GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that's crispier than the first chip out of the bag.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ Why AI is pointing back at crypto.
- 🍪 Brian Armstrong: crypto rails win over TradFi rails.
Bridge just released a free guide called “The Stablecoin Playbook” that covers the most prominent real-world use cases for stablecoins. Download the free guide now.
Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.
EVERYONE'S LOOKING AT AI. WE THINK IT'S POINTING BACK AT CRYPTO. 👈
As you know by now, every Monday we turn our morning content meeting into your own personal eavesdropping session.
(Giving you a fly on the wall look at what we think is worth watching this week.)
Here's where we landed today:
Crypto still feels lifeless… the U.S.-Iran peace deal continues to flip-flop…
Meanwhile, SpaceX has gone public and is pulling cash off the table like a giant capital vacuum…
The question nobody in the room could give a clean answer to:
Where does money rotate next?
Truth is, most of our feeds are focused on AI right now, not crypto - and Martin's been turning over a thesis that starts there…
Right now everyone's watching the frontier labs - the ones building the biggest, smartest models (think: OpenAI & Anthropic).
But open-source models (the free, public ones anyone can run) are catching up fast.
The newest, GLM 5.2, reportedly goes toe-to-toe with many of the top closed models (inc. Anthropic’s Fable 5) - and as more challengers pile in, the cost of running AI keeps falling…
So here's where Martin's looking next:
The edge might not stay with the labs at all. It could shift to the software businesses nimble enough to build on that near-free intelligence.
What he can't square yet is the bill.
If everyone routes to cheap, light models - who earns back the hundreds of billions being spent on chips and data centers to build all this?
That's where John jumped in, because to him the AI story and the crypto story have become the same thing.
His logic goes like this…
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EVERYONE'S LOOKING AT AI. WE THINK IT'S POINTING BACK AT CRYPTO. (P2) 👈
John sees two big potential risks looming on the horizon for AI.
Risk number one:
If open-source models continue to keep pace, the moat around centralized AI could become a lot thinner than it currently appears.
Risk number two:
Governments start deciding who's allowed to use each model.
E.g. Fable 5 (Anthropic’s biggest/latest model) just got taken down at the request of the U.S. government.
When your business runs on something a government can switch off, infrastructure that nobody can shut down becomes a form of risk management.
And that's John's whole case for Ethereum.
So given crypto prices are in the toilet - isn't this the perfect moment to be looking at onchain assets?
Short answer: yes.
Because while prices may have stalled, progress hasn’t.
Real businesses with real revenue are rebuilding onchain, and the momentum is still strong:
- One reinsurance project (insurance for insurance companies) is dragging the Lloyd’s of London model onchain under the ticker RE, with a token launch coming soon.
- Chainlink keeps compounding.
- Solana is trading its ‘memecoin-casino’ rep for institutional rails and tokenized stocks.
- Aerodrome & Velodrome (two of the biggest onchain exchanges) are set to merge their ecosystems in July.
Point being: these are all parts of trillion-dollar markets that are crying out for better plumbing - and AI may soon join the ‘we need better, more defensible infrastructure’ party.
The stronger the case for open, neutral AI infrastructure becomes → the stronger the case for crypto.
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Mike Novogratz: "What you really need to do when you got $40T of debt is constantly have inflation a little higher than people are comfortable with."
Erik Voorhees: A new kind of inequality is coming, and it has nothing to do with money.
Brian Armstrong: Crypto rails win over TradFi rails, regardless of regulation (even if KYC rules changed and AI agents could open traditional bank accounts).
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