🥛 Elon's next move: crypto trading 🤯

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter more refreshing than flipping your pillow to the cold side.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

✍️ Trade crypto from your X feed.
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Crypto’s Biggest Setup Is Happening Right Now w/ Kyle Reidhead.
🍪 Everyone's waiting for a catalyst to bring sentiment back to crypto.

Mercuryo is a global crypto payments platform designed to help businesses onboard users and convert more customers. Learn how Mercuryo works for businesses.

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

TRADE CRYPTO FROM YOUR X FEED 😧

In the coming weeks, you could well be able to trade crypto and stocks from your X timeline.

What the actual end-to-end experience will look like is still a little murky, but here’s how we’re reading the information currently at hand…

The experience won’t be fully handled by X, as was first expected when this was dropped:

Source: @nikitabier

There will likely be external backend steps, with partner brokerages and exchanges handling the actual trade, which was later clarified here:

Source: @nikitabier

But from a user perspective - who cares how it works!

We’re going to be able to trade crypto & stocks directly from our X timeline baaaby!

Here’s why this could become the mother of all onboarding events:

Before this, social media and trading existed in separate universes.

You'd see someone post about ETH, get curious, open Coinbase, search for it, maybe check a chart, then decide if you wanted to buy.

(Friction everywhere.)

After this, the entire funnel collapses into a streamlined flow.

Here’s what we mean by that…

HOW TO INCREASE REVENUE AS A BUSINESS

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Customers make it all the way to checkout but then poor payment infrastructure kills the sale.

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Learn how Mercuryo works for businesses.

TRADE CRYPTO FROM YOUR X FEED (P2) 😧

The tea leaves at the bottom of our cup are telling us the post-Smart Cashtag crypto funnel could look something like this:

See a cashtag (e.g. $ETH) → view the live price and chart embedded in the post → tap to trade via linked partners → done.

The big shift here isn't simple convenience - it's that X is positioning itself as the distribution layer for financial markets.

Coinbase has ~105M worldwide users, ~10.8M of which actively trade each month.

X has ~560M monthly active users.

Even if 5% of X's active users try trading through Smart Cashtags, that's ~28M people - or 2.6x Coinbase's entire active trading base!

Source: Milk Road

This new feature means crypto discovery & purchasing becomes passive.

You don't seek it out anymore, it finds you in your timeline → the barriers within the "interested in crypto" to "owns crypto" pipeline effectively disappear.

And every financial influencer on X will become a potential distribution channel for markets. 👇

Source: @nikitabier

One of the most exciting parts here? The timeline. It’s SHORT.

Coming "in a couple of weeks" means this is essentially done - they're not talking about a 'concept', but an imminent launch!

The takeaway:

When ~560M people can trade from their feed, the entire distribution model for both crypto and equities shifts.

X looks like it’s about to insert itself between social discovery and financial action.

(That's the most valuable real estate in the attention economy.)

And the exchanges that win X’s business will likely have a whooole lot of trade execution (and fee revenue) coming their way soon…

We’ll be watching closely to see who comes out on top.

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

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Bitwise’s Matt Hougan: We have the lowest fear & greed measure in history - we got down to 5. It can go to 0 or it can go to 100 - that's a pretty asymmetric skew.

Yikes! U.S. Q4 GDP just came in at 1.4%, below 3% expectations - here’s why we’re not worried…

Scott Melker: Everyone's waiting for a catalyst to bring sentiment back to crypto. The catalyst is higher prices. That's it.

*sigh* There’s a new crypto tax rule from the IRS. It’s called the 1099-DA and we’ve broken everything down around it here.*

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