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. 👇

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!

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.

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:

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:

Sick! Ok, but this news is 3 months old. Why are we talking about it again?
Well, a few weeks ago, Visa announced that it would integrate x402 into its existing infrastructure…
We’re not sure if this was a coincidence, or a genuine catalyst – but following that announcement, this happened:

For context this chart is showing that between last week and the week before it, x402 saw a 3,431% week-on-week increase in transactions.
And along with that came a 120,148% increase in x402 volume over the trailing 3 weeks (week ending Oct 13 - week ending Oct 27). Bonkers!
As to why you should care about this?
The more demand there is for crypto micropayments via x402 → the more demand there is for the crypto tokens that fuel each payment.
And when assets with a restricted supply see an increase in demand → number go up.

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I’m happy for you. Or sorry to hear that: Mt. Gox is delaying $13B worth of Bitcoin repayments… is this good or bad for crypto markets? — DL News.
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MILKY MEMES 🤣





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