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GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that makes Hot Ones look like a tea party. |
Here’s a taste of this week’s menu: |
🥵 Compute ate Bitcoin's lunch. 🔥 Stablecoins might break the EU. 🌶️ Sorry, but we're still in a bear market.
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Nexo is back in the U.S. - and new clients get 30 days of Wealth Club Premier perks! Higher yields, lower borrowing rates, and crypto cashback - start here. |
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HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK 🔥 |
| | | | Compute ate BTC’s lunch as the corporate store of value 🖥️ | Kyle Reidhead (Head of Research at Milk Road): | Corporations have decided compute is the new store of value - the role everyone swore BTC would fill back in 2021 (and never did). | The difference is corporations don't just want a scarce asset, they want a scarce asset that's also productive - BTC was scarce but passive, ETH was supposed to be the answer, and it turned out to be GPUs. | Exhibit A: xAI dropped $24B on compute and is already renting it to Anthropic for ~$29B a year. | That's why Google is raising $80B in equity and stuffing every spare dollar into the buildout. | Whoever controls the compute finds a way to monetize it - so they're never stopping until the last possible second. | 🎙️ Listen to the full episode here. |
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| | | | Stablecoins might be the thing that breaks up the EU 🇪🇺 | Michael Howell (Founder & CEO of Cross Border Capital) made the boldest call of the week: | This sovereign debt mess could eventually crack the European Union wide open. | His logic: the only real safe asset in Europe is the German Bund. | French and German debt are diverging fast, and the glue holding it all together was NATO, which is now wobbling. | Then add dollar stablecoins, which make it dead simple to flee the euro for dollars with less paperwork, faster settlement, and a little anonymity from the taxman. | Michael thinks that capital flight is a genuine threat to the euro, the pound, and every emerging market currency. | Not tomorrow, he says - but the dominoes are lined up. | 🎙️ Listen to the full episode here. |
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| | | | Sorry, but we're still in a bear market 🐻 | Jamie Coutts (Chief Crypto Analyst at Real Vision) pointed out that the 25-30% pop earlier this year was a textbook counter-trend rally. | Until Bitcoin reclaims/breaks the mid $80k’s on the weekly chart he's not flipping bullish - and he thinks we get one more flush to the mid-$60k’s first (which has since happened). | And that's exactly where he's accumulating. | Jamie's whole thesis is that the agentic AI economy needs blockchain rails to move value - so the smart money is quietly buying the quality onchain protocols positioned for that over the next 12-24 months while everyone else chases AI stocks. | 🎙️ Listen to the full episode here. |
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HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK (P2) 🔥 |
| | | | We're speed-running a global gas shortage ⛽ | Jim Bianco (Founder of Bianco Research) thinks the whole world is being reckless with oil. | The market is betting the Strait of Hormuz reopens in 30-60 days, so everyone - Japan, China, Europe, the U.S. - has been aggressively draining inventories to keep prices capped. | Jim's point: if that bet is wrong and the Strait stays shut, we blow through "operational minimums" - and you can't run the tanks to zero. | Then comes demand destruction, which is the polite term for pricing people out at the gas station - Asia feels it first (21-day tankers from the Gulf), then Europe, then the U.S. | Oil's already up 8% to ~$95, and while $200 isn't his base case, he's not ruling it out. | 🎙️ Listen to the full episode here. |
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| | | | Nobody wants privacy until they suddenly, desperately do 🔓 | Yan Liberman (Co-founder of Delphi Digital) is calling Venice - Eric Voorhees' privacy-first LLM - wildly undervalued even after a 10x in three months. | He says people won’t care about it at all… until something goes wrong. | When there's a leak or a government subpoena - everyone stampedes at once. | He figures even 5-10% of all AI inference wanting real privacy is a massive market, and that's the conservative slice. | On the numbers, Yan pegs Venice at roughly $60M ARR, with ~$10M added in a single month, trading near 11x revenue - cheap for that kind of growth. | His read: only crypto money has touched it so far, and it re-rates hard the moment enterprise and AI investors wake up. | (We just wrote a PRO Report on Venice - here.) | 🎙️ Listen to the full episode here. |
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BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪 |
DeFi Saver turns Aave v4 into a trading bot for your loans: Stop losses, take profits, and one-click loan migration - we broke down the pros, cons, and fees so you don't have to.* |
Bitwise CEO: this is the most bullish moment in Bitwise's entire 7-8 year history in crypto. |
John Gillen: SpaceX's IPO is about to be a $1.8T vacuum in an already-overcrowded U.S. market. |
James Seyffart: Everyone's freaking out about $4B leaving BTC ETFs - but ETFs still hold ~$55B in net inflows, and investors aren't behaving like previous-cycle tourists. |
Your Bitcoin can hand you cash without selling a single sat → That's Ledn's whole pitch, and our full review breaks down everything you need to know about the platform.* |
*this is sponsored content. |
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👉 Get started here |
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MILKY MEMES 🤣 |
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