🥛 2 big pieces of news. 1 real. 1 fake. 🤨

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter delivering two pieces of news to you today. One real. One as fake as a Discord “support agent”.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

✍️ 2 big pieces of news. 1 real. 1 fake.
🍪 Here's how the U.S. can reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

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2 PIECES OF BASE NEWS DROPPED. ONE REAL. ONE FAKE. 🤨

Base just published its 2026 game plan for the world to see.

And while everyone was digesting that…

A leaked codebase had crypto Twitter convinced that one of the biggest AI companies in the world was quietly building crypto payments into its product.

Turns out… not so much.

But shoot, I'm getting ahead of myself - first, the official stuff.

Base dropped a full 2026 Mission, Vision, and Strategy doc, and if it ended at the 2025 recap alone, that would be impressive enough:

$17T in stablecoin volume, across 26 currencies, and 17 countries.
They became the #1 onchain venue for Bitcoin spot trading.
The Base App went live in 140+ countries.
And they funded over 50 teams through their builder program (called Base Batches).

Source: @base

The 2026 plan? It boils down to three big bets:

1. Bring every major asset class onchain

Stocks, commodities, prediction markets, perpetuals (which are basically futures contracts with no expiry date). All of it is tradable 24/7 with sub-second settlement and near-zero fees.

2. Scale payments and stablecoins

Think: privacy features, smarter wallet infrastructure, and turning the Base App into the easiest way to spend, borrow against, and earn yield on your USDC.

3. They want to be the home base (pun intended) for builders

This means rolling out tools like AI-native smart accounts, open-source developer access, and x402 payment standards.

Now, x402 is worth knowing about because it's at the center of yesterday's other big story…

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2 PIECES OF BASE NEWS DROPPED. ONE REAL. ONE FAKE. (P2) 🤨

In case you're new to the agentic payment rails game:

x402 is an open payment protocol (developed by Coinbase) that lets AI agents make payments using stablecoins.

It showed up in Base’s strategy doc - and then (seemingly) in another BIG document drop…

Over 500,000 lines of Claude's source code (Anthropic's AI assistant) leaked online yesterday, and people combing through it found multiple references to x402 scattered across it.

Crypto Twitter went nuts. The implication being that Anthropic was already wiring up its AI to use Coinbase's crypto payment protocol.

Source: Giphy

The post with the most popular mirror of the code got 315,000 views. The repo got 8,100 forks…

One problem: it was planted.

A forensic analysis comparing multiple mirrors of the leaked code found that the two clean extractions (pulled straight from the original source map) had zero x402 references.

None.

The only mirror that contained x402 was the most popular one - uploaded by the same person who also snuck in their own separate tool.

Source: Github

“It's real code. It's just not Anthropic's.”

And by the time anyone noticed?

Anthropic's DMCA takedown had already nuked the repo and all 8,100 forks, which made cross-referencing basically impossible.

The takeaway from both stories combined:

The Base 2026 strategy is real, and it's ambitious. x402 as a protocol is real too - it's just not secretly baked into Claude.
AI agents using crypto payment rails is still very much the direction things are heading. Base is building for that future explicitly.
When source code leaks and everyone's racing to post the hottest take first, it pays to check which mirror you're actually reading (easier said than done though - we fell for it too).

Long story longer: the real stuff is exciting enough on its own.

We don't need the fan fiction to be true.

… though, cards on the table: we definitely want it to come true.