🥛 War = Money printer go brrr 💸

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that comes in hotter than a trader explaining why their 40% drawdown is actually “part of the strategy”.

Here’s a taste of this week’s menu:

🔥 War = Money printer go brrr.
🥵 Kalshi is Walmart with a crypto hat on.
🌶️ Meta is the BlackBerry of Big Tech AI.

Alchemy is the blockchain infrastructure behind Robinhood, Polymarket, Stripe, and Coinbase Wallet. Get their free guide on banks & stablecoins here.

HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK 🔥

War = Money printer go brrr 💸

Arthur Hayes (Co-founder & former CEO of BitMEX) basically laid out a playbook that every time the U.S. gets into a prolonged Middle East conflict, the Fed eventually fires up the printer.

He charted it out: Gulf War, post-9/11, Obama's surge…

Every single time, rates got cut or securities got bought.

Arthur's saying if Iran drags on past mid-March and the Fed meeting hits with troops still deployed or refineries getting bombed, Powell's gonna have no choice but to "provide accommodative monetary policy" - aka finance the war.

He's not buying anything right now though.

Just watching and waiting for that press conference.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

Kalshi is Walmart with a crypto hat on 🤡

Tom Schmidt (General Partner at Dragonfly Capital) went full scorched earth on Kalshi, calling them out for what he sees as "stolen valor".

According to Tom, Kalshi paid influencers to trash Polymarket's founder Shane after the FBI raided his house - which Tom says was obviously politically motivated and led to nothing.

Now Kalshi's trying to rebrand as a crypto product, but Tom says there's nothing happening onchain - they just accept crypto payments.

Tom compared them to Walmart accepting Bitcoin and calling themselves a crypto company.

He straight up said when an organization keeps twisting the truth, there's usually something darker under the hood.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

Meta is the BlackBerry of Big Tech AI 🥴

Kuran Francis (Founder of the Fin Tek channel on YouTube) was asked who's going to be the BlackBerry of the AI race, and he didn't hesitate long - Meta.

His argument is that Meta has been reactionary at every turn.

They jumped into crypto years ago, bailed, and now they're crawling back during the up cycle.

They sank years into the metaverse.

And on AI, they've mostly been following OpenAI and Google's lead instead of setting the pace.

Meanwhile Google went from being "two years behind" when ChatGPT launched to now matching or beating OpenAI's latest models.

Kuran’s not saying Meta is dead - but if someone's getting left behind, that's his pick.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

FREE GUIDE ON STABLECOINS

Here’s a stat that might surprise you:

49% of financial institutions are already using stablecoins.

Yet most of the crypto audience still thinks this adoption is years away.

But Alchemy, the crypto infrastructure behind Stripe, Visa & Robinhood, just published a free guide on how banks are actually using stablecoins and tokenized deposits today.

Here’s what’s covered:

How banks generate revenue with stablecoins
Behind-the scenes look at how stablecoin payment rails work
The infrastructure stack powering stablecoins in production

If you want to understand where finance is heading, this FREE GUIDE is worth the read.

Get their free guide on banks & stablecoins here.

HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK (P2) 🔥

Institutions weren't even watching (we just wanted them to be) 😴

Here's a humbling one.

Nick Roberts-Huntley (CEO of Bluebird Financial) straight up said he doesn't think big institutions were actually paying attention to crypto legislation like the CLARITY Act for a long time.

We wanted to believe they were. We wanted that validation.

But Nick says when you look at the relative size of digital assets compared to what bulge bracket banks and long-short firms actually handle - it's a rounding error.

He thinks institutions only really started paying attention in the last 8-12 months, and even now it's mostly just "boots on the ground" hiring - not massive balance sheet moves.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

Housing is about to rip and almost nobody sees it coming 🏡

Keith McCullough (Founder & CEO of Hedgeye Risk Management) is making a contrarian call on housing.

While most people are getting bearish on the sector, Keith says if bond yields drop 100 basis points on the 10-year (which is his base case) housing becomes basically a one-factor trade:

Rates go down, demand goes up.

Simple as that.

He recently added housing stocks to his portfolio and says they could have more "pop" than bonds themselves.

Keith's partner Josh Steiner apparently has the models to back it up, but Keith keeps it blunt: it doesn't need to be complicated.

Lower rates = housing resurgence.

He didn't own them on the way down last year, which means he's not playing defense here.

He's going on offense.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

PRO INSIGHT OF THE WEEK 🔮

Bitcoin: is it going higher or lower in the near term - if so, what’re the levels to watch?

(Simple question. Hard one to answer/approach.)

But that was the jumping off point for a conversation between one of our PRO All Access members and our Macro NoP (Nerd-on-Payroll), John Gillen this week.

It went something like this…

“Do you take into account the risk of undershooting $58-60k with something like $45-55k? And will you be a (partial) seller at $86k levels if we reject there?”

John’s answer:

“IMO there isn't much risk of us breaking below $60k.

It could happen and if it does I'll be buying, but I don't expect Bitcoin to go down below $60k and spend months in that range. Very unlikely IMO.

In fact I would say it's more likely that we never go back to $60k than it is that we break below it.

But I could be wrong and I'll react accordingly if I am.

As far as how to deal with $86k if and when we get there.

We'll see. If it looks like a hard rejection. I might sell a bit. If we break through I might buy the break out.

Regardless though I'm going to end up with more Bitcoin and the nice thing about having a lot of Bitcoin is that I don't really have to trade it. I can just wait.

But those are the levels and the thinking I have about Bitcoin right now

If we get to $60k I'm going to buy so much I might start skipping meals.”

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