GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that makes you the person everyone texts when Bitcoin moves.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ Crypto spent $176M and still lost Congress.
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Crypto Fundamentals vs Macro Mayhem: When Will the Bulls Finally Win?
- 🍪 Binance explains the $6.34B hack.
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CRYPTO SPENT $176M AND STILL LOST CONGRESS. BTC DIDN’T CARE 🗳️
Crypto groups put ~$176M into Tuesday's midterms, spread across 100+ races.
Most of it came through Fairshake (the super PAC backed by Coinbase, Ripple and a16z).
… and on Wednesday morning, crypto woke up to Democrats running the House and the Senate.
Which was a very different outcome when contrasted against crypto’s previous foray into lobbying.
In 2024, crypto spent ~$40M to knock out Ohio's Sherrod Brown (then chair of the Senate Banking Committee, and one of crypto's loudest critics).
It worked, and it made crypto's political money look unbeatable.
This year, Brown ran again - with crypto-linked PACs spending more than $60M trying to stop him…
But he still managed to win.
It wasn't the industry’s only miss either:
- Fairshake spent $10M+ against Juliana Stratton in Illinois, and she's now headed to the Senate.
- Rep. Bryan Steil lost in Wisconsin. He chaired the House subcommittee that oversees crypto and co-sponsored the CLARITY Act.
In crypto's defense, Fairshake has still won 29 of its 34 races called so far - including Nebraska, where Fairshake spent $13.5M to help keep Sen. Pete Ricketts, who voted for CLARITY.
Here's how three of its biggest Senate bets went:
Source: Reuters, The Washington Sun
Unfortunately, those losses hold more weight than any of the wins because of the CLARITY Act.
It passed the House in July 2025, then fell one vote short in the Senate in September (49 to 50, on a procedural vote that needed 60).
If it doesn't pass by Jan. 3, when this Congress wraps up, it dies - with traders on Kalshi now giving it a 6% chance of becoming law before 2027.
If Congress is off the table until 2027 at the earliest…
Where does crypto's next win come from?
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CRYPTO SPENT $176M AND STILL LOST CONGRESS. BTC DIDN’T CARE (P2) 🗳️
Where does crypto's next win come from?
Mostly from regulators.
The SEC and CFTC can keep writing crypto rules without Congress, and the CFTC flexed that muscle on Election Day.
Chair Mike Selig let perps on single U.S. stocks start trading on CFTC-registered exchanges for the first time (perps are future bets on asset prices that never expire).
The problem is that rules made this way are easier to undo.
A group backed by Cboe (the options exchange) sued the CFTC almost immediately, and CME (the world's biggest derivatives exchange operator) is already suing it over the crypto perps it approved in May.
On top of that… a future administration can reverse anything a regulator does on its own, and the new Democratic Senate gets a big say in who runs the SEC and CFTC next.
There's still a path to a crypto bill though.
70+ House Democrats backed CLARITY last year, so a slower, more bipartisan version in 2027 still has a realistic shot.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, took all of this in stride.
In the same week as the $6.3B Binance hack, BTC dipped to ~$75.7K on election night.
That's right on its 50-week moving average (BTC's average price over the past year or so), which John (our crypto analyst) treats as bull market support.
Then it bounced straight back to ~$80K:
Here’s where John (our in-house crypto analyst) thinks it goes next:
BTC has been stuck between ~$75.5K and ~$87K since August, and only a break above or below that range will change the picture.
Until then, he expects more of the same (with a growing chance it retests $85-87K next).
His take on the week is that "the bears just unloaded a huge barrage of bearish catalysts and Bitcoin held its ground."
In fact, John called this one before it happened.
Last week he said that if $80K broke, BTC would likely tag its 50-week moving average and bounce back up.
And that’s exactly what it did - pushing John back to the top of the Milk Road PRO analyst leaderboard this week.
(Brb, borrowing John’s crystal ball real quick.)
P.S. If you want John's levels before the next move instead of after it, try Milk Road PRO for a buck for 7 days.
BLUE WAVE MEETS BITCOIN 🌊
Democrats just took the House and the Senate - so what does this mean for markets?
Felix Jauvin, host of Blockworks' macro podcast Forward Guidance, joined John to break down just that.
Here's what we covered:
- Whether a split government just means gridlock, or real risk for AI and crypto.
- How deep the oil shock runs, even if a peace deal with Iran lands.
- Why ICE backing Hyperliquid perps matters, and what it'll take to get Bitcoin moving again.
👉 Watch the full episode now.
YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
Binance explains the $6.34B hack: It started with a fake job interview, where an engineer was told to download a coding "assignment" onto his work computer.
Coinbase's agent trading is booming: Brian Armstrong says agentic volume is growing ~20% week over week, though it's "still relatively small."
Sharplink's CEO on AI agents: Joseph Chalom estimates agents will touch 35%+ of financial services fees, about $4T of fees by 2035.
