🥛 Fed decision + Trump-Xi = chaos? 😧

GM. This is Milk Road, the newsletter that catalogs the biggest news in crypto, so you can look smart in front of your friends.

Here’s what we got for you today:

✍️ The ungodly big week ahead
✍️ How Coinbase’s x402 could pump your bags
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: This Crypto Setup Is the Most Bullish Since 2020 w/ Lark Davis
🍪 Mt. Gox delays $13B Bitcoin repayments

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Prices as of 2:00 PM ET. Buy today with Milk Road Swap.

WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR THIS WEEK 📆

What is this feeling?

It’s almost as if a sense of bullishness has crept back into the market? (Welcome home old friend).

Here are some key events that could push/hurt that shift this week:

1/ Macro 🌎

The government shutdown continues, so macro data/events are in scarce supply.

But the few events we do have on the list this week are about as big as they come!

Fed Interest Rate Decision – Wednesday – Will we get a rate cut, and by how much?
Fed Chair Powell Press Conference – Wednesday – Jerome Powell speaks. The market listens.
President Trump Meets President Xi – Thursday – Will we see a trade deal get inked (please god, let it happen).

(Yuh — plenty of room for both forward momentum and general market chaos).

Now, on that first point…

About a week ago, the 3 rate cuts the market was expecting this year was revised down to 2. So if we get a cut this Wednesday, it could be the last for the year. 👇

Source: Polymarket

2/ Earnings 💰

It’s a MASSIVE week for earnings, with ~20% of the S&P 500 reporting – we’re talking:

Coinbase, Strategy, Meta, PayPal – *deep inhale – Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet (Google)... it’s a lot!

Source: @eWhispers

3/ Podcasts 🎙

Here’s who’s joining us to yap across the Milk Road podcast ecosystem this week:

Tuesday – Santi, co-host of Blockworks’ Empire Podcast – Milk Road Macro
Tuesday – Kash Dhanda from Jupiter – Milk Road Daily
Friday – Peter Schiff renowned Gold bug / Bitcoin skeptic – Milk Road Daily

(Gonna need some milk on hand for that last one, it’s bound to get spicy).

4/ Charts 📈

We’re officially back in ‘Uptober’ territory after Bitcoin’s weekend recovery (we’re now +1.24% on the month).

… the question is: can it sustain/continue to grow from here. We’ll be watching closely.

Source: Coinglass

How do you see October shaking out? Reply to this email and let us know:

Uptober will happen
Downtober is coming

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WHY COINBASE’S X402 PROTOCOL COULD SOON PUMP YOUR BAGS 💰

Man, it feels good to win one.

Martin was yapping at me (yet again) to write about a particular topic – this time it was Coinbase’s x402 payment protocol.

But for once, I beat him to the punch (I wrote about it 3 months ago).

So here’s a quick refresher on what x402 is all about, and why it’s good for your bags:

The early internet had a payment system baked into it… kinda. It was more of a placeholder for a universal internet payment system that never came to be.

Now, because it was a simple placeholder – anyone that tried to use it would get a “402 Payment Required” error in response.

And as it then played out – instead of a universal internet payments system, we got a web of siloed, geo-restricted payment systems that builders needed to cobble together:

Source: Paykickstart

This splintered system has worked up until now. But in a world where AI agents are a thing, issues are bound to arise – not just in compatibility, but cost.

Most payment providers charge merchants ~3% + $0.30 per transaction – a cost that will still need to be passed on to consumers when micropayments are being made (think: ~$0.01).

Coinbase’s x402 system upgrades the internet’s 402 protocol from ‘placeholder’ to ‘live product’, allowing builders to place a single line of code at the top of their codebase and collect micropayments – all while paying no fees to the x402 protocol.

(Instead, they only pay fees to the underlying blockchain – e.g. Base, Solana, and Polygon – which are often less than $0.01).

Here’re the stats stacked side-by-side: