🥛 Crypto Twitter's new obsession 🥰

GM. This is Milk Road, the newsletter that’s so thick with sauce you might as well call us carbonara.

Here’s what we got for you today:

✍️ Lighter’s secret sauce
✍️ More TradFi dollars incoming
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Q4 2025 Could Mark the Start of Bitcoin and Crypto’s Biggest Bull Run w/ Kevin Kelly & Jesse Eckel
🍪 Samsung Wallet will let users buy crypto via Coinbase

Houdini Swap is a DEX aggregator that just launched a brand-new, one-of-a-kind incentive program. Join the POINTLESS incentive program here.

Prices as of 2:00 PM ET, provided by CoinGecko.

WHY CRYPTO TWITTER WON’T SHUT UP ABOUT LIGHTER 🔥

What’s Lighter’s secret sauce?

It (along with other perp DEXs, like Aster) is giving Hyperliquid a run for its money as ‘the platform of choice, when it comes to trading crypto with leverage.’

Check out the numbers it’s putting up…

1/ Volume is ripping

Lighter only launched its beta access in January and has already done more than half a trillion dollars in cumulative volume – roughly 30% of which hit in just the last month.

Source: DeFiLlama

2/ Open Interest (OI) is hockey sticking

OI is just a fancy name for ‘active options or futures trades’ – and right now, Lighter has $1.8B worth of open interest. That’s a $1.2B increase since the start of Sep.

Source: DeFiLlama

3/ Total Value Locked (TVL) on the protocol is following suit

TVL has more than doubled in the last month, from ~$340M to ~$880M.

Source: DeFiLlama

The picture being painted here: traders are flocking to Lighter.

Ok, but why? (Again) what’s Lighter’s secret sauce?

It’s three fold:

Insane speeds – High frequency traders care about one thing above all else: speed. And Lighter is estimated to be 45x faster than most other Perp DEXs
Points program – Lighter is currently running season 2 of its points program, with an airdrop planned for the future
Zero Fees – What’s better than cheap? Free

Those are the ingredients…

The final condiment looks like this:

A perp DEX with the fastest tech in the space, that’s free to trade on, and will likely gift you a bunch of tokens in the near future just for using it.

That’s pretty hard to compete with.

SWAP & GET INSTANT USDC REWARDS

Most DeFi incentive programs are total scams.

You often spend 6 months farming protocols to earn “pointless” points.

But Houdini Swap’s incentive program is different: It gives you fresh $USDC every month.

No farming. No waiting. Just real rewards.

Here’s how it works:

Simple enough, huh?

Oh, and bonus: if you hold $LOCK, you can unlock higher reward tiers of the incentive program.

Join the POINTLESS incentive program here.

MORE TRADFI DOLLARS ARE ABOUT TO HIT CRYPTO 💸

The TradFi to DeFi ‘dollar pipeline’ is about to widen.

…which sounds cool, but what does it actually mean?

There’s currently potential for 5 rate cuts from now until April – and when rates get cut, three things tend to happen:

Traditional lending rates go down (i.e. it costs less to service loans)
Treasury yields (the return you get from buying government debt) go down
Investors go searching for yield elsewhere – some flocking to riskier assets/sectors like crypto & DeFi (with the increased demand pushing DeFi yields up across the board)

Now, here’s how all of that creates an interesting, relatively idiot-proof arbitrage opportunity…

If investors can take out TradFi loans at say 5%, then park that cash in staking or DeFi lending protocols that will return 8-10%, they can net a consistent profit of 3-5%.

(Without really doing much.)

And it’s not like those kinds of lending/staking returns aren’t already available in crypto. 👇

1/ Coinbase

You can get 10.8% APY when you lend your $USDC out on Morpho, via Coinbase.

Source: @rbthreek

2/ Ethena

Ethena’s $sUSDe has returned 7.8% over the last 3 months – and returned (wait for it) an average of 19% throughout last year. 👇

Source: Ethena

3/ Kamino

Kamino will give you a tidy 9.88% on your $USDC – and returns over the last 90 days have averaged out even higher (currently sitting at 12.45%).

Source: Kamino

The cool part is, as more investors pile into crypto looking for better yields as government treasury yields drop, these APYs are likely going to increase.

(Creating even MORE incentive for TradFi investors to move into crypto.)

Now, navigating the hassle of TradFi loans and lending platforms just to net returns of 3-5% may seem boring to you…but it won’t to everyone.

And the more it happens, the more value will be added to the total crypto market cap over time.

(We can get behind that.)

P.S. We’re about to cover this growing arbitrage and a whole bunch more in tomorrow’s PRO report – become a PRO member here to get it!