GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter with more kick than a habanero margarita.
Here’s a taste of this week’s menu:
- 🔥 Crypto got boring. That's bullish.
- 🥵 "Not buying Nebius or CoreWeave? You're a f*ing idiot".
- 🌶️ Robinhood's real moat is a $50 subscription.
Securitize is the platform institutions trust to tokenize their assets onchain. See what nine years of regulated tokenization looks like.
HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK 🔥
Crypto got boring. That's bullish. 🥱
Krista Lynch (Head of Capital Markets at Grayscale) had the most counterintuitive read on the retail doom loop we've all been watching.
Her take: retail checked out because crypto stopped being the shiny object - it's now competing with AI for attention, and big banks talking about your asset class kills the thrill.
But that boredom IS the maturation.
The bitcoin ETF cohort bled $5B this year, yet Grayscale's low-cost BTC product pulled in $500M of inflows, and the whole cohort still sits at $75B+ after just two years (gold ETFs took two decades to get 3x that).
Krista's basically saying the gulf between apocalyptic retail and bullish institutions is what mass adoption looks like from the inside.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
"If you're not buying Nebius or CoreWeave, you're a f*ing idiot" 🤖
That's a direct quote from Melvin (Milk Road AI analyst) on this week's AI rollup, and he wasn't joking - he doubled down on both mid-recording.
His logic: the cost to build 1 gigawatt of compute jumped from $50B to $100B in about three months, so anyone who already locked in capacity is sitting on a moat no newcomer can afford.
Meanwhile Jensen is playing landlord AND bank, backstopping GPU financing for neoclouds so lenders will fund their clusters.
Kyle (our Head of Research) backed that view from another angle: we're in the early 90s of this cycle and the real application layer (agents and robots) hasn't even started.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
Robinhood's real moat is a $50 subscription 💳
Sam Andrew (crypto and markets analyst at North Island Ventures) laid out why Robinhood Gold is becoming the Amazon Prime of finance.
You give away ~$800 of value for $50 a year, Gold users hold roughly 5x the assets of regular accounts, and the payback period is about three months.
The kicker is the monetization gap:
Robinhood earns ~$160 per user while competitors pull $600-$1,400, and Sam thinks that converges as an $80T boomer wealth transfer rolls downhill into the one app that now does equities, options, crypto, retirement, banking AND prediction markets.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
THE RAILS BEHIND BLACKROCK'S ONCHAIN FUND
Assets still run on decades-old infrastructure:
Slow settlement, walled access, paperwork everywhere.
Tokenization fixes that but who’s actually doing it at an institutional scale?
With nearly nine years in the business, Securitize has become the platform institutions trust to bring assets onchain.
Here's why it stands out:
- BlackRock, Morgan Stanley & ARK Invest have all invested in Securitize
- NYSE, VanEck & BNY have chosen Securitize to tokenize their stocks.
- The only public pure-play in tokenization infrastructure
This isn't a crypto project waiting for TradFi to catch up. It's the regulated bridge that the largest asset managers in the world already build on.
See what nine years of regulated tokenization looks like.
HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK (P2) 🔥
Software stocks are the tobacco stocks of tomorrow 🚬
Adam Parker (ex-Morgan Stanley chief U.S. equity strategist) says software now trades like a staple:
Decent returns near term, but structurally doomed as pricing power erodes at renewal and AI opex eats those fantasy 80% gross margins.
The misses won't show up in sales this quarter; they'll show up in 2031 estimates, which is exactly what the multiple compression is already telling you.
His rule: never buy cheap software expecting a re-rate - the market made it cheap for a reason.
If you must own the sector, pay up for the expensive fast growers, where disruption odds are lowest.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
Eli Lilly could be bigger than Nvidia 💊
Vincent (Milk Road AI analyst) went on record with this one and didn't flinch when pressed.
Lilly is already a $1T company with AI contributing basically nothing to the P&L yet - they grew 45% last year with 99% of it from GLP-1s, and free cash flow is closing in on $10B.
Meanwhile they've built their own $5B data center with 1,000+ GPUs, opened their trained models to outside scientists like an app store, and dropped $50B+ into manufacturing since 2020.
Vincent's frame: curing disease for a growing global population is a bigger TAM than selling chips, and the first AI-designed drugs around 2028-2030 would force a violent repricing.
He bought in before the market connects those dots.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
Best crypto loan platforms in 2026. Milk Road pick: Ledn.*
Lyn Alden: Bitcoin follows global M2 83% of the time. Right now is the other 17%.
Tom Lee: "We may be reaching a point where agents actually own more wealth than we do."
Matt Hougan: "The good thing about the point we're at right now is we know who the next marginal buyer is. It's the end boss of investing. It's institutional capital.”
Which crypto exchanges publish proof of reserves? Bitget has been reporting monthly since December 2022.**
*this is sponsored content. **this is partner content.
See what nine years of regulated tokenization looks like.
MILKY MEMES 🤣
