🥛 ETH vs. the $12T lending market 📈

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that’s here to help you bid farewell to 2025 and look to the future!

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

✍️ ETH vs. the $12T lending market
✍️ Top 10 crypto narratives of 2025
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Why 2026 Might Not Be the Bull Market Everyone Expects w/ Julio Moreno
🍪 The BTC ETFs just flipped positive

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.

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF ETH ABSORBED TRADITIONAL LENDING? 💰

Today I learned something – and honestly, it’s kinda nuts:

Right now, Ethereum mainnet is absorbing ~78% of onchain lending revenues.

Source: Blockworks

… which got me wondering – what happens if:

The global lending market moves entirely onchain.
Ethereum mainnet maintains its ~78% rev. share of the onchain lending market.

Let’s geek out and do some back of the napkin math real quick…

According to Magistral Consulting, the global lending market is pulling ~$12T in annual revenue right now…

Source: MagistralConsulting

Note: This $12T figure represents the revenues earned from interest charges made by lenders (covering home, personal, working capital, vehicle, and industrial loans), but not the value of the loans themselves.

All of this to say…

If this approximation of the global lending market were to move onchain tomorrow, Ethereum mainnet would absorb $9.36T of the total $12T in revenue being spat out.

For context, lending on Ethereum mainnet generated ~80M worth of revenue in 2025.

Meaning if these loans eventually move onchain (which we believe they will) and Ethereum were to maintain its 78% rev. share…

That would lead to (and this is going to sound insane, because it is…) a 117,000x increase in Ethereum’s lending revenue, based on today’s current figures.

The takeaway:

When it comes to the ‘tokenization of everything’ and what it means for crypto – we’re still so early!

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.

TOP 10 CRYPTO NARRATIVES OF 2025 🗣️

What’s that one crypto category you couldn’t help but check up on each week throughout 2025?

For me, it’s kinda murky.

Right now – it’s RWAs… back in Q1, it was AI… a few months from now, it could be something else all together…

Point is: within crypto, our collective interests and the narratives that drive them are forever changing – but each year is typically defined by a select few dominant names.

Wanna know who won 2025?

Here’s the leaderboard according to CoinGecko:

Source: CoinGecko

Our biggest ‘hmm, ok, that’s interesting – making a note…’ moments from the CoinGecko report:

The memecoin narrative claimed the #1 spot (again), but saw a decline from the 14.36% share it pulled last year.
AI racked up a 6.72 percentage point increase year-on-year (YoY) to maintain second place again in 2025.
AI agents recorded the largest ‘narrative interest market share’ improvement YoY, moving from 1.17% to 5.03%.
Real World Assets (RWA) experienced the largest YoY decrease in share of narrative interest from 8.64% to 4.98% (though we think that will reverse in 2026).

Ok, now – how about we check what the Milk Road hive mind sees on the horizon…