road is booking Q4 sponsorships now. If you want to reach 88,000 crypto and AI investors a day, book a call now.

HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK 🔥

HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK (P2) 🔥

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Novogratz: "Web3 is kind of dead." The blockchain ecosystems that got valuable didn't earn it through transactions - they became money through storytelling.

John Gillen: "If it [the CLARITY Act] does pass, that could be another major bullish catalyst because the market is positioned for it to fail."

Raoul Pal: By 2032, SpaceX could be worth $10T while 80% of U.S. companies fail - and the economy could still grow. "It's a really weird world."

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MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @boldleonidas

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GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that's the well-timed assist right before your portfolio scores.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ AI agents are transacting onchain (again).

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Wall Street Is Moving Onchain Faster Than Most Investors Realize.

• 🍪 Saylor: "STRC is digital credit." Bitcoin is digital capital.

Optionality is a free trading community with 14 active traders, real-time trade alerts and end of day recaps. Join the Optionality community for free.

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AI AGENTS ARE PAYING EACH OTHER ONCHAIN AGAIN 🤖

Back in March, pretty much everyone agreed that AI agents paying each other onchain was a dead idea.

And the numbers backed them up.

Weekly machine-to-machine payments running on x402 (Coinbase's payments standard) had fallen more than 95% off their November high, down to under 1M a week.

Even Coinbase's own product team admitted in March that the demand just wasn't there.

And if you don’t know what x402 is - lemme help you out real quick.

There's an error code baked into the internet called 402, "Payment Required," and it's sat unused since the 90s. Coinbase wired it up to stablecoins so software can charge other software per request.

Your agent asks a server for some data, the server says "that'll be half a cent," the agent pays in USDC, and the data comes back. No account, no subscription, and no humans needed.

But that November peak was a bit of a lie.

Token Terminal counted 20.1M of those payments in the week of November 17, 2025, and 18.7M of them ran on Base.

Chainalysis traced that surge largely to PING, a token you minted by paying $1 of USDC.

I.e. people were paying to farm a coin, so the traffic was speculation, not legit agent-to-agent micropayments.

So when it collapsed, the obituaries kinda wrote themselves.

But while everyone was busy writing them, Amazon was building agent payments into Bedrock AgentCore (its main AI product for business customers), with Coinbase and Stripe supplying the wallets.

That went into preview on May 7, then live for every AWS customer on August 18.

Last week, x402 saw 8.7M payments, up from 4.1M the week before.

(Doubling, week over week.)

Source: Token Terminal

Which would be a decent story on its own, but the interesting part is where all those payments went…

AI AGENTS ARE PAYING EACH OTHER AGAIN (P2) 🤖

If this were November all over again, the traffic would have gone straight back to the one chain that was paying for it all.

Instead it spread across four:

• Base: down to 48% of the weekly count (from 93%).

• Solana: up from 6% to 38%.

• Everyone else: the remaining 14%.

Source: Token Terminal

Because Amazon wasn't the only one turning this on.

Ramp switched x402 on for its 70,000+ business customers on August 20, and Google Cloud now lets agents pay per request for Gemini, BigQuery and Vertex AI over Solana.

Vincent saw this one coming.

He bought SOL for the PRO portfolio on March 31, at the exact bottom of the panic, writing: "Solana is a bet on agent payments. If AI agents start paying for APIs, compute, data, and each other, the winner is likely a chain built for small, fast, cheap, real-time transactions."

His entry was $82.56. SOL's at ~$105 at the time of this writing.

The volumes here aren't as wild as they were when there was a token to farm, and they're not meant to be.

Agents pay per request instead of per purchase, so every payment is priced like an API call, which keeps things at pennies while software buys from software.

8.7M payments a week tells us that the plumbing is being used (though nobody's getting rich off the payments themselves yet).

Which brings us to who's actually getting paid here.

The standard charges nothing on each sale, by design.

The money lands with whoever runs the wallet and earns interest on the dollars parked inside it.

Which, in this case, is Coinbase. It wrote the standard, runs one of the two wallets Amazon shipped, and takes a slice of the interest Circle earns on USDC reserves.

Last quarter that business brought in $292M, with a record $20B of USDC sitting inside Coinbase products (over 30% of every USDC in existence).

When it comes to agent-to-agent payments onchain, we’ve barely begun to see the start of this adoption story.

And Coinbase is set up to be one of the largest benefactors.

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Tom Lee: Crypto winter may already be ending, and Wall Street could be caught underexposed.

Saylor: "STRC is digital credit." Bitcoin is digital capital. Stablecoins are digital currency... the missing piece is stable, yield bearing, Bitcoin-backed digital money.

Denelle Dixon: The CLARITY Act isn't going to open the floodgates, because they're already open.

*this is sponsored content.

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ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛

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GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that's the pressure washer blasting the grime off confusing crypto news.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ BTC’s up 22% and John’s holding cash?

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Tom Lee: The Next 5 Years of Crypto Will Be About Ethereum.

• 🍪 BTC’s volatility hit historic lows right before the squeeze.

On Sept 23, Milk Road's Martin sits down with Alumni Ventures to talk about blockchain and private markets. Save your free seat here.

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BITCOIN RIPPED 22% AND JOHN'S STILL SITTING ON CASH 🤨

Bitcoin just had its biggest week since late 2024.

It ran from about $62,800 to nearly $80,000, and plenty of people were ready to call the bear market over right there.

But our crypto analyst, John Gillen, isn't quite there yet - he’s still sitting on a good chunk of cash.

Here’s where we’ve come from/where we’re at:

On August 19, the U.S. Treasury said it would at least double the size of its long-end buybacks, from $2B to at least $4B per operation.

(A buyback is the government purchasing back its own longer-dated debt, to keep that market functioning when nobody else wants to step in.)

Bond yields dropped on the news. The 30-year fell 9 basis points to 5.196%, having just touched its highest level since 2007.

Cheaper money is good for crypto, so crypto went nuts.

But two things complicated the whole thing…

First, the bond market handed a lot of its progress back inside a day, with the 30-year climbing seven basis points to 5.26%. Right back above where it sat before the announcement.

Second, roughly $2.7B of bets against crypto got force-closed. I.e. a big chunk of that green candle was traders being made to buy, not choosing to.

Which brings us to the level John actually cares about…

Source: TradingView

The 200-week moving average (blue) is the average price over roughly the last four years. In bear markets it tends to cap rallies, and in bull markets it catches the dips.

Bitcoin's sits just over $64K, which it has now reclaimed and held above. That's the properly bullish part.

But it's still stuck under the ceiling that capped this market back in May: the $83K level (white dotted line).

Get a weekly close above that, and John thinks higher prices become more likely than lower, with a path into the 90s and maybe even $100K.

Until then, he thinks $74K comes first.

But the main reason he won't call the bottom has almost nothing to do with Bitcoin...

BITCOIN RIPPED 22% AND JOHN'S STILL SITTING ON CASH (P2) 🤨

ETH spent about 30 weeks below its own 200-week average, which John puts at roughly $2,493. 

Call it $2,500.

By his count, it's been rejected from that level four separate times in major market moves - and five separate times since Saturday.

But still, no definitive break:

Source: TradingView

John wants a confident break above $2,500 if he’s going to call the bear market dead.

That said… he does think the bottom is in.

Right now, momentum is fading under resistance rather than building over support, so he expects a pullback before the next leg up.

What he's watching is whether that pullback makes a higher low, or breaks the old ones. He thinks higher, because there’re enough sidelined buyers waiting to step in.

He's treating the dip as a re-test, and plans to buy into it.

Two dates to watch from here:

Sept 9: when the bigger Treasury buybacks actually begin (they run through Nov 4).

Sept 15: the Senate's procedural vote on the CLARITY Act.

The two prices to watch: 

A weekly close above $83K on Bitcoin, and a weekly close above $2,500 on Ethereum.

According to John, whichever way that second one breaks tells us whether we’re back or not.

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Novogratz: Every major TradFi institution now accepts one thing - no more "crypto assets" vs "TradFi assets" - almost everything gets a tokenized version.

Raoul Pal: Gold bugs have been doom-mongering for 30 years and missed everything.

John Gillen: BTC’s volatility hit historic lows right before the squeeze. "94% of BTC’s history, it’d been trading with more volatility than it was prior to this short squeeze."

*this is sponsored content.

Save your free seat here.

MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @ToolySOL

Source: @naiivememe

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GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that just extended its Milk Road PRO price increase window by 24hrs.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ Coinbase put Nvidia onchain.

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Bitwise Just Launched the Next Generation of Onchain Investing.

• 🍪 "I believe Ethereum will outperform Bitcoin this year.”

Ledn gives you an indirect way to get professional, institutional-grade custody. See how Ledn stores your BTC.

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COINBASE PUT NVIDIA ONCHAIN ⛓️

Coinbase spent Monday putting four American tech stocks onchain.

Nvidia, Apple, Meta and Alphabet went live as tokens on Base, where anyone eligible outside the U.S. can hold them in a self-custody wallet with no brokerage account involved.

They trade 24/7, which is already more than the actual stock market manages.

The plumbing works like this:

A market maker buys the real shares → Alpaca (an SEC-registered broker-dealer) holds them in a segregated account → and you get a token that's a claim on that share (with dividends and stock splits passing through to the token).

Which sounds neat… 

But, why bother when stocks are already easily tradable elsewhere?

Because a token can plug into other software, while a brokerage account can't.

Roughly 50 Base apps supported these on day one. Aave and Morpho for lending, Aerodrome for spot trading, Wasabi for options.

I.e. you could post your tokenized Nvidia as collateral and borrow against it at 3am on a Sunday, which your broker will absolutely not let you do.

As for actual demand on day one, it was modest:

• Tokens minted: ~$4.55M.

• Onchain liquidity: ~$3.06M.

• First 24 hours of trading: $10.8M.

• Holders of NVDAc, the biggest of the four: 1,745.

That's arriving into a tokenized stock market worth $2.48B - one that's nearly doubled since March.

Source: RWA & DEX Screener

Coinbase turned up last, and smallest, to a party that's been going on for a while.

Good news is, this market’s so dang big that I doubt ‘first’ is going to be the deciding factor…

COINBASE PUT NVIDIA ONCHAIN (P2) ⛓️

Right now, Americans can't buy any of these onchain stocks.

These tokens are sold under Regulation S, the rule covering securities offered only to non-U.S. buyers. Coinbase asked the SEC for domestic permission back in June 2025 and is still waiting.

Which sounds like a handicap, until you look at what sits on the other side of that border.

Global stock markets are worth $157.8T, and the U.S. accounts for $68.9T of that.

So the slice Coinbase can already sell into is roughly $89T of equities, against $2.48B of tokenized stocks across every issuer combined, with Citi wagering that tokenized securities reach $5.5T by 2030.

I.e. There’s plenty of room to grow:

Source: SIFMA & RWA

Kyle (our Head of Research) has been waiting for someone to build this properly, and I’m going to borrow his take on why the earlier attempts fell short…

24/7 trading is a nice feature, but composability with DeFi is the part that legitimately matters.

Tokenized stocks only pull people out of brokerages once they carry the same rights as a brokerage share and let you do more with them than a brokerage allows.

Coinbase has both now. Dividends and splits pass through, and Aave, Morpho and Euler will lend against them.

Giving a retail investor the ability to borrow, lend and earn against stocks they already own is the thing that will move them onchain. Nothing before this managed to do that without piling on extra risk.

The still-yet-to-be-answered question is whether non-crypto people will bother making the move.

Kyle's guess is that it takes real incentives, plus a simple way to shift existing holdings across (the way you'd transfer an account between brokers today). Get that part right and it becomes a no-brainer.

Which brings us to COIN itself:

Kyle's been holding since $35, bought near the last bear market lows, and it's one of his biggest positions.

His argument is that Coinbase hands you crypto upside with a floor underneath it:

• Up 30% this week, against BTC's 22% and ETH's 27%.

• Beat ETH by 3x and BTC by 2x through the last bull market.

• Revenue from stablecoins, stock trading and prediction markets that don’t swing with crypto prices.

• Exposure to Bitcoin and Ethereum through its balance sheet and Base, plus Solana, Circle, OpenUSD, Hyperliquid's USDC treasury, and a venture arm across the whole industry.

The catch being you can't self-custody a share of COIN, and you're trusting Brian Armstrong's team to keep executing. 

(Kyle's cool with both.)

What we’re watching for from here: 

• More TradFi tickers landing onchain within the next few weeks.

• Whether Coinbase builds that transfer path.

• The CLARITY Act vote in September.

Keep your eyes peeled!

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Still interested? Good: Lyn Alden's biggest long-term fear for Bitcoin isn't quantum or regulatory risk, "It's more about the risk of disinterest."

Jordi Visser: "I believe Ethereum will outperform Bitcoin this year. Bitcoin is the S&P 500. It's amorphous. It is the thing that survives over time." ETH is a different beast.

CZ: There is no "crypto finance vs traditional finance.” There's not two parallel financial industries. There should just be one.

*this is sponsored content.

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MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @ToolySOL

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ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛

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GM. This is Milk Road, the newsletter that knows that when two of the best macro traders of all time get into a public feud about the bond market, it’s time to lock in.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ Clash of the titans

• ✍️ Druckenmiller Druck’s back

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: The One Catalyst Bitcoin Needs to Break All-Time Highs.

• 🍪 Vlad Tenev: Robinhood's credit card is a dark horse.

Every morning, Elite Trade Club provides a detailed briefing before the opening bell. Get the free AI Infrastructure briefing here.

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CLASH OF THE TITANS

Instead of our usual Milk Road Macro updates, I wanted to break down what’s going on with one of the coolest macro smackdowns in memory.

A major feud has erupted in high finance, pitting U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent against his legendary former mentor, billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller.

I often call these two guys the ‘92 Bulls of macro investing.

That’s because in 1992, the duo worked together under George Soros to famously "break the Bank of England" by betting against government price intervention.

Fast forward to today: roles have flipped. Bessent is running the U.S. Treasury, managing a massive $40T national debt, while Druckenmiller is calling out his former protégé for breaking the very economic principles they traded on.

Well, well, well, how the turntables.

What are they fighting about?

Bessent’s Treasury launched an unscheduled, expanded bond buyback program to pull down surging long-term interest rates. Druckenmiller publicly slammed the move as dangerous government price-fixing.   

What triggered the feud?

The bond market has been flashing red as the U.S. national debt has topped $40T and the annual federal deficit hovers around 6% of GDP. With annual net interest costs surging past $1.1T and exceeding the U.S. defense budget, investors demanded higher yields to hold government bonds.   

In mid-August, 30-year U.S. Treasury yields spiked to 5.33%, their highest level in nearly two decades.   

Source: Milk Road

Bessent’s move: The "Treasury twist"

To cap rising borrowing costs, Secretary Bessent executed an off-cycle maneuver:   

• Doubling long-end buybacks: Treasury doubled its buyback cap on 10-to-30-year debt from $2B to at least $4B per operation, signaling it could go even higher.   

• Tapping the cash cushion: Officials hinted at using the Treasury General Account’s (TGA) near-$1T cash pile to fund yield support operations.   

Bessent's defense:

Bessent framed the program as a "Treasury twist.” Swapping long-term debt for short-term T-bills to clean up illiquidity in thin summer trading.

He argued that yields were artificially driven up by temporary factors, like Middle East geopolitical headlines and massive corporate bond issuance from tech companies funding AI data centers.   

Druckenmiller’s clapback:

Druckenmiller launched a direct counter-attack in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "Let the bond markets speak".   

Source: WSJ

DRUCKENMILLER DRUCK’S BACK

(BTW, if a lot of this looks like it was written by an AI and not Stanley Druckenmiller, that’s because it seems like it was written by an AI, not Stanley Druckenmiller. What a time to be alive, amirite? Imagine being like, “Claude, roast the Secretary of the Treasury, make no mistakes”.)

It's price fixing, not liquidity:
"This wasn't liquidity management, it was price management — and a mistake far larger than $4B suggests". He noted there were no failed auctions or frozen dealer balance sheets to justify intervention.   

You cannot buck the market: 

"Governments defending prices against fundamentals always lose. The only variable is how much they spend before conceding".   

The bond market is the only disciplinarian left:

Rising yields force politicians to confront reckless spending. Artificially lowering yields is a "subsidy to procrastination" that allows lawmakers to ignore structural deficit reform.   

Fix the deficit, not the yield:

Druckenmiller argued that a credible budget-cutting package would do more to lower long-term rates than a buyback program 1,000 times the Treasury's size.   

The market verdict & macro takeaways

The market quickly sided with Druckenmiller.   

When the buybacks were announced, 30-year yields briefly dropped ~10 basis points. But within 24 hours, sellers flooded the market, pushing yields right back above 5.24%.   

Unlike the Federal Reserve's Quantitative Easing (QE), the Treasury cannot print money. To buy long-term bonds, it must issue more short-term T-bills or drain cash, simply shifting duration around rather than creating true demand.   

Do you know what Ferguson’s law is? The bond market does.

Historian Niall Ferguson noted that any major power spending more on interest payments than defense enters structural decline. Investors know administrative buybacks can't fix a $2T annual deficit.   

Bottom line

Bessent tried to use debt management tools to quiet down the bond market, but investors proved that state intervention can't override raw supply-and-demand realities for long.

The solution?

I mean, the way things look right now, it seems like they're going to have to debase the dollar.

This means it’s more important than ever to own assets to protect your capital from debasement.

Stay safe, stay educated, and stay bullish!

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Vlad Tenev: Robinhood's credit card is a dark horse. 1M cardholders, $17B in annualized transaction volume, and it just crossed $100M in annualized revenue.

M0xt: Figure's moat is deeper than it looks. "You cannot just copy paste the blockchain and all of a sudden have the blockchain integrations and all your partners onboard."

Lyn Alden: a lot of the "permissionless" use cases in Bitcoin were actually just regulatory arbitrage.

👉 Get the free AI Infrastructure briefing here. 

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MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @ToolySOL

Source: @boldleonidas

ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛

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GM. This is Milk Road, the newsletter that’s happy Bitcoin is finally doing Bitcoin things again.

​Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

• ✍️ What’s next for Bitcoin?

• ✍️ How our analysts are playing this market.

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Ethereum Is Setting Up for Something We Haven’t Seen in 10 Years.

• 🍪 Bitcoin will be over $100K by the end of this year.

Nexo is a premier digital asset platform that helps clients build, manage, and preserve their wealth. Get started with Nexo today.

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WHAT’S NEXT FOR BITCOIN? 🤔

Every Monday morning, John, Martin & I jump on a call.

We talk through what we're watching for the week ahead and how we're actually thinking about our portfolios.

This Monday, the mood was cautiously optimistic.

As we broke down on Thursday & Friday, Bitcoin’s having a gala time.

But despite the recent pump, our crypto analysts aren't popping champagne just yet.

They’re cautiously watching the market.

The number John is watching closely is $82,000.

That's the bull market support band. It’s the price level that separates "we're in an uptrend" from "something's wrong." 

John's two key retrace levels if things cool off: $74,000 first, then $71,500 if that doesn't hold. 

Those are the spots he'd start getting more interested in.

Source: TradingView

The reason John is cautious is because of some sell pressure in the market.

The Kingdom of Bhutan (yes, the country) and Wintermute (one of the largest crypto trading firms in the world) have both been moving Bitcoin onto exchanges recently. 

When large holders move crypto onto exchanges, it usually means one thing: they're getting ready to sell.

But so far, it's been absorbed. 

Bitcoin ETFs have been pulling in enough fresh money to soak up the selling. The bulls are holding the line.

There are two events this week that could shift the picture in either direction:

1. A Treasury buyback announcement

The U.S. government repurchasing its own debt could inject additional liquidity into the market.

2. Kevin Warsh's debut speech at Jackson Hole on Friday

Markets will be watching closely for any signals on the economy, rates and liquidity.

HOW OUR ANALYSTS ARE PLAYING THIS MARKET 🧑‍💻

So how are we actually positioned through all of this?

Martin has around 13% of his portfolio directly in Bitcoin.

On the other hand, John avoids having exposure to any crypto-adjacent stocks.

His argument: 

Companies like Coinbase built their business models on top of things that Ethereum increasingly does natively and for free. 

Trading fees, custody, settlement (the stuff that made these businesses valuable) are slowly being eaten by the network itself. 

Why pay a middleman for something the underlying infrastructure does itself? As Ethereum grows, the moat around those businesses shrinks. So John avoids them altogether.

So while Martin sees opportunities in crypto stocks, John would rather own crypto directly.

Two smart investors but very different approaches.

And that's exactly why Milk Road PRO is valuable.

Inside Milk Road PRO, you don't get five analysts all repeating the same opinion.

You get five different perspectives on the same topic:

• John is heavily focused on crypto.

• Martin mixes crypto with stocks.

• Kyle and Vincent have their own crypto exposure and market views.

• Melvin takes a completely different approach and currently has no crypto exposure at all.

And depending on your investment style, time horizon and thesis, one approach might make more sense to you than another.

Inside PRO, you get direct access to all five portfolios and can see what each analyst is buying, selling, holding and watching.

You don't have to blindly follow anyone.

You get to see the research, understand the thesis and decide which approach fits you best.

And if you've been thinking about joining, this is your last chance to get in at the current price.

Milk Road PRO's price increases on August 26. Less than 2 days from now.

Once the price goes up, the current price is gone.

So if you want access to all five analysts and their portfolios at the lowest available price:

Get in before August 26

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Lyn Alden: “We’ve likely bottomed here.”

Jordi Visser: "I would be extremely happy if my kids would never own a home."

David Duong: Bitcoin will be over $100,000 by the end of this year.

Get started with Nexo today.

MILKY MEMES 🤣

Source: @boldleonidas

Source: @ToolySOL

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