🥛 "BTC is still in a bear market, full stop" 🛑

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that’s equal parts insight and inferno.

Here’s a taste of this week’s menu:

🔥 Bitcoin is still in a bear market, full stop.
🥵 ETH is the greatest asymmetric risk/reward of our lifetimes.
🌶️ The AI race is a capital formation game and one of them is going bankrupt.

Consensus Miami is one of the largest digital asset conferences that’s going all in on crypto and agentic commerce. Grab your passes at 20% off.

HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK 🔥

Bitcoin is still in a bear market, full stop 🐻

Caleb Franzen (Founder of Cubic Analytics) isn't buying the BTC relief rally.

His line in the sand is the 2-day 200 moving average at around $95,650 - anything below that and we're still technically in a bear market.

He sold BTC at $97k back in November, bought back 20% of his stack at $67k, and he's using 12/18/24 month Williams %R as his accumulation signal.

His hottest take though was on equities:

"If you pick any random date to invest in the S&P 500, forward one year returns are their highest when the market is at all time highs."

So yes, he knows it looks overbought, and that's exactly why he's buying more.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

ETH is the greatest asymmetric risk/reward of our lifetimes 🦄

Michael McGuiness (from Etherealize) went scorched earth on Bitcoin's security model.

His back-of-the-envelope: it'd only cost about $6B to 51% attack the entire Bitcoin network right now, which hyperscalers spend every quarter.

Meanwhile ETH's proof-of-stake security scales directly with market cap - if ETH hits $3T, it'd cost $300B to attack.

His full take: "Ethereum is better money than gold for all the reasons Bitcoin is better money than gold. But then it's better than Bitcoin because it's more secure. And then it has this productive yield component to it that it actually compounds."

Etherealize are sketching a path to $250k per ETH if it reprices from ‘tech token’ to ‘monetary asset.’

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

The AI race is a capital formation game and one of them is going bankrupt 💸

Our Head of Research, Kyle Reidhead, came at Anthropic's $25B Amazon deal with a brutal take.

These AI models have zero moat, switching costs are basically nothing, and every user actually makes them LESS profitable because inference costs scale with engagement. His words: "I guarantee you that Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Gemini - one of them will not exist in a few years from now."

The only thing that matters is who can raise the most capital cheapest to lock in compute at today's prices before GPUs get even more expensive.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

THE ENTIRE INDUSTRY IS HEADING TO MIAMI

Where do you go to hear people talk about crypto, AI, and real capital?

If you surface-level takes, then it’s probably in my group chat.

But if you want institutions with deep pockets, you’ll have to head to Consensus Miami.

Consensus Miami is one of the largest digital asset conferences that’s going all in on crypto and agentic commerce.

Here are the key details:

20,000+ global attendees
$4T AUM managed by finance giants attending Consensus Miami
The ultimate intersection of crypto and AI

The best part?

You can get an exclusive 20% discount on passes with code MILKROAD.

Grab your tickets at 20% off.

HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK (P2) 🔥

Bitcoin just became a call option that moved one standard deviation into the money 🎯

The Bitwise boys broke down why the Iran conflict structurally changed BTC forever.

They frame BTC as two bets: digital gold + an out-of-the-money call option on becoming apolitical international settlement rails.

Their take: Iran requesting for shipping tolls be paid in BTC actually moved that option from 2 standard deviations out of the money to 1 standard deviation, which is a "many multiples" jump in premium value.

It's no longer a 2% chance of happening, it's now like 15-20%.

They raised their 2035 BTC price target from $1.3M to potentially $2.3M off the back of this.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

Saylor found product market fit and Wall Street is scrambling to copy him 🏛️

John Gillen (Milk Road Macro host) dropped what might be the single best framing of what's actually happening with MicroStrategy's Stretch product.

Stretch hit product market fit offering basically zero volatility with an 11.5% payout.

And now Goldman, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Schwab, and Franklin Templeton are all rushing to launch competing Bitcoin income ETF products to keep their clients from defecting.

John’s take:

The next marginal BTC buyer isn't coming from retail or crypto natives, it's coming from Morgan Stanley wealth clients through products that didn't exist 6 months ago.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

PRO INSIGHT OF THE WEEK 🔮

One of our PRO members through a question to the community:

Where would they invest $10k right now, if they had to hold the assets for 5yrs?

Our Head of Research, Kyle, jumped in with his answer:

“If I was to invest in something that I wouldn't touch for 5 years, there's probably only 4 assets I would buy:

NVIDIA, TSLA, BTC and maybe ETH.

I'd also add COIN into that mix - but even that one is tough for 5 years out (a lot has to go right in the world of crypto for them to become what I think they can become).

If you plan to be more agile with your assets, then of course that opens the door to many other opportunities.

But that’s my reaction to 5 year buys.”

P.S. Want direct access to our PRO analyst team, so you can get your burning questions answered in real-time and make the right moves?

👉 Try Milk Road PRO for $1!