GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that puts the "fire" in "fireside chat."
Here’s a taste of this week’s menu:
- 🔥 BTC ETF diamond hands are a myth.
- 🥵 Being a hyperscaler is a terrible business.
- 🌶️ MiCA is about to boot 80% of crypto out of Europe.
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HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK 🔥
The Bitcoin ETF diamond hands were a myth 💎
James Seyffart (senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence) came on the Milk Road Show to basically bury the idea that ETF buyers are steady-handed long-term holders.
Bitcoin ETPs are now over $11B below their October peak, and the selling isn't slowing, with June 25th alone seeing ~$700M walk out the door in a single day.
His view: there are no profits to defend unless you bought right at launch, and both capital and eyeballs are getting vacuumed up by AI and space instead.
James says the outflows look worse than even he'd have expected, and there's just no diamond-handed base holding the line.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
Being a hyperscaler is a terrible business 🥪
Vincent, one of Milk Road's AI analysts, dropped a contrarian take on our latest roundtable:
The raw hyperscaler cloud business is a commodity race to the bottom, and he won't touch it for exactly that reason.
His logic: they're sandwiched, with memory suppliers like Micron jacking up prices on one side and AI labs begging for cheaper compute on the other because they can't compete with Chinese open-weight models charging ~10x less per token.
So the guys building the data centers get squeezed at both ends while the margins evaporate.
Vincent would rather own Amazon and Google for their AI-adoption and Waymo upside than for the cloud business everyone's cheering on.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
MiCA is about to boot 80% of crypto out of Europe 🐴
John Gillen (host of The Milk Road Show) told a scary story that doesn’t seem to be on too many people's radar:
When MiCA's transition window shut on July 1, roughly 80% of the ~1,200 crypto firms operating in the EU still didn’t have a compliant license, so they'll have to wind down, migrate clients, or leave.
His warning is that a big legal framework isn't automatically a gift - a hostile regulator can weaponize the same text, which is why he calls it a Trojan horse and a preview of the risk baked into the U.S. CLARITY Act.
He frames the whole thing as "capital wars," with the EU pushing out stablecoin off-ramps while fast-tracking a digital euro to stop capital flight.
And counterintuitively, John says all this state clampdown is bullish for Ethereum as the neutral, censorship-resistant alternative people run to once they hit the limits of the old system.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
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HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK (P2) 🔥
If it quacks like a security... 🦆
Roger Bayston (EVP and head of digital assets at Franklin Templeton) took a shot at the stablecoin crowd while pitching Franklin's onchain money market fund, Benji.
His point: stablecoins legally can't pay interest, so issuers dress up yield as a "reward" through distribution deals - and in his words, if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck, it probably should be treated like one.
Benji, by contrast, is a real U.S. government money market fund living onchain, where you start accruing T-bill yield the second the token lands in your wallet.
Roger thinks that's the wedge that turns the $7T money market into onchain collateral and settlement rails.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
Iran is toll-boothing the Strait of Hormuz in Bitcoin ⚓
Ben Werkman (chief investment officer at Strive Incorporated) served up the spiciest real-world Bitcoin use case of the week:
Iran has been collecting fees from ships moving through the Strait of Hormuz in Bitcoin, because it's the one asset nobody can sit in the middle of and switch off.
He tied it to a broader thesis - every time a major global conflict flares (Russia-Ukraine, Iran, BRICS), Bitcoin walks into the conversation as the sovereign, censorship-proof bearer asset.
Ben's company (Strive) is still stacking hard, buying 2,500 BTC and 1,500 BTC in recent weeks and closing in on 20K total.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
Another crypto IPO! Securitize is now officially a public company under the ticker $SECZ. (great ticker tbh).*
Saylor: Bitcoin dominance fell to 41% in 2021 and everyone called for the flippening, now it's back near 70%.
Lyn Alden: People keep asking "when will the debt matter?" Like there's some big day of reckoning coming. "It has been mattering... since about 2018/2019."
Raoul Pal: The best performing brokerage accounts at every firm are the ones belonging to dead people. "It's because they don't sell."
Bitcoin lending is making a comeback. Several major US banks (like Ledn) have begun offering Bitcoin-backed credit lines.**
*this is sponsored content. **this is partner content.
MILKY MEMES 🤣
