Today’s edition is brought to you by Flare - a full-stack layer-1 blockchain designed for data intensive use cases, including DeFi for non smart contract assets.
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GM. This is Milk Road – the newsletter that's like a landmine detecting robot for your crypto portfolio.
(*radio static* all clear).
Here’s what we got for you today:
- ✍️ The $1.7B catalyst hiding in plain sight
- ✍️ Nation states are launching memecoins?
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Is Altcoin Season Cancelled? Ethereum Historic Short w/ Carl Vogel
- 🍪 We might see 5 crypto IPOs in 2025
Prices as of 2:00 PM ET. Click here for our Fear & Greed Index.
WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR THIS WEEK (INC. A POTENTIAL CRYPTO CATALYST) 📅
Need a skimmable list of all the potentially market-moving data that’s scheduled for release this week?
Say no more.
1/ Macro 📊
We’ve got a stacked macro line-up this week!
- Trump's steel, aluminum, and "reciprocal" tariff announcements – Monday – Trump announces 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, alongside a reciprocal ‘if they tax us, we’ll tax them’ stance for any country looking to place tariffs on the US.
- China’s energy and vehicle tariffs – Monday – China will impose a 10-15% tariff on energy and vehicles imported from the US starting today.
- Fed Chair Powell speaks – Tuesday/Wednesday – J Powell will deliver his semi-annual monetary policy testimony to Congress over two days, sharing his outlook for the year to come.
- January CPI Inflation data – Wednesday – How much did the cost of consumer goods go up or down in Jan?
- January PPI Inflation data – Thursday – How much did the cost of production go up or down in Jan?
- January Retail Sales data – Friday – How much did consumers spend in Jan?
The market will soon be digging through all of the above data to try and answer a range of questions…
Is inflation heading in the right direction (down)? Will Trump’s tariffs push this data in the wrong direction (up)? Is any of this fear finding its way into the minds of consumers (causing them to spend less)?
We don’t know the answers just yet – but one thing is for sure: volatility is on the cards this week.
2/ Earnings Reports 💰
~20% of S&P 500 companies are reporting earnings this week – but we’re only looking at one (maybe two) of them…can you guess which ones?
Yep, it’s Coinbase (with Crocs Robinhood as the runner up). Coinbase is like a yardstick for the crypto industry – if $COIN is healthy, the industry is likely healthy – which makes their earnings reports kinda like the Super Bowl of crypto.
And right now, analysts expect Coinbase to report upwards of $1.7B in quarterly revenue – marking an 83% year-over-year increase!
Those are the kinds of headlines that can bring new momentum to the market.
So set your reminders for the market close on Thursday. ⏰
3/ Potential $ETH short squeeze 🪗
Institutions are betting against Ethereum in greater dollar amounts than ever before…
Is this a bad sign of things to come? Or an opportunity? Here’s what could be at play…
These funds short $ETH, forcing the price down → they buy $ETH for cheap → close their shorts → prices rebound → forcing others to close their shorts → pushing prices even higher.
Is this what’s happening? No one knows right now – but the potential is real, so it’s worth keeping an eye on, at the very least.
4/ The Milk Road PRO Research Meeting
Tomorrow, our PRO research team is sitting down for their weekly meeting, as per usual.
What’s different of late is: they’ve been filming them!
Every Tuesday from here on out, PRO subs will be able to access the recordings in Beehiiv shortly after each meeting finishes – meaning they get the alpha fresh outta the oven!
(While free subs will be able to watch the meeting on Saturday’s episode of The Milk Road Show. 🤝)
Alright, that’s everything that could potentially help or hurt your portfolio this week (the important stuff at least).
All that’s left to do is mark your calendars, light a candle, and pray to the crypto gods for a positive outcome. 🙏
ONE-STOP DEFI CARNIVAL
If we asked you to describe DeFi in one word, we’d most probably get “complicated”, “confusing” or something similar.
But DeFi doesn’t have to be any of that—and Flare is here to prove it.
They’re launching Flare Fair, a DeFi carnival to learn more about Flare’s DeFi ecosystem. 🎉
The best part? You can win rFLR rewards along the way.
Here’s how:
- Bridging
- Lending
- Staking
- Swapping
And if that’s not enough, you can also earn FlareDrops just for participating.
Wait, what are FlareDrops? They’re monthly airdrops for everyone who stakes $FLR, holds $WFLR (Wrapped Flare) or indeed claims their rFLR rewards.
👉 Win rFLR rewards in Flare’s DeFi Carnival!
NATION STATES ARE LAUNCHING MEMECOINS NOW? 🥴
Every Monday it seems as though there’s fresh ‘what the hell happened this weekend?’ madness to be covered.
For the past three Mondays, we’ve seen:
- The $TRUMP token launch
- DeepSeek stokes fears that $NVIDIA is overvalued, tanking markets
- Trump’s tariffs triggering the worst crypto liquidations (ever)
And today is no exception…
Over the weekend, we saw the first case of a nation state launching a memecoin.
(Seriously, check the date – April fools day is a ways off yet).
Yesterday evening, the president of the Central African republic (Faustin-Archange Touadéra) announced the launch of the country’s memecoin $CAR, on Solana. 👇
And within the first three and a half hours of its launch, $CAR’s market cap reached ~$830M – for context, that’s ~27% of the Central African Republic’s total GDP ($3.03B)!
But as is the reality for all memecoins: these things can turn around very quickly…
Almost immediately, Crypto Twitter began speculating whether Touadéra’s account had been hacked – which was compounded by the fact that:
1/ One of the announcement videos looked like it could have been AI generated
2/ The news page that was being announced in that video was quickly suspended
Helping to tank $CAR’s price by ~92%...
But here’s the crazy part:
The jury’s still out on whether this was a hack or not.
Faustin-Archange jumped back on X earlier this morning to reassure people of $CAR’s validity, and went as far as calling the launch a ‘success’. 👇
And if aaall of that wasn’t crazy enough…
On Saturday, Dave Portnoy randomly decided to start pumping a Bar Stool-related memecoin that some anon created ($JAILSTOOL).
Which did two things:
- Pumped $JAILSTOOL’s market cap to $200M+ (before dumping to $27M)
- Gave Dave an excuse to spend most of his weekend yelling at crypto nerds on a live stream. 👇
At this point, we don’t know if these kinds of things are top signals, or the new normal…
Either way, we hope that this general cycle of weekend madness takes a break soon (we need to rest).
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
Crypto.com’s card = free crypto with every swipe. Our take? If you're gonna spend, might as well earn free crypto while doing it.**
Ripple to offer instant cross-border payments between Portugal and Brazil. Why does it feel like a wave of Ripple partnership announcements is about to hit?
Berachain’s token plummets. Another token, another example of why airdrops are just not working nowadays.
We might see 5 crypto IPOs in 2025. From Circle to Kraken, our buddies over at DL News go over the whole list for you. - DL News
Want to put your brand in front of 300K+ of the smartest/coolest people in the crypto industry? You’ve come to the right place.
We’re hiring a social media manager! You’ll be the voice of Milk Road across X, Instagram, Youtube and maybe even more. Oh, and we’re a blast to work with.
We reviewed the best exchanges for crypto leverage trading. Spoiler alert: We think Bybit is the best.
**This is partner content.
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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.
