GM. This is Milk Road, merry Christmas to those that celebrate – we come bearing gifts!
Here’s what we got for you today:
- ✍️ The Biggest events of 2025
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: How Crypto Actually Becomes Part of Global Finance w/ Nevin
- 🍪 Can Congress pass a major crypto bill in 2026?
Bridge helps businesses send, store, accept, and launch stablecoins instantly. Learn how Bridge is powering stablecoin-backed money movement.
Prices as of 2:00 PM ET. Trade today with Milk Road Swap.
THE BIGGEST EVENTS OF 2025 😦
If you’re looking down at your 2025 bingo card and cursing your predictions - you’re not alone.
2025 was one helluva wild card, punctuated (and punctured) by a slew of events that made us go “wait, really!?” on a near weekly basis.
Here’re the 8 defining moments of 2025 (for us, at least):
When we first wrote about this, we led the article off with the following:
“Open your reminders app and punch in Dec 31st 2025…Got it? Good.
Let’s all circle back on this story on that date and see if it’s still one of the wildest crypto stories of the year – ‘cause from where we’re standing right now, it is absolutely in the running.”
Feeling pretty confident that we’ll be able to mark this as ‘confirmed,’ come next week.
2. The announcement of a U.S. BTC reserve
Forget 2025 – this may have been the biggest day in crypto history ever (or at least, to date).
On March 6th, 2025 – Trump signed an executive order to do the following:
- Move any Bitcoin seized by the U.S. government (past, present, or future) into a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve
- Stop any further selling of BTC on the U.S. government’s behalf
- Allow the U.S. Treasury to create strategies to buy more BTC (as long as it doesn’t cost the taxpayer)
- Create a general (non-Bitcoin) crypto stockpile with any existing/future seized crypto assets (note: the Treasury won’t be able to buy more of these tokens)
TL;DR: We got a Bitcoin Reserve and a general Crypto Reserve, at no cost to the taxpayer.
…unfortunately, it only had a brief effect on the market, as tariffs were announced a few days earlier.
3. Tariffs scared the sh*t out of investors
The Bitcoin Reserve announcement added $350B to the total crypto market cap!
… all before the tariff-induced growth scare reversed it all and sent us into a month of (mostly) down-only price action, driven by general market uncertainty.
Ouch!
The GENIUS Act gave stablecoin issuers rules to play by in the U.S. (giving the green light for companies to start building in the space).
The defined rules included:
- Issuers must be able to freeze tokens on lawful order
- Individuals will be allowed to self-custody stablecoins
- Stablecoin issuers won’t be able to offer native yield to holders
Among others:
Feel like there’re some obvious events missing?
Keep scrolling to the next article for our final 4 contenders.
STRIPE JUST BET BIG ON STABLECOINS
Stablecoins are arguably the biggest use case in crypto right now.
But let’s be real, using them onchain is still way too complex.
That’s exactly the problem Bridge is solving.
Recently acquired by Stripe (yep, that Stripe).
Bridge helps businesses send, store, accept, and launch their own stablecoins instantly.
Here are the three facts about Bridge:
- Users can seamlessly transition between fiat and stablecoins
- Businesses can launch a custom stablecoin in as little as one day
- All Bridge-built stablecoins are interoperable with one another
Stablecoins are going global, Bridge is powering that shift.
👉 Learn how Bridge is powering stablecoin-backed money movement.
THE BIGGEST EVENTS OF 2025 (P2) 😦
Remember when everyone was saying “Ethereum is dead”?
Feels like that was years ago at this point – but in reality, the tide only turned a few months ago.
Starting with…
5. The ETH Foundation’s revamp
The leadership behind ETH was gutted, and the protocol’s attitude switched from “slow and steady wins the race” to “let’s build and ship as if we’re a hungry startup”.
This massive tone shift re-invigorated investors, and timed beautifully with…
6. The Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) boom
The DAT playbook is simple:
Sell shares in your company → use those funds to buy digital assets → turn those assets into more assets through staking/DeFi → repeat.
And ETH was ground zero for DAT adoption in 2025.
So much so that public Ethereum treasury companies now hold more than 5% of the total ETH supply.
The battle to become the one true financial ‘everything app’ heated WAY up in 2025, with massive platform/feature announcements from Robinhood, Coinbase, and GalaxyOne.
This one gave us whiplash…
While the entire crypto market was melting down and shedding billions throughout Q4, investors started taking onchain privacy seriously all of a sudden.
Like, really seriously.
To the extent that Zcash (the leader in the privacy space) ripped ~1,500% from late September, to early November.
Alright, that’s our top 8.
Did we miss a must-have event?
Reply to this email and let us know what’s on your list!
CRYPTO PRO “WHERE ARE WE IN THE CYCLE?” INDICATORS 🤔
We hope you’re draped in your tackiest sweater and have a heavy dose of eggnog in arms reach, ‘cause we’re about to check if ol’ St. Nick left us any presents under the tree.
(By ‘presents’, we mean bullish signals – and by ‘tree’ we mean crypto cycle indicators.)
The goal is to spot the bull market peak before the inevitable 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 the music stops.
⚠️ CLICK HERE to view the Crypto PRO “Where Are We In The Cycle” Indicators.
GO CRYPTO PRO AND UNLOCK:
- Full access to the 6 bull market peak indicators above to help you spot the bull market top 📈
- Weekly reports that help you spot early trends, navigate the markets 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. 🫂
CRYPTO PRO REVIEW OF THE WEEK
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
Arc is now live on testnet. If you’re looking to build on Circle’s layer 1, now’s your chance to test it out.*
2021 vibes: Pudgy Penguins are currently calling the Las Vegas Sphere home.
Fingers crossed… Can Congress pass a sweeping crypto bill in 2026?
Looking ahead - What will happen to the business cycle next year?
Come work with us! We're hiring for a Head of Product role @ Milk Road!
Wanna buy the dip? Milk Road Swap lets you trade across Ethereum and Solana tokens in one clean interface.
*this is sponsored content.
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