🥛 Uh oh, I went ‘full prepper’ 🥴

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that teaches you how to surf before the economic waves hit.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

✍️ Uh oh, I went ‘full prepper’.
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: The One Metric Investors Must Watch to Understand Crypto’s Next Move w/ Nick Forster.
🍪 Ethereum's RWA flywheel accelerates.

Arc is a new Layer-1 blockchain designed to support real-world economic activity and it’s now live in testnet. Dive into Arc and start experimenting.

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

**PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE ECONOMIC SH*T SHOW** 🫣

So, I had a bit of a ‘come to Jesus’ moment today…

And it was all thanks to four converging factors that hit over the last 24hrs:

The S&P 500 hit new all-time highs.
Consumer sentiment reached 10yr lows.
Raoul Pal laid out his ‘Economic Singularity’ thesis on our pod.
Amazon just laid off 16,000 corporate employees due to “rising competition over AI”.

Here’s how it went down, and the ‘fire-under-my-a**’ realization that it triggered:

1. The S&P 500 hit new all-time highs

Positive earnings from ~80% of the companies that reported Q4 earnings yesterday, resulted in this:

Source: TradingView

Which, on the surface, doesn’t feel all that crazy - new S&P highs seem to be hitting every other week in the current climate.

But the disconnect hit when I learned this. 👇

2. Consumer sentiment just reached 10yr lows

That's a decade-low (lower than COVID!) in how regular people feel about the economy, while asset prices are printing fresh records.

For years, markets and consumer sentiment moved roughly together.

When people felt good, they spent and invested → when they felt bad, markets reflected that anxiety.

That’s no longer the case.

The average consumer is getting squeezed by persistent inflation and high rates, all while they watch asset markets rip from the sidelines!

This creates a two-tier economy where asset owners win and everyone else falls behind.

Source: Conference Board

And the next two events only pushed the snowball further down the hill. 👇

ARC IS NOW LIVE ON TESTNET

Circle is already one of the biggest names in crypto…

But most people still haven’t heard much about Arc, the Layer-1 blockchain built by Circle.

Arc is a new Layer-1 blockchain that’s now officially live on testnet.

It’s built to bring real-world economic activity onchain. And with full Circle platform integration at its core (e.g., USDC, EURC, USYC), it’s positioned to do exactly that.

Here’s what stands out:

Low and predictable gas fees paid in stablecoins
Instant settlement & deterministic finality
Native FX & Privacy infrastructure

Developers and institutions have already started testing on Arc. Now it’s your turn.

Dive into Arc and start experimenting.

**PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE ECONOMIC SH*T SHOW (P2)** 🫣

The final two nails in the ‘oh sh*t, I need to prepare’ coffin looked something like this…

3. Raoul Pal laid out his ‘Economic Singularity’ thesis on our pod

ICYM yesterday’s edition, here’s a brief recap on the thesis:

Raoul believes we all have until roughly 2030-2032 to build life-changing wealth.

After that, we hit the ‘Economic Singularity’ - aka: a point at which AI becomes the ‘apex species’ of the economic world…

Robots are everywhere, agents are building products for other agents, and the traditional way of making money (e.g. selling your time or labor) could well break.

You can listen to the full episode here if you want to dive deeper. 👇

Source: Milk Road

4. Amazon just laid off 16,000 corporate employees due to “rising competition over AI”

Wait, what!? Even the corpos aren't safe??

This really drove the point home: whether it's 'competition in AI' or AI itself taking jobs - these kinds of layoffs are going to continue to happen across the board.

The weird part is: instead of hurting asset prices, it will help them.

Because corporations will be able to lower headcount (costs) while increasing efficiency (revenue).

Source: @MilkRoad

And it’s all of this that led to my ‘come to Jesus’ realization:

Asset ownership is no longer a ‘nice to have’.

Anyone that wants to protect against the combination of monetary debasement, rising cost of living, and AI job replacement that will all help define the ‘Economic Singularity’ needs to: