🥛 The cause of this crash revealed? 🔪

GM. This is Milk Road – the newsletter that never sleeps (so you can get smarter about crypto, without staying glued to Twitter).

Here’s what we got for you today:

✍️ DAT playbook under attack
✍️ MSTR = GameStop 2.0?
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: A Massive Liquidity Shift Is Coming: How It Could Flip the Entire Crypto Market w/ David Duong
🍪 JPMorgan ends banking ties with Strike CEO

Fuse is a $300M ARR energy company launching The Energy Network on Solana. Discover the future of energy now.

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

THE DAT PLAYBOOK IS UNDER THREAT 🔪

If you managed to stay off Crypto Twitter this weekend – first, well done!

Second, lemme catch you up on the big story you likely missed:

Source: @cryptomanran

Here’s the theory in a nutshell:

MSCI (one of the largest creators of indices in the world) floated the idea that Digital Asset Treasury companies (DATs) should be considered ‘funds’ not ‘companies’ – and be removed from their indices as a result.

Confused? Same. Here’s a beat-by-beat breakdown of what that means and the mechanics at play…

1/ The DAT playbook

If a DAT grows large enough, it will start being considered for addition to a range of indexes.

(Aka: lists of companies that match certain criteria and/or fit certain market niches – e.g. the Nasdaq 100 is a tech index.)

Which sounds boring as hell – but getting added to an index is a massive potential growth driver for DATs.

See, there’s a huge range of companies/funds that are mandated to buy a certain amount of stock from companies listed on these indices.

So if/when a DAT is added, it means it’s going to receive a whole bunch of consistent/forced buying pressure (growing the DAT’s value further and allowing it to buy even more crypto).

E.g. Strategy/MSTR’s addition to the Russell 1000 on June 30, 2024 helped it grow ~300% (start to top) over the following 6 months (amongst other factors).

Source: TradingView

2/ The threat of this proposal

Obviously, if MSCI’s proposal passes and is adopted by other indices, this will damage the DAT model.

But what’s worse is what happens to companies that are already listed on these indices…

If this ‘DATs are funds, not companies’ trend were to catch on – companies like MSTR would experience heavy sell pressure, as all of the big-dog funds that are mandated to only hold indexed companies start to sell their DAT positions.

And we’ve already seen Saylor (executive chairman & co-founder of Strategy/MSTR) respond:

Source: @saylor

3/ The timing of this explains a lot

And guesses on when MSCI made their proposal public?

Yuh. The very same day that the crypto market nuked (Oct 10), kick starting its recent ~33% decline, which saw $1.4T get shed from the total crypto market cap over 42 days.

The mechanics behind this theory:

MSCI’s proposal spooked institutions (as DAT flows have contributed heavily to crypto’s recent price rise) → so they de-risked their portfolios ahead of time (selling crypto/crypto related assets). 👇

Source: TradingView

Now, the date to watch?

January 15th, 2026.

That’s when MSCI’s expected ruling will be announced.

If the proposal passes, it will lead to a whole bunch of forced selling of any DATs listed on MSCI indices – like MSTR, which is listed on the MSCI USA Index and MSCI World Index.

(Likely flowing over to the broader crypto market.)

We’re crossing our fingers, eyes, n’ toes in hopes the proposal gets blocked.

P.S. If you want a closer look at DATs (how they work and how to profit from them) – check out this report.

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Follow Fuse on X for updates.

RUMOR MILL: STRATEGY (MSTR) WILL BECOME GAMESTOP 2.0 🎮

Grain?

A grain of salt?

No. For this article, we're going to need a heaping handful of the stuff.

‘Cause right now, this is just a combination of rumors, fueled by whispers…

That said, it is also:

Primo water cooler talk (which doesn’t hurt in moderation)
Directly linked to our lead article
Huge if true

So here’s the basic gist…

Rumor #1:

JPMorgan has a massive short position open on MSTR – meaning…

They borrowed a bunch of MSTR stock → sold it (expecting the price to go down) → and eventually plan to buy it back/repay their lenders once the price bottoms out.

(The idea: sell high → buy back low → keep the difference.)

Source: @TokenTideCrypto

Rumor #2:

The U.S. government is considering taking stakes in Strategy (MSTR) and Coinbase (COIN).

VERY bold claim imo. Pure ‘Trust Me Bro’ info…

Though (to play devil's advocate) it’s not like the Trump administration hasn’t previously taken stakes in public companies – they bought 10% of Intel back in August.

Plus: the Trump family doesn't have a lot of love for JPMorgan – and the government buying into MSTR would likely hurt JPMorgan’s rumored short position. 👇

Source: @TheBTCTherapist

Combine these two rumors and you get this:

JPMorgan has a massive short on Strategy. If the U.S. government announces it’s buying MSTR, it could pump the stock, hurting JPMorgan and forcing them to buy back MSTR at inflated prices.

(Creating a GameStop-style short squeeze.)

The rumored price target for this short squeeze? +50% from MSTR’s close last Friday (or $255.75).

I.e. back to where it was at the start of the month. 👇