🥛 Why is crypto selling off today? 📉

GM. This is Milk Road, your crypto dehumidifier (we remove fog and increase clarity).

Here’s what we got for you today:

✍️ Guess who’s back from the dead…
✍️ Why is crypto selling off today?
🥛 PRO “Where are we in the cycle?” indicators
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Bitcoin’s Golden Bull Run: Treasury Companies, Institutions & Macro Analysis w/ Charles Edwards
🍪 September rate cuts locked and loaded?

Chainlink is the global standard and platform integrating the world to the onchain economy. They just announced the “Chainlink Reserve”, read more about it here.

Prices as of 2:00 PM ET. Click here for our Fear & Greed Index.

PUMPFUN RECLAIMS THE THRONE / WE CATALOGUE OUR RECENT FAILURE 👑

Two weeks ago I made a small but increasingly frustrating mistake:

I didn’t hit ‘record’ on a particular weekly call that would’ve made me look like a big-brain-smart-guy by association.

See, most Thursdays I sit in on the Milk Road PRO research meeting to learn and get ideas for articles…

And two weeks ago, the topic of discussion was $PUMP.

At the time, its price/vibes were both in the toilet:

letsBONKfun was ripping into PumpFun’s market share
Pump’s buy back scheme was hard to track/get excited about
And the platform felt like it was in dire need of a fresh incentive program

The basic gist of our PRO team’s discussion:

Yuh. The Pump team is going to fix all of that. It’s been like two weeks since they launched their token – it’s insane that the market is so impatient…there’s an opportunity here. 👀

Since that call, we’ve seen…

1/ PumpFun launch its new community token buy back initiative

Pump launched the ‘Glass Full Foundation’ (GFF if you’re nasty) – which buys up leading memecoins launched on the platform, and has injected $1.69M into community tokens so far.

So if you launch a successful token on PumpFun → you could see some of their $1.3B war chest thrown at your token. 👇

Source: adam_tehc/Dune

2/ They launched the $PUMP token buy back dashboard

Initially, PumpFun committed to using 25% of platform revenues to buy back $PUMP and re-distribute those revenues to token holders.

…but at launch, it was hard as hell to follow – you needed to be an onchain sleuth, or permanently glued to Twitter in order to track each purchase.

(Meaning these buy backs were largely hidden from public view, dampening the potential excitement.)

But boy has PumpFun since adjusted for this…

They’ve not only created a public buyback dashboard, they’ve upped their daily purchases by an insane amount – from 25% of daily revenue to anywhere between ~80% and ~200%. 👇

Source: PumpFun

As a result…

3/ PumpFun has taken back its market share

Pump went from making up ~10% of daily Solana Launchpad Revenues on Aug 3, to ~76% Aug 13 (that’s a crazy turn around in just 10 days!) 👇

Source: Blockworks

And so far, these steps have translated into positive price action for $PUMP…

It’s up ~42% since our PRO meeting took place:

Source: TradingView

Our (personal) takeaway:

P.S. Our PRO All Access members got a ‘buy’ call in our private signals channel shortly after this meeting – if you don’t want to miss the next one, upgrade to PRO All Access here!

CHAINLINK UNVEILS STRATEGIC LINK RESERVE

Ever wonder how Chainlink will accelerate its dominance across DeFi and TradFi?

With trillions in tokenized assets set to come onchain, the answer is no longer a mystery.

Introducing the Chainlink Reserve: a strategic reserve of LINK tokens.

Here’s how it works:

Funded by onchain and offchain revenue from large enterprises adopting Chainlink
Accumulates LINK over time
Built to support the long-term growth of the Chainlink Network

Demand for Chainlink has already created hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

With Chainlink being uniquely positioned to power and benefit from the accelerating tokenization wave, the strategic LINK reserve is the jet fuel that propels Chainlink’s journey there.

WHY IS CRYPTO SELLING OFF TODAY? 🤨

Short answer?

Producer Price Index (PPI) data just came in WAY hotter than expected (👇) and collided with two other contributing factors.

Source: @MilkRoadMacro

Long answer?

PPI tracks the increase/decrease in cost of wholesale goods.

And when wholesale prices go up, producers typically pass those costs on to consumers (so kind of them).

The problem for crypto in this scenario is:

Increases in consumer costs are then reflected in Personal Consumption Expenditures data (PCE) – the metric the Federal Reserve uses to decide on rate cuts…

So here’s the potential daisy chain of events that the market is partly acting on here:

Wholesale costs go up → pushing consumer costs up
The Fed holds off on rate cuts in order to fight this increased inflation
Higher rates = businesses/consumers spending more to service loans/credit
Less money in people’s pockets = less money finding its way into risk assets (like crypto)

Now – take aaaalll of that and add the fact that:

Crypto prices were already due for a breather after this recent run up + Scott Bessent (Treasury Secretary) just said the US wouldn’t be buying additional $BTC for the Strategic Reserve… 👇

Source: @DeItaone

And boom! There you have it – the perfect recipe for a short-term sell-off.

The good news? This is likely just a momentary blip on the bull market radar.

According to Polymarket, the likelihood of a September rate cut is still leaning comfortably in our favor:

Source: Polymarket

Say it with me now:

“Ear muffs.”

CRYPTO PRO “WHERE ARE WE IN THE CYCLE?” INDICATORS 🤔

Knowing where we are in the crypto cycle is crucial for capturing the best opportunities.

(The goal being to spot the bull market peak before the bear market hits your bags hard.)

So how is our PRO team reading today’s sell off, in the context of the overall crypto cycle?

Go PRO and keep scrolling to find out!

ICYMI: We track 6 indicators with a color-coded system to show how close they are to signaling the market peak:

🟢 Plenty of room to run 🏄

🟡 Getting closer to the top signal, but haven’t yet reached the mark ⚠️

🔴 We’ve hit the market top indicator 🚨

Every Thursday, we update these 6 indicators exclusively for PRO members.

Our advice? Don't wait for all of them to hit 🔴. It's better to take profits as they get closer to that point.

Let's dive in and see if we're anywhere near the top of this bull market. 👇

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GO CRYPTO PRO AND UNLOCK:

Full access to the 6 bull market peak indicators above to help you spot the bull market top before it’s too late 📈
Weekly reports that help you spot early trends, navigate the markets by limiting risk & catch those sweet cha-ching moments 💰
Access to the PRO Community, where the Milk Road crew & 1000s of fellow PROs talk crypto. 🫂

GO PRO TODAY

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