GM. This is Milk Road, your friend in crypto - the kinda friend whose mom lets you stay up late playing video games.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ Buying a coffee with home equity.
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Bitwise: Tokenization Could Be the Biggest Crypto Trade of the Decade.
- 🍪 NEAR is up 32% against BTC this past week.
Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.
TOKENIZATION: WHERE WE ARE VS. WHERE WE'RE HEADED 🗺️
Robinhood Chain hit a new all-time high in DEX trading volume on Tuesday ($1.92B) - and Vlad Tenev (Robinhood's CEO) is just as surprised as anyone.
He got on a Goldman Sachs stage this week and admitted the first version of stock tokens flopped in Europe.
They lived inside the Robinhood app, so you could buy them, sell them, and that was about it.
Or in his words: they sat in "this messy middle of not having any credible differentiators versus traditional stocks."
Robinhood's solution: let 'em out of their cage - allow tokens to become fully composable on Robinhood Chain.
This meant any developer could plug them into their own code without asking Robinhood for permission - putting tokenized stocks into DeFi pools, pairing them with other crypto assets, or wiring them into smart contracts.
Around 200 U.S. stocks now trade this way on Robinhood Chain, across 120+ countries - pulling in $8.2M of Real Economic Value (i.e. the total fees users paid to use the chain) in a single day last week! 👇
In short - Robinhood handed the same set of assets over to strangers, let them build whatever they liked with them, and the demand turned up on its own.
Kyle (our Head of Research) has a great explanation of why this works:
Hold Tesla in your Schwab account and the only thing you can do with it is buy it or sell it. You can't send it to a friend, you can't pay with it, and you can't swap it into Nvidia without cashing out to dollars first.
Tokenize it, and all of those doors open at once.
Now apply that to something that isn't a share…
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TOKENIZATION: WHERE WE ARE VS. WHERE WE'RE HEADED 🗺️ (P2)
Every listed stock on the planet adds up to roughly $160T, which sounds enormous right up until you put it next to everything else.
As Jordi Visser told us on the pod yesterday, there's about $700T of fiat assets in the world (property, gold, private credit, venture stakes, all of it).
And two-thirds of it is illiquid! Meaning it can't be sold quickly without taking a painful discount.
Jordi calls it ‘dormant wealth’ - assets that show up in your net worth, but do nothing else. 👇
Still struggling to visualize what tokenizing the full $700T of global wealth could lead to?
Lemme paint a picture for you…
Imagine buying a house, then using your equity in said house to buy a coffee.
Right now, that would mean filling out a bunch of paperwork and getting a home equity loan to cover a $6.48 double shot latte from Starbies... who's doing that??
Tokenization makes that dormant wealth spendable, and has the potential to enable crazy sh*t - like buying a coffee with your home equity.
The takeaway here:
Stocks were the easiest asset in the pile. Already liquid, already priced by the second, and already sitting in an app on your phone.
Robinhood Chain isn’t even Act 1, Scene 1 of the adoption curve - it's the previews before the movie.
The tokenization of the other $467T worth of global assets is still yet to come, and is promising to unlock financial tools & products most people have never even conceived of before.
Say it with me now: “we’re still so early.”
YOU CAN NEVER GET ENOUGH VISSER. I WILL DIE ON THIS HILL
The Jordi Visser episode that went out on The Milk Road Show yesterday was only half of what we recorded.
The conversation was too good to cut short in the moment, so we let it run long and split it in two.
Part 1 covers all things crypto (that's the one you saw yesterday).
While Part 2 digs into the equities and AI side of Jordi’s thinking, with a 20 minute breakdown of the whole conversation with John and LG.
Whether or not you’re familiar with Jordi’s work/thinking - you’re going to want to watch this one. 👇
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
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Movement detected: NEAR is up 32% against BTC this past week. The move was driven by a cluster of NEAR-specific catalysts.
Huh? The recent stock/meme pairing boom hit memecoins, launchpads, and AMMs. So why are all three down anywhere from ~12-22% over the last 24hrs?
New hire: Polymarket just brought in Amazon's former finance chief Warren Jenson as its first CFO.
MILKY MEMES 🤣
ROADIE REVIEW OF THE DAY 🥛
VITALIK PIC OF THE DAY
