🥛 Gold broke out. BTC to follow? 📈

GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that makes understanding the crypto market smoother than my legs on date night.

(What, a guy can’t look nice?? God forbid.)

Here’s what we got for you today:

✍️ Gold broke out. $BTC to follow?
✍️ Tether raises at a $500B valuation
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Why Crypto Isn’t Pumping After Rate Cuts w/ Scott Melker
🍪 Airdrops are back baaaaby!

Houdini Swap is a DEX aggregator that just launched a brand-new, one-of-a-kind incentive program. Join the POINTLESS incentive program here.

Prices as of 12:00 PM ET, provided by CoinGecko.

GOLD BROKE OUT. $BTC TO FOLLOW? 📈

We mentioned this briefly in the cookies yesterday, but it’s worth digging into – because:

There’s more at play than meets the eye here
It does what my 6th grade teacher, Mr. Henderson, could not: it makes math fun

ICYMI: Since late 2020 / early 2021, Bitcoin and Gold have both formed ‘rising wedge’ patterns.

…unfortunately, these patterns typically have an ~80% chance of breaking to the downside.

The good news is: Gold bucked that trend and started breaking to the upside in January of this year. 👇

Source: TradingView

The even better news? Bitcoin tends to follow Gold, 3-4 months down the line.

And right on cue, in March of this year, $BTC began to mimic Gold’s “rise → pause → last minute spike” pattern highlighted in the green above.

Check out the same green box in the Bitcoin chart below (which has been shifted forward 3 months to match the lagging trend).

So far, Bitcoin has risen & paused just like Gold before it…

And if the correlation holds – $BTC is now ready for a last minute spike through October/November, breaking out of its rising wedge. 👇

Source: TradingView

The cherry on top:

Gold’s ‘last minute spike’ represented ~10% gain – but Bitcoin has been known to outperform Gold’s percentage returns by 5-10x.

Putting Bitcoin’s potential ‘last minute spike’ in the 50-100% range (or ~$160k to ~$220k).

See…isn’t math fun??

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TETHER RAISES AT A $500B VALUATION 😧

Pop quiz: What are the top 3 most valuable private companies in the world?

…SpaceX? OpenAI? Maybe ByteDance (owners of TikTok)?

Oof! So close. They were. Until yesterday, when Tether went and did this:

Source: @zoomerfied

Meaning the leaderboard now looks a little something like this:

Source: @crunchbase

One of the craziest parts of all of this, from where we’re standing?

If you were to rank Tether’s market cap among publicly traded companies in the banking sector, it would flip Bank Of America (a 120-year old company) and sit only second to JP Morgan. 👇

Source: @mdudas

Now, here’s why this is more than just an impressive number:

Stablecoins are a prerequisite for most onchain applications (to use them, you need stables).

And Tether couldn’t have reached this milestone without growing demand.

More demand for stablecoins = more stablecoins being minted = more users being brought onchain = number go up.

(Hey, look at that – more fun math!)

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

This DEX solves an actual UX issue! Milk Road Swap supports both Ethereum and Solana tokens in a single interface.

Airdrops are back baaaaby! Here’s what LG is currently farming ahead of Q4.

Speak of the devil… Base activity has just hit an all-time high thanks to growing airdrop speculation.

New initiative: the CFTC wants to allow traders to use crypto as collateral (think: stablecoins) when trading derivatives, further blending crypto and TradFi.

We’ve added a new research tool to this page. And honestly, it’s on us for not including it sooner. We use this one every single day.