GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that breaks down the institutional shifts affecting your portfolio.
Here’s what we got for you today:
- ✍️ $10T tsunami heading to Base?
- ✍️ Circle beats earnings → drops 8.5%
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: No More Altcoin Seasons? Welcome to the New Crypto Market Reality w/ Koroush AK
- 🍪 Crypto’s own ‘Howey Test’
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Prices as of 2:00 PM ET. Trade today with Milk Road Swap.
JP MORGAN’S $10T OF DAILY PAYMENT VOLUME CAN NOW MOVE ON BASE 🤯
You know how we’ve been harping on about how the growth of onchain Real World Assets (like stablecoins and stocks) are:
“The most important metric in crypto.”
(The more tradable assets there are onchain → the more money stays onchain → the more demand there is for crypto). 👇
Yeah, well – this could be the mother of all ‘RWA onramps’:
Here’s what you need to know:
JPMD is a digital representation of dollar deposits held at JPMorgan owned banks, which gives JP Morgan clients access to instant, 24/7 transfers, for ~$0.01 in fees on Base Chain.
Bit of a snooze fest at first glance – but here’s where it gets REALLY interesting:
JP Morgan’s payments business moves roughly $10T every. single. day.
For context: that’s more than 100x the entire daily network volume of Ethereum and Bitcoin combined.
Meaning if just 1% of JP Morgan’s payments business moved onchain to Base – the Base Network’s daily transaction volume would be roughly triple that of the Ethereum L1 Network.
And remember what we keep driving home:
All onchain transaction fees are paid in a network’s native token.
(More money moving through an onchain network = more transaction fees = more demand for the network’s native token.)
Base Chain’s native token is ETH (though as we mentioned yesterday, they’re teasing the launch of a BASE token).
Either way, whatever the native token is (or becomes) – all of the JPMD volume that moves to Base will automatically create demand for its native token (to cover fees).
And JP Morgan’s payments business moves up to 3.65 QUADRILLION dollars per year.
(As we said earlier: ‘mother of all RWA onramps’).
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CIRCLE BEATS EARNINGS → DROPS 8.5%? 🤨
While we’re on the subject of RWAs…
Circle (CRCL), issuer of the USDC stablecoin, released their Q3 earnings yesterday afternoon.
They beat expectations and saw solid early adoption of their new ‘Arc’ L2 – yet their stock is down ~8.5% as of this writing?
Here’s what you missed, and a theory on why the stock is selling off:
1/ Earnings
It was an open & shut case as far as an ‘estimate beat’ was concerned…
2/ Arc adoption
Meanwhile, 100+ major companies joined Circle’s Arc L2 testnet…
Sooooo…
3/ Why the hell is the stock down?
Short answer: Circle just increased their expense forecasts, which some traders weren’t stoked about – plus, CRCL sprinted out of the gates when it IPO’d (it may be due for a correction).
Long answer: Circle adjusted their operating expense forecast up $20M, to $495-510M, which might have spooked investors who were already concerned about Circle's ability to maintain profitability.
Plus, Circle IPO’d in June at ~$6.9B, and has since tripled to $21.65B today (that’s a lot of ground covered).
The market is pretty fearful right now, which makes crypto stock prices harder to move – even when their quarterly earnings come in swinging.
(We saw a similar ‘earnings beat → price slump’ with Robinhood last week.)
CRCL may need to correct further, or at the very least stabilize for the time being. 👇
Good news: if we do get a solid correction from here, it could make CRCL a ‘buy’ in the near future.
MIKE NOVOGRATZ ON THE FUTURE OF AI INFRASTRUCTURE 🥛
The first episode of our brand new AI podcast just dropped, and it’s a heavy hitter.
Mike Novogratz sat down with Duncan (or Flood Capital as he’s known to many on X) and they dig into:
- Why bubbles have always formed around life-changing technology
- Galaxy’s plan to turn its Helios data campus into a global AI infrastructure hub
- The new GalaxyOne App
- How he’s thinking about the intersection of crypto, wall street and AI
- And yes, a few spicy takes on leadership, markets, and building a brand people trust
If you want a grounded take on how the next trillion-dollar narrative is taking shape, this is the one to start with. We’ll have another episode out on Friday… make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss it.
Watch the full episode here. 👇️
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
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The sharing/creator economy, onchain. Visa will test USDC payouts for creators and gig workers in 2026.
Crypto’s own ‘Howey Test’: The SEC is working on a crypto-specific framework that will help them identify certain tokens as securities.
We’re getting a Privacy DAT: the Winklevoss twins' family office is leading a $58.9M raise for a Zcash treasury company.
500+ cryptos. 11,000 stocks. 190+ countries. We’ve just done a thorough review on one of crypto’s oldest exchanges.
*this is sponsored content.
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