GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter delivering a daily 3-in-1 special: analysis, research, and entertainment. 🤝
Here’s what we got for you today:
- ✍️ 3 pieces of momentum-driving news
- ✍️ DATs and their long-term risk
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: The Most Bullish Ethereum Thesis You Haven’t Heard (Yet) w/ The Ether Machine
- 🍪 VanEck plans to file for $HYPE spot staking ETFs
Walrus is making blockchains faster, cheaper and more secure. Click here to learn more about Walrus.
Prices as of 2:00 PM ET, provided by CoinGecko.
3 PIECES OF MOMENTUM-DRIVING NEWS 📰
September’s crypto price action may have remained flat so far…
But the bullish momentum building behind the scenes remains consistent!
Here are the 3 pieces of news adding to it today:
1/ It’s official: alt season is upon us
75% of the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market cap have outperformed $BTC over the past 90 days, which means we’re in alt season! 👇
Though, it comes with a caveat…
This recent flip into alt season has largely been driven by the fact that $BTC has gone down while alts have remained flat.
So we’re kinda in alt season on a technicality.
The ideal scenario would be to see both $BTC and alts move up, but for alts to do so faster – that’s when the face-melting gains really start to hit.
(Watch this space.)
2/ Memecoins go TradFi
Speaking of alt season gains – maybe this could help push things in the right direction?
By tomorrow, $XRP, $DOGE, $BONK, and $TRUMP will all have the ability to soak up TradFi dollars on US exchanges. 👇
3/ $FORD closes its round
That $1.65B that Forward Industries ($FORD) wanted to raise for their $SOL treasury? They’ve closed it!
Next step: buy a metric sh*t ton of Solana. 👇
Oh, and BONUS:
Today’s CPI data release (which measures consumer price inflation) just met the market’s expectations – giving the Fed yet another excuse to cut rates this month.
The takeaway:
Crypto prices may not have moved a whole lot just yet – but there’s a ton of inertia building behind the scenes.
Q4 is looking mighty promising!
WEB3’S PRIVACY ISSUE: FIXED 🤝
Imagine if Google made it so anyone with the right link could access your online data.
(It’d be bedlam!)
…now get this: in web3, that concept isn’t a hypothetical, it’s a reality.
Thankfully, Walrus is about to close this privacy gap with the launch of Seal – their decentralized secrets management service.
Seal’s use cases are FAR reaching! For example:
- AI marketplaces: share proprietary training data while gating access
- Gaming: reveal encrypted in-game content as players reach certain levels
- Messaging: encrypt attachments & chat logs with recoverable access
Ready to super charge your web3 app?
Click here to learn more about Walrus!
DIGITAL ASSET TREASURIES AND THEIR LONG-TERM RISK 🥴
Just like a divorced dad experimenting with spices n’ seasonings for the first time…
It feels like we may be about to learn ‘how much is too much’ when it comes to Digital Asset Treasury companies (DATs).
In the past month alone, we’ve already seen a bunch of new DATs pop up:
- Forward Industries (Solana)
- Eightco Holdings (Worldcoin)
- Sonnet BioTherapeutics (Hyperliquid)
- CleanCore Solutions (Dogecoin)
- CaliberCos (Chainlink)
And they often follow a “rip n’ dip” pattern when first hitting the market. 👇
So now, the question people are starting to ask more-and-more frequently is:
Could this DAT trend come back to bite us in the ass down the line?
I don’t have a crystal ball – and honestly, this topic is edging towards “too dense for the daily newsletter, maybe I should pressure the PRO team into explaining it” territory – BUT!
If it were to happen, my best (semi) educated guess at how it could play out goes something like this…
The DAT playbook is to raise funds → buy crypto.
Which means if you wanna become the biggest dog in the DAT yard, you’re going to need a few different fundraising options at your disposal.
One of the more common routes, outside of selling plain old shares, is to sell long-term convertible corporate bonds:
Investors buy these bonds which are held for, say, 5yrs → they earn interest on them → if at the end of 5yrs the stock has hit a certain target price, they get their money back in shares.
…but if the stock hasn’t hit the targeted price – they get their money back in cash.
And it’s that last bit that poses some risk.
Here’s a beat-by-beat of how it could cause a DAT company to spiral:
- The DAT sells 5yr bonds
- It builds a treasury around a smaller, niche token without a proven history
- Over the 5yr period, the treasury token underperforms, hurting the DAT’s stock price
- The DAT is forced to pay bond holders back in cash. To do so, they sell treasury tokens
- This forced selling hurts the token’s price, lowering the DAT’s treasury value…
- Which drops the stock price further, leading to more cash payouts for bonds…repeat. 👇
(And if there are other competitors holding the same digital asset in their treasuries, it could cause contagion across them.)
Yikes! So…
What’re some ways to mitigate against this potential future risk if you’re feeling the urge to ape into this new crop of treasuries, long-term?
Look for DATs holding assets with proven ability to grow over time (5+ years), that are backed by folks with enough reputation to raise money in a pinch.
(E.g. Saylor/$MSTR, Tom Lee/$BMNR, Mike Novogratz/$FORD.)
What’re your thoughts on all of this?
Come and continue the conversation over in our Telegram group!
CRYPTO PRO “WHERE ARE WE IN THE CYCLE?” INDICATORS 🤔
Welcome to our “Where Are We In The Cycle” section – where we poke the market with a stick and see if it reacts.
(Ooop! It just moaned!)
The goal is to spot the bull market peak before thevitable bear market hits your bags hard.
Since timing the top perfectly is almost impossible, we use various indicators to give us a better shot at taking profits before it's too late.
Below are the 6 indicators we track, with a color-coded system to show how close they are to signalling the market peak:
🟢 Plenty of room to run 🏄
🟡 Getting closer to the top signal, but haven’t yet reached the mark ⚠️
🔴 We’ve hit the market top indicator 🚨
Every Thursday, we update these 6 indicators exclusively for PRO members.
Our advice? Don't wait for all of them to hit 🔴. It's better to take profits as they get closer to that point.
Let's dive in and see if we're anywhere near the top of thull market. 👇
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GO CRYPTO PRO AND UNLOCK:
- Full access to the 6 bull market peak indicators above to help you spot the bull market top before it’s too late 📈
- Weekly reports that help you spot early trends, navigate tarkets by limiting risk & catch those sweet cha-ching moments 💰
- Access to the PRO Community, where the Milk Road crew & 1000s of fellow PROs talk crypto. 🫂
Already a Crypto PRO member? Log in here.
CRYPTO PRO REVIEW OF THE WEEK
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
This DEX solves an actual UX issue! Milk Road Swap supports both Ethereum and Solana tokens in a single interface.
Remember last year’s recession? Me neither — but one analyst is making the case that we saw a shadow recession in 2024, and our macro team just dug into it.
So much Hype: VanEck plans to file for Hyperliquid spot staking ETFs in the US and Europe.
Moooar IPOs! Crypto lending platform, Figure, just raised $787.5M at a $5.3B valuation.
We’ve just added a new event to our conference page: European Blockchain Week. Use code “MiLkROADebc” for a 20% discount on tickets.
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