🥛 'Crypto winter is over' 🥶

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter served with a side of Pepto-Bismol.

Here’s a taste of this week’s menu:

🔥 Crypto winter is over.
🥵 The Overton window on BTC allocation has flipped.
🌶️ AI agents are about to take over the financial system.

A leading VPN provider, NordVPN, launches a new product: NordProtect. Protect your identity and get up to 79% off with code MILKROAD.

HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK 🔥

Crypto winter is over - it lasted just 4 months and most people missed it 🥶

Mark Newton (Managing Director & Head of Technical Strategy at Fundstrat Global Advisors) flipped his bearish call on Bitcoin and basically admitted he got it wrong.

He had been calling for BTC to drop to $60k and ETH to $1,500, but the spring rebound caught him offsides.

Now he's saying lows are probably in for 2026 and this would be one of the shortest crypto winters on record at about 4.5 months.

He's still expecting a pullback to the low $70ks in mid-May to June though, which he'd treat as a buy.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

The Overton window on Bitcoin allocation has completely flipped 🪟

Matt Hougan (Chief Investment Officer at Bitwise) hit us with a new stat that managed to fly under the radar recently…

For the first six years of Bitwise, they were practically begging clients to "get off zero" and put 1% into Bitcoin.

Now Charles Schwab is publicly recommending 2-7%, which is actually higher than Bitwise's own historical 1-5% range.

Combine that with Morgan Stanley, Wells, and Goldman, and Matt says Bitcoin has been completely normalized as an allocation.

Wild thing is, we're so deep in the $60-80k trenches we kind of forgot how massive that shift is.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

AI agents are about to take over the financial system, and crypto is the only rail that works 🤖

Ali Yahya (General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz / a16z) thinks the majority of financial transactions globally will be driven by AI agents, not humans, in the near future.

And there's no way that runs on ACH, wires, or SWIFT.

Crypto becomes the default rail because it's instant, programmable, global, and Internet native.

He's already imagining AI agents that have wallets, raise money, buy compute via x402 endpoints, and stay alive purely from the value they create.

Two years out, this stops being sci-fi.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

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(if not… welcome back from under that rock).

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Protect your identity and get up to 79% off with code MILKROAD.

HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK (P2) 🔥

Invest where the elites park their money, because they won't blow themselves up ⚓

Clem Chambers (Founder of A New Fn, financial commentator on CNBC/BBC/Fox News) dropped a rule that's so simple it's almost cynical.

His framework: if you want to know where to invest, look at where the public sector elite is putting their money, because "they won't wreck themselves. They'll be the last people to be wrecked."

That's why he loves Equinor (Norwegian state oil, 3.8% dividend) and is bullish on the nuclear renaissance.

Belgium just nationalized their nuclear plants because they're terrified the EU bureaucrats will try to shut it all down again. Clem says energy security IS the trade for the next decade.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

Forget the $1.1T AI CapEx number, it's already too low 💸

Kyle (our Head of Research) basically dared everyone to think bigger on AI.

Morgan Stanley dropped an estimate that hyperscalers will spend $1.1T on AI CapEx in 2027, and Kyle's response was:

“Ask anyone 2 years ago if they thought we'd be spending $1.1T… everyone would have said you're absolutely nuts. And yet it's happening, and probably it's going to be even higher by the end of this year."

His whole frame is that PEs don't matter in a structural buildout this big.

The weird thing about AI vs the dot-com era? The higher these stocks go, the more revenue they actually make.

We've literally never seen that before.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

PRO INSIGHT OF THE WEEK 🔮

This past week, a Milk Road PRO member asked for a balanced take on Chainlink…

“I think it’s time for some deeper coverage of chainlink. It’s hard to get real takes on it because it’s all just link army bull posts.”

To which our resident big-brain, John Gillen, replied:

“Chainlink Labs' enterprise-level revenue grew from roughly $65M in 2023 to $105M in 2024, with 2026 projections reaching $180–$190M.”

“Chainlink generates revenue from both onchain usage of its decentralized oracle services and offchain enterprise integrations.”

“These revenues are increasingly converted into LINK via its Payment Abstraction layer and funneled into mechanisms that directly benefit token holders.”

“The two main ways this is done is through the Chainlink Reserve (a buyback-like system) and staking rewards.”

“So that's the gist of it. Chainlink's model captures real revenue (on- and offchain) and funnels it back into LINK via the Reserve (buy-backs) and staking.”

“As far as tokenomics - historically they weren't great but they've improved.“

“LINK has a 1B capped supply with scheduled emissions.”

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!