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GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that turns “should I care?” into “I’m glad I read that.” |
Here’s what we’ve got for you today: |
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Midnight is a fourth generation blockchain that just launched last week. Check out their launch announcement here. |
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CHAINLINK’S SOLUTION TO WALL STREET'S $58B PAPER JAM 🪄 |
Somewhere, right now, inside a major bank, there’s an analyst reading a PDF about a stock split and copying and copy-pasting the details into a spreadsheet. |
By hand… like it's a middle school homework assignment… in the year of our lord, 2026. |
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It’s insanely inefficient, but it’s how "corporate actions" get processed in traditional finance. |
Corporate actions are events like stock splits, mergers, or dividend payouts - basically any time a public company does something that affects its shareholders. |
There are 3.7M of these events every year in the U.S. alone - and 46% of the data involved is still processed manually. |
Each of these events touches 110,000+ interactions between firms - the total bill? |
$58B per year in costs, errors, and delays. |
For context - that’s more than 3.5x Goldman Sachs' annual profit! |
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You'd think someone would've fixed this by now… and to be fair - it’s not for lack of trying. |
The industry has been pushing for decades to get every company to standardize how they send their data, so banks can read it cleanly on the other end. |
But it never worked. |
Too many companies, too many formats, too many people who'd rather keep doing things their way. |
So Chainlink tried a different approach… |
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| Here’s a fun fact: | 90% of people are concerned about the privacy of their data. | Yet privacy hasn’t really been considered for most blockchains. | And that’s why Midnight is doubling down on it. | Midnight is a fourth generation blockchain design to unlock real-world adoption. | Here’s what they’re building: | A blockchain enabling privacy by default Infrastructure to bring real-world finance onchain A dual-component model with the $NIGHT token and $DUST resource
| And here’s the cherry on top: | Midnight just launched this week. It’s fresh, live and ready to explore. | Check out their launch announcement here. |
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CHAINLINK’S SOLUTION TO WALL STREET'S $58B PAPER JAM (P2) 🪄 |
Instead of changing how the data gets sent, Chainlink is changing how it gets received. |
And they’ve partnered with 24 of the world's biggest financial institutions to test it out, including: |
Swift (the global payments messaging network). Euroclear (a major securities settlement house). UBS (one of the largest banks on Earth).
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Here's how it works in three steps: |
AI reads the mess. The jumbled PDFs, the inconsistent formats, the weird edge cases… AI models digest it all and pull out the key info. Chainlink verifies it. Oracles (which are basically data middlemen that connect blockchains to the outside world) take the outputs from multiple AIs, cross-check them, and agree on one trusted answer. That answer gets published onchain as a "Golden Record." One single source of truth, stored onchain, that can't be tampered with or lost in someone's inbox.
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The results from the pilot? |
They hit 100% consensus across every corporate action they tested - all with zero hallucination problems from the AI layer. |
The big-picture formula looks like this: traditional finance connects to onchain infrastructure → AI collects the data → oracles verify it → blockchains secure it. |
The ‘tokenization of everything’ thesis doesn't just mean slapping a token on a stock and calling it a day. |
The plumbing underneath has to move onchain too. |
That's what this is. The boring, unsexy, back-office plumbing that makes financial markets actually function - running onchain. |
We love to see it. 🥲 |
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BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪 |
The entire industry is headed to Miami. Get 20% off Consensus Miami passes with code MILKROAD.* |
Tax free stables: Transfers of regulated stablecoins (like USDC and USDT) could soon be tax-free if they stay pegged between $0.99 and $1.01. |
That’s progress! Oil just dropped to $93.61 after markets got optimistic about US-Iran tensions easing up. |
The strait is closed, but markets don’t care (yet): Iran says they are open to giving up nuclear weapons following new U.S. blockade. |
Everyone’s betting big on prediction markets. Birdeye just dropped a solid report on their growing institutional adoption. Read it here.** |
*this is sponsored content.
**this is partner content. |
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Check out their launch announcement here. |
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MILKY MEMES 🤣 |
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ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛 |
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VITALIK PIC OF THE DAY |
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