GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that’s like a weather forecast for your portfolio.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ Are GPUs the new crypto collateral?
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Solana, Aave, Venice AI: 3 Altcoins With MASSIVE Potential.
- 🍪 Solana hits $5T in stablecoin volume.
Every $BTC to $ETH swap is a taxable event. But inside a crypto IRA, it generally isn't. Here's how Roth and Traditional crypto IRAs work (and the catches).
Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.
GPUS ARE THE NEXT COLLATERAL 🖥️
Big Tech is spending money on AI at a pace that's hard to wrap your head around.
Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta plan to spend ~$730B on CapEx (things like chips, data centers and power) this year, up from ~$410B in 2025. 👇
Source: Company guidance (latest)
Goldman Sachs expects the four of them to spend $5.3T between 2025 and 2030, and it expects a growing chunk of that to be funded with borrowed money.
A lot of it goes into GPUs (the chips that train and run AI models).
That leaves Wall Street and crypto chasing the same question: how do you lend against a GPU?
Step one is giving it a price.
Companies rent GPU time by the hour, but every deal is negotiated privately, so there's no public price the way there is for oil or electricity.
CME (the world's biggest futures exchange) wants to change that with futures on Nvidia H100 and B200 rental prices. Futures are contracts that let you lock in today's price for something you'll buy later.
They were meant to launch Oct 5, but the CFTC (the U.S. regulator for futures markets) extended its review to Nov 9.
CFTC Chairman Michael Selig is clearly a fan, saying America can't win the AI race without a proper market for trading compute.
Once compute has a price, you can lend against it.
And a crypto lender is already doing exactly that…
HOW MUCH OF YOUR BITCOIN GAINS DOES THE IRS GET?
Say you buy Bitcoin to hold for 20 years. Solid plan. Then one day you sell.
At the top federal bracket, long-term gains can be taxed at up to 23.8% (20% capital gains plus the 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax). Trade along the way and short-term gains can be taxed at up to 37%.
And in a normal account, almost everything counts. Swapping $BTC for $ETH is a taxable event. So is rebalancing. Ugh.
A crypto IRA changes because trades inside the account generally don't trigger taxes. With a Roth crypto IRA, qualified withdrawals in retirement can come out tax-free.
We broke down how it works: Roth vs. Traditional, the 2026 contribution limits, how custody works when you can't hold your own keys, and all those little catches (income limits, no tax-loss harvesting, early withdrawal penalties).
Read the crypto IRA breakdown →
GPUS ARE THE NEXT COLLATERAL (P2) 🖥️
USD(dot)AI makes loans backed only by GPUs and the income they earn.
If a borrower runs into trouble, the lender's claim is on the chips, not on the rest of the company.
Its biggest deal yet came in September: a $128.9M loan for 32 of Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 systems (racks of 72 top-end GPUs wired together) in British Columbia.
Part of that money comes from crypto, with stablecoin holders (people holding crypto dollars) earning yield from the loans.
Aave (crypto's biggest lending app) could be next.
BlackRock's AI research paper argues that standardized compute contracts could be pledged as collateral and settled onchain.
Aave already lends against things that aren't crypto. Since Sept 25, users outside the U.S. can post Coinbase's tokenized stocks and borrow USDC against them.
John (our crypto analyst) thinks a tokenized compute contract is the natural next step, and he ran a rough comparison to show what's at stake. 👇
Source: Goldman Sachs, Aave
If just 1% of Goldman's $5.3T forecast found its way to Aave, that's $53B, well above the ~$34B deposited in total on Aave today.
A few reality checks:
- Aave doesn't lend against GPUs or compute today, and its tokenized stock market only holds ~$10M so far.
- USD(dot)AI has funded ~$420M in GPU loans since launch, which is small change next to $730B a year of spending.
- GPUs tend to lose value as newer chips ship, which makes them trickier collateral than a house or a barrel of oil.
- Even the CFTC says compute isn't standardized enough yet to trade like a normal commodity.
The date to mark on your calendar is Nov 9, when the CFTC's review of CME's GPU futures runs out.
If you want John's full breakdown of which crypto protocols stand to win if compute moves onchain, try Milk Road PRO for a buck for 7 days.
SOLANA GOT 85X FASTER. NOW WHAT?
Solana just switched on Alpenglow, its biggest upgrade ever, making transactions final about 85x faster. So why is SOL still down 60%+ from its high?
Kyle Reidhead, our Head of Research, and Martin Toman, our Lead Analyst, joined John to dig in.
Here's what we covered:
- Why Solana's tech keeps improving while SOL's price and ETF flows lag behind.
- What VVV holders actually get from Venice's $150M+ revenue run rate.
- Why Martin calls Aave "great infrastructure attached to a weak token."
👉 Watch the full episode now.
YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
Wealthy investors ranked crypto above stocks as the best way to build wealth over 10 years. But only 2% plan to hold it that long. Why though?**
Solana hits $5T in stablecoin volume: That's up from ~$3T in all of 2025, with 10 weeks left in the year - even though Solana only holds ~5% of stablecoins.
Two critical PHP bugs are being exploited: The flaws, rated 9.2/10, let attackers run their own code, so wallet users should take two minutes to read up.
Spark's CEO on stablecoins: He predicts a jump from $300B to $3T by 2030, and says the real opportunity is liquidity and lending, not issuance.
Crypto holders never sell, but they do spend: ether(.)fi cardholders just passed $1B in card purchases and got $25.3M in cashback. See where it went.**
**this is partner content.
