🥛 Fed decision in 48 hours 📆

GM. This is Milk Road – the daily newsletter that holds the crypto TV antenna, so you can get a clearer picture.

Here’s what we got for you today:

✍️ What to look out for
✍️ The battle for Hyperliquid’s stablecoin
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Ethereum is Becoming the Base Layer of the Digital World w/ SharpLink Co-CEO & EigenLayer CEO
🍪 Coinbase is eyeing a Base token launch

Walrus is making blockchains faster, cheaper and more secure. Click here to learn more about Walrus.

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

WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR THIS WEEK 📆

Crypto is a noisy space…

But there’s signal to be found amongst the static!

Here’re the events/movements we’re watching this week. 👇

1/ Macro 🌎

There’s a whoooole bunch of macro events hitting this week!

August Retail Sales data – Tuesday – How did retail sales fare last month in the US?
Fed Interest Rate Decision – Wednesday – Will we get a rate cut, and by how much?
FOMC Press Conference – Wednesday – Fed Chair Jerome Powell yaps with the press, giving us an insight to his current thinking
Fed Dot-Plot Projections – Wednesday – Fed members list out their expectations for future rate cuts
Initial Jobless Claims data – Thursday – How many people are filing for unemployment for the first time?

You might be inclined to ignore everything outside of Wednesday’s rate cut decision, where a 0.25% cut is expected to be announced…

But there’s a whole lot more to be gleaned from outside of that event.

The FOMC Press Conference will give us a glimpse into Jerome Powell’s current mood/outlook on the economy, helping the market to determine his stance on further cuts.

And the Fed Dot-Plot Projections will show us how many rate reductions each Fed member is expecting to see this year – giving us an even closer look at total potential cuts for 2025.

(Right now, the CME Group’s FedWatch tool is predicting 3 reductions of 0.25%.) 👇

Source: CME

2/ Earnings 💰

The crypto exchange/media company, Bullish ($BLSH), is reporting its first-ever quarterly earnings as a publicly traded company.

The more public crypto companies find/report success → the hungrier Wall St will become for crypto exposure → the more money will pile into the sector → the more ‘number go up’.

Source: @eWhispers

3/ Government 🏛️

…speaking of quarterly earnings reports – Trump wants to axe them in favor of bi-annual reports.

The idea being: both US companies and the people investing in them will be incentivized to take longer-term views on growth.

Source: @DegenerateNews

4/ Podcasts 🎙️

Another week, another banger line up of podcast guests:

Tuesday: Nic (CEO & Co-founder of the world's largest crypto YouTube channel, Coin Bureau) – The Milk Road Show
Tuesday: Milk Road Degen PRO AMA — submit your questions here!
Wednesday: Ryan Connor (Head of Research at Blockworks) – The Milk Road Show
Wednesday: Milk Road Macro PRO AMA — submit your questions here!
Thursday: Mike McGlone (Senior Commodity Strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence) – Milk Road Macro
Friday: Mando (of Mando Minutes / Yeet / Rekt Brands fame) – Milk Road Degen

Not in the mood to wait? Say no more.

We just sat down with Joseph Chalom (Co-CEO of SharpLink) and Sreeram Kannan (Founder & CEO of Eigen Labs) on today’s episode of The Milk Road Show. 👇

YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

Alright, that’s this week’s calendar sorted.

Prime your Sharpies and get-to-marking. 🫡

WEB3’S PRIVACY ISSUE: FIXED 🤝

Imagine if Google made it so anyone with the right link could access your online data.

(It’d be bedlam!)

…now get this: in web3, that concept isn’t a hypothetical, it’s a reality.

Thankfully, Walrus has closed this privacy gap with the launch of Seal — a decentralized access control service.

Seal’s use cases are FAR reaching! For example:

AI marketplaces: gate access to datasets, models, and chat logs, while sharing only when needed
Gaming: reach encrypted in-game content as players reach certain milestones
Content monetization: encrypt media and unlock with pay-to-decrypt, tiered access, timed trials

Ready to super charge your web3 app?

Click here to learn more about Walrus!

THE BATTLE FOR HYPERLIQUID’S STABLECOIN IS OVER ⚔️

How did an issuer that’s just a few weeks old win the battle to support Hyperliquid’s new $USDH stablecoin??

ICYMI: Hyperliquid currently handles close to $400B in monthly perps volume (perps = leveraged bets on crypto) and generates $100M+ in monthly revenue. 👇

Source: DeFiLlama

But the ~$6B worth of stablecoins that sit on Hyperliquid and enable those volumes/revenues?

It’s mostly made up of $USDC.

Meaning:

If Hyperliquid launched their own stablecoin → soaked up the $6B stablecoin market that exists on their platform → put that money into long term treasuries (like Circle does with $USDC)...

They’d be making an extra $240M a year from treasury yields alone.

(Which they could then funnel into $HYPE buybacks, user rewards, validator incentives, ecosystem growth initiatives, etc.)

Now, to no one's surprise – they recently jumped on this opportunity, announcing that they’d be taking proposals from anyone who wanted to partner with them to create the $USDH stablecoin.

And there were some big/well established names in the line up:

Paxos (Issuer of PayPal’s $PYUSD, and Binance’s $BUSD)
Sky Ecosystem (issuer of $USDS)
Ethena (Issuer of $USDe)

All pitching a range of different perks…

Source: @glxyresearch

Yet somehow, it was the recently formed ‘Native Markets’ that clinched the win yesterday, gaining ~70% of the votes from Hyperliquid validators. 👇

Source: @fiege_max

Ok…but how?

Simple answer: Native Markets outperformed on both alignment and bidding.

Max Fiege (the dude behind Native Markets) is an OG in the Hyperliquid community and proposed that 100% of the stablecoin’s yield revenue be pumped back into the ecosystem.

(50% to the Alliance Fund which buys back $HYPE, and 50% to growing $USDH’s adoption.)

I.e. A stablecoin that self-funds its broader adoption and adds more and more buy-pressure to the $HYPE token as it ($USDH) grows in market cap.

(Ok, makes sense now – that’s a pretty darn enticing flywheel.)

P.S. If you want to read up on Hyperliquid’s broader business model – check out this report!