🥛 2 key things to watch for in Q1 📆

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that hits harder than a surprise WiFi signal on a long flight.

Here’s what we got for you today:

✍️ 2 key things to watch for in Q1
✍️ The winners & losers of DeFi
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Crypto’s K-Shaped Market: Why Some Assets Will Explode and Others Go to Zero w/ Kyle Reidhead
🍪 ~$330B worth of economic activity sits on top of ETH

Launching The Energy Network on Solana, Fuse Energy has just secured $70M in Series B funding. Discover the future of energy now.

Prices as of 2:00 PM ET. Trade today with Milk Road Swap.

2 KEY THINGS TO WATCH FOR IN Q1 2026

Sure, we can have some fun and guess at what we think might happen in the entirety of 2026…

But no one actually knows what’s going to happen on that kind of time scale with any kind of accuracy.

The cool part is – if we tighten up the dates, the plausibility factor increases.

So let’s do just that and take a look at 2 things to watch for in Q1 2026:

First up: Rate cuts

As of this writing, the market is betting that we’ll see rates hold steady at January’s FOMC meeting, while March’s predicted outlook is tied between ‘no cut’ and ‘a cut of 0.25%’.

Ideally, we want to see each of these odds flip comfortably towards two cuts of 0.25% or more.

‘Cause when rate cut expectations grow, the price of BTC tends to follow. Check out how it correlated in the lead up to December’s rate cut decision:

Source: Milk Road Macro

Second: The Market Structure Bill

Right now, the rules for U.S. institutional investing across the broader crypto sector are kind of murky – so the big dogs are holding off on putting their money anywhere outside of the ETFs.

The Market Structure Bill will help clear things up by defining the rules of engagement for institutions looking to invest in any/all crypto tokens.

(Once the rules are set, the capital can flow.)

Right now, the credible window for the bill actually becoming law is around mid 2026.

But remember: markets are forward looking – so any momentum on the Market Structure Bill could see investors front-running its passing and pushing crypto prices up in the process.

This legislation should help shift the balance of allocation further in the direction of institutions (aka: big money, aka: number go up drivers):

Source: @cryptounfolded

Keep your eyes peeled!

FUSE ENERGY RAISES $70M AT A $5B VALUATION

Is this the most legit energy company to ever enter crypto?

Fuse Energy is a $400M ARR utility powering 200,000+ homes, announcing a $70M Series B at a blockbuster $5B valuation.

This comes after the recent beta launch of The Energy Network, a new digital layer engineered to scale our grids and save billions in costs.

And now, it’s just building its momentum:

Raised $70M in Series B led by Lowercarbon and Balderton
Now valued at $5B
Launched beta on Solana
Received landmark no-action letter from the SEC last month
Planning listings for early 2026

A new foundation for the grid is coming.

Check out their announcement here and follow Fuse on X for updates.

WINNERS & LOSERS: DEFI NET FLOWS OF 2025 🥇

Take all the money flowing into a blockchain… factor in the money flowing out of it…

BOOM! You have a chain’s net flows.

Positive flows = the chain is winning (attracting more money than it’s losing).

Negative flows = the chain is struggling (losing more money than it's attracting).

With that in mind, here are the winners & losers of 2025, when it comes to DeFi net-flows.

Note: Bitcoin is not included here, as it doesn’t ‘do’ DeFi.

Source: Artemis

Winner totals & quick takes:

Ethereum +$3.9B of flows – No surprise here
Hyperliquid +$2.4B of flows – Pretty damn impressive given Hyperliquid only launched last year
Sonic +$1.3B of flows – A lot of these flows are likely due to Fantom’s migration over to Sonic, meaning many of these flows are likely existing users transferring their holdings

Loser totals & quick takes:

Arbitrum -$4.5B – Token unlocks + user rotation toward Base, Optimism, and other high-incentive chains = this result
Unichain -$1.3B – Unichain has leaned on token incentives to bootstrap locked value, attracting capital that was never structurally “sticky”
BNB Chain -$1.2B – This is surprising given the amount of narrative momentum that gathered around BNB in the second half of 2025

Ok – we’ve given our take, now we want yours: