GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter packing more heat than Texas in July.
Hereโs a taste of this weekโs menu:
- ๐ฅ Ethereum is the Microsoft of crypto.
- ๐ฅต Itโs Wartime for Ethereum.
- ๐ถ๏ธ OpenClaw gaslit Alchemy's head of engineering.
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HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK ๐ฅ
Ethereum is the Microsoft of crypto ๐ป
Haseeb Qureshi (Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital) sees Ethereum as the Microsoft of crypto:
Big, slow, enterprise-friendly, not the fastest innovator, but irreplaceable and worth a fortune.
He pointed out that if you add up every public crypto company that isn't a DAT: Coinbase, Circle, eToro, Galaxy, all of themโฆ
The combined market cap is less than half of Ethereum.
๐๏ธ Listen to the full episode here.
Itโs Wartime for Ethereum โ๏ธ
John Gillen (co-host at Milk Road) went on a tear about the Ethereum Foundation drama this week.
His read on Vitalik's "CROPS" post is that Vitalik is softly calling for a second foundation to handle the BD and "number go up" work that the EF refuses to do.
(Similar to how Michael Saylor evangelizes Bitcoin while the core devs stay heads-down.)
John wants to put Danny Ryan, Joe Shalom, Tom Lee, and David Hoffman in a room and launch the thing himself!
๐๏ธ Listen to the full episode here.
OpenClaw gaslit Alchemy's head of engineering ๐ค
Guillaume Ponce (Head of Engineering at Alchemy) was building agent payment infrastructure and realized that OpenClaw was constantly gaslighting him.
(Claiming it did things it never actually did.)
His takeaway:
Any agent payment system has to include a verification loop where you can prove the agent actually moved the money, because otherwise the agent will confidently lie about settling a transaction.
๐๏ธ Listen to the full episode here.
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HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK (P2) ๐ฅ
The bull market in bonds is dead - and nobody noticed ๐
Andreas Steno Larsen (Founder of Steno Research, Senior Editor at Real Vision) thinks we just structurally flipped from a 40-year bond bull run into a bear, and most macro guys are still reading the old playbook.
But his sleeper alpha was the ESLR reform that went live April 1st.
It freed up $1.2T of bank balance sheet capacity for repo transactions.
Banks have already used $250B of it since April to lever up, which is why semis and risk assets ripped from April onwards.
Andreas calculates we've potentially got 4-5x more repo liquidity still to deploy through year-end, meaning the rally might have its best leg ahead.
๐๏ธ Listen to the full episode here.
The Fed is gonna QE the war ๐จ๏ธ
Michael Nicoletos (Founder & CEO of DeFi Advisors) basically painted the rate hike chatter from Fed Governor Waller as a red herring.
His logic: this is supply-side inflation from the Strait of Hormuz, and hiking rates won't print more oil - it'll just nuke the economy into a recession right when SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are trying to raise trillions in IPOs.
He thinks the Fed pulls out yield curve control and starts buying bonds again to cap the 10Y and 30Y before they ever hike.
Michael's biggest call though:
Stablecoins are the U.S. government's secret weapon for dollar dominance, and Scott Bessent's $2T projection is way too conservative.
Michael sees $5T+ in stablecoins within five years, which means trillions in new forced demand for U.S. Treasuries.
๐๏ธ Listen to the full episode here.
PRO INSIGHT OF THE WEEK ๐ฎ
This past week, the talent exodus happening over at the Ethereum Foundation (EF) became a topic of focus in our PRO Discord.
One PRO memberโs worry:
โAre you suggesting the EF veteran departures might actually be a healthy signal โ and that youโre still structurally bullish on ETH despite that?
My concern is similar to what is potentially going to happen/happened with SOL:
Iโm questioning whether Ethereumโs adoption and technical progress will NOT automatically translate into asymmetric ETH returns.
The chain can grow, but the token might not capture that growth the way it used to.โ
Our PRO analyst, and general ETH bull, John Gillen gave his thoughts:
โ[Vitalik] is saying that people leaving the EF and going out to build other things in the ecosystem extends and increases Ethereum's network and ETH's value, so to your questions, yes, there is a way to look at these departures that would indicate that this is healthy for Ethereum and positive for ETH's long term value.
Whether or not you believe that is another question entirely.
But Vitalik directly says he wants the EF to just be another node in Ethereum's governance, not the total controller.
He says he's reducing his personal control of the EF itself, he says the EF only holds .16% of the total ETH supply, but that 90% of his personal worth is in ETH.
This reflects his commitment to decentralizing the governance of ETH while at the same time being personally all-in on Ethereum and on ETH.
Ethereum has record low fees, record high transactions, record high staking percentages, and a robust long term view of its network and ETH as an asset.
Lotta risks for sure, lots of places to be critical, not perfect, but that's sort of their strategy for the moment as I see it.โ
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?
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Raoul Pal: "ETH has the most economic and intellectual density and the most lindy effects."
Director of Product at Kraken: The bull market is here - it's just not evenly distributed. ETH barely moved this cycle, but Solana and Hyperliquid? "Extraordinary."
Called it: SK Hynix just hit $1.08T market cap having added $480B in market value in the last 30 daysโฆ our lead analyst put a trade alert out for it back on May 5th.
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MILKY MEMES ๐คฃ
