🥛 Citrini’s portfolio skips BTC & ETH 👀

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that’s your daily cheat sheet for the onchain economy.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

✍️ Citrini’s portfolio skips BTC & ETH.
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Stablecoins Could 10X by 2030 - But These Crypto Projects Could Win Even Bigger.
🍪 Solana is #1 in stablecoin transfers.

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CITRINI'S CRYPTO PORTFOLIO SKIPS BTC & ETH 🤔

Citrini Research (a macro research firm with 260K+ Substack subscribers) just dropped a 79-page report called "Breaking The Wall."

Inside is a 15-token crypto portfolio… with zero BTC and zero ETH.

Citrini still likes the big two, but this report is betting on something else.

The idea is that stocks, credit and Treasuries keep moving onchain, and the fees end up with whatever chain they trade on.

Citrini also thinks AI agents will speed this up, since bots that never sleep need markets that never close.

And regulators are helping. On Sept 17, the SEC gave platforms trading tokenized stocks a five-year exemption, so they can operate without registering as a full stock exchange.

The 15 tokens selected by Citrini fall into three buckets:

Trading: the exchanges where tokenized stocks and derivatives (bets on an asset's future price) change hands, like Uniswap, Aerodrome, Hyperliquid, Lighter, Derive and Backpack.
Yield and credit: apps that pay interest or lend money out, like Ethena, Ether(.)fi, Maple and Pendle.
Plumbing: the stuff underneath, including Solana, Chainlink, Aave, LayerZero and Ondo.

Here's how the reported weights stack up. 👇

Source: Odaily

John (our crypto analyst) already owned 7 of the 15 (the yellow bars) before Citrini hit publish.

He's now writing a PRO series going through Citrini's picks one by one.

But he doesn't agree with all of them…

Ondo runs the biggest pile of tokenized Treasuries in crypto at ~$3.0B.

But John can't find clear evidence that any of that business flows back to the people holding the token.

Which is the risk in this whole basket (and Citrini's report admits it, too). More activity onchain doesn't guarantee the token goes up.

Solana is another good example.

John pointed out that during the week of Sept 14, Solana's exchanges handled 208M trades vs. 189M on the NYSE.

Solana also hosted ~97% of all tokenized stock trading volume in Q2 ($4.8B).

But SOL holders see very little of that, since the whole chain collected just $28.1M in fees over the last 30 days.

That said, John's early Citrini picks have mostly held up well. 👇

Source: John Gillen's Milk Road PRO portfolio

John also thinks Citrini left a few things out:

Privacy, where his picks are NEAR and NIGHT (Midnight's token).
A direct AI x crypto bet. He holds NEAR under this thesis too, with TAO and SUI on his watchlist.
ETH and BTC. In John's words, Citrini has "the worst case of ‘doesn't have enough Bitcoin’ I have seen in days."

Point being: John and Citrini agree on where crypto's money flows next, but they disagree on how much to bet on it.

John keeps ~73% of his portfolio in BTC and ETH, then builds the fee collectors around that core.

Either way, the test for all 15 tokens is whether the money these apps make reaches the people holding the token.

Btw - John bought AERO on Aug 31 at ~$0.48 and told PRO members, "No one has noticed this yet."

Five weeks later, Citrini gave it a 7% weight. AERO is ~$0.78 today, which puts that buy up ~64%.

He's working through the rest of Citrini's 15 in PRO over the next couple of weeks. Try Milk Road PRO for a buck for 7 days to catch every breakdown.

WHERE THE STABLECOIN MONEY GOES

Stablecoins moved tens of trillions of dollars onchain last year, but a new Citrini Research report found only a tiny sliver of it went to actual payments.

Sam MacPherson, co-founder and CEO of Spark, the biggest capital allocator in the Sky ecosystem (formerly MakerDAO), joined John to explain where the rest is going.

Here's what we covered:

How stablecoins ended up working like savings accounts.
Why tokenized Treasuries are a bigger opportunity than tokenized stocks.
Why banks are likely to plug into DeFi lending protocols rather than build their own.

👉 Watch the full episode now.

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