GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that keeps you informed without stealing your whole afternoon.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ What we’re watching this week.
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: The ONLY 2 Catalysts That Matter for Bitcoin Right Now w/ John Gillen.
- 🍪 Clarity Act failure risks U.S. crypto lead.
Nexo is back in the U.S. - and new clients get 30 days of Wealth Club Premier perks! Higher yields, lower borrowing rates, and crypto cashback - start here.
Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Trade today with Milk Road Swap.
WHAT WE’RE WATCHING THIS WEEK 👀
Every Monday morning, the Milk Road team jumps on a call to figure out what the hell is happening in the world and what it means for your money.
And as always, we're letting you eavesdrop.
Here's what we're seeing right now…
The overarching theme: we’re stuck in a loop.
If you've been paying attention to the Iran situation, Mondays have developed a pattern. A very predictable, very annoying pattern.
It goes like this:
- Ceasefire talks happen.
- Oil dips.
- Futures go green.
- Everyone gets hopeful.
- Then, a few hours later, Iran rejects the terms.
- Markets reverse.
- Rinse. Repeat.
Our macro social manager, Archie, laid it out:
"Just a typical Monday. What happened for the last 31 days is happening today."
The market buys into the hope. And every week, the hope gets pulled out from under it like a tablecloth at a magic show.
… except the dishes don't stay on the table.
It was at this point in the conversation that John, our in-house macro analyst, decided to scare the sh*t out of us, in true John fashion:
One week of disruption? Not a big deal. Two weeks? Manageable. One month? That's a problem. And we're past one month.
We're now moving from what was roughly a 500M barrel oil shortage toward a billion barrel shortfall. That's a billion barrels of oil that simply won't get pumped, won't get shipped, and will vanish from the global economy.
Gas is back at $7 in California. There's power rationing in parts of the world. And John's take is that the U.S. is only just now about to feel the first real impacts.
Some analysts - like Andreas from Real Vision - are floating the idea that Iran will just run the Strait of Hormuz like a toll road, gradually letting more ships through until things normalize.
But John's not buying it:
“I like and respect him (Andreas). He's a great analyst. I think he's underestimating this.”
"We killed their leadership again this weekend. They attacked desalination plants in Kuwait with drones. That feels more like escalation than de-escalation to me."
The honest answer from the team? Nobody knows what happens next.
It’s another case of needing to "hurry up and wait."
Which brings us to crypto…
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WHAT WE’RE WATCHING THIS WEEK (P2) 👀
Bitcoin's been flat for two months.
And weirdly… that might be a good thing?
John's read: "It got so oversold there's nowhere else to go but bounce. It's just me and the cockroaches and I don't even know where the sell button is."
The one thing the team all agrees actually matters? The CLARITY Act.
If that gets through, it could flip the mood (and the market).
Meanwhile, the risks aren't just macro.
Drift (a decentralized trading protocol on Solana) got hit with a $270M exploit last week:
And this wasn't some anonymous code hack - it was a six-month social engineering operation.
A group apparently posed as a legitimate quant trading team, built a real relationship with the Drift team, pitched themselves as wanting to build on the protocol, shared progress through Telegram…
And somewhere in there, they slipped a malicious app to the team through Apple's TestFlight (a tool developers use to share pre-release versions of apps).
If you downloaded it and had sensitive info on your machine? They had access.
The scariest part? Everything these attackers did - building relationships, sharing early builds through Telegram, etc.? It’s not an uncommon practice in crypto.
Other teams could be compromised the same way and not even know it yet.
So where does all of this leave us?
Geopolitics? Uncertain. Oil? Scary. Crypto? Flat. Security? Under threat.
Not exactly a feel-good Monday. But John closed the call on an uplifting note.
How? By getting biblical on us. Literally.
John quoted six words from the Book of Proverbs: "Buy the truth, and sell it not."
70% of his portfolio is in Bitcoin and Ethereum. The rest is cash and a few concentrated bets. No overtrading. No chasing. Just conviction.
"The more trades I make," he said, "the more likely I am to have human error screw it up."
In a week where everything feels uncertain, there's something grounding about that.
Know what you own. Know why you own it. And don't let the noise shake you out.
And on that note… we'll see you tomorrow.
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
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The AI Bubble just got real - and the market isn’t ready.
Let’s get ‘er done: CLARITY Act failure could see U.S. lose global crypto leadership, experts warn - DL News.
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