GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that explains the market like your smartest friend after two beers.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ Robinhood ate Lighter’s lunch.
- ✍️ Calling all crypto nerds.
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Geoffrey Kendrick: These 4 Altcoins Could Explode as Wall Street Moves Onchain.
- 🍪 Standard Chartered initiated coverage on ENA.
Securitize is the company quietly powering BlackRock, Apollo and KKR's move onchain. Here's what you need to know about Securitize.
Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.
ROBINHOOD JUST ATE LIGHTER'S LUNCH 🍱
On Tuesday night in Houston, Robinhood used its HOOD Summit to announce crypto perps for U.S. customers.
(Perpetual futures = futures contracts with no expiry date, so you can hold a leveraged bet on a price for as long as you like.)
Robinhood says these will land in "the coming months":
- Perps on eight coins: BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, DOGE, ADA, LINK and HYPE.
- Up to 10x leverage on BTC and ETH (i.e. $100 controls a $1,000 position), and 3x on the other six.
- A fee of 0.01% per trade through the end of 2026.
… with the contracts running through Robinhood Derivatives (its in-house futures broker) and Bitstamp - the exchange Robinhood bought for ~$200M in 2025.
Lighter isn't part of it, which stung (plenty of traders had bet it would be).
Why they bet that way:
- Robinhood's venture arm backed Lighter's $68M raise at a $1.5B valuation.
- Robinhood Wallet added Lighter perps on July 1 (for users outside the U.S. only).
- By early September, trades routed from Robinhood made up ~17% of Lighter's daily volume.
But Lighter doesn't have a license from the CFTC to offer perps stateside. Its founder says the application process has started, but nothing's been approved.
LIT, Lighter's token, traded like a U.S. deal was locked in anyway…
It peaked at ~$5.57 on Sept 24 and had already slipped ~16% before Robinhood's announcement, then fell another ~12% after it.
One of the traders caught in that move is our crypto analyst, John Gillen.
He bought LIT on Sept 6 at ~$4.83 and added at ~$4.17 a week later. Robinhood distribution was one of the four pillars of his thesis, and he wrote that when the U.S. opens up to perps, "we're going to see some fireworks."
Yes, the U.S. is opening up to perps - but Robinhood tapped Bitstamp for the role instead.
Which leaves the Lighter thesis looking a lot shakier than it did a week ago...
THE COMPANY BRINGING $400T OF TRADFI ONCHAIN
$400 trillion in stocks, bonds, funds and private credit sits in traditional finance.
Someone has to bring it onchain.
Securitize is already doing it and in July 2026, t hey went public on the NYSE under ticker $SECZ.
Few facts about Securitize:
- $4.6B+ in tokenized assets under management
- Works with BlackRock, Apollo, KKR, Hamilton Lane, BNY and VanEck
- Partnered with the NYSE to build tokenized securities markets
- Tokenized their own stock at IPO
One of the largest tokenized money market products in the world (BlackRock's $BUIDL fund) runs on Securitize rails.
Here's what you need to know about Securitize.
ROBINHOOD JUST ATE LIGHTER'S LUNCH (P2) 🍱
Lighter does still have one Robinhood door open.
Robinhood hasn't said it's ending the Lighter integration inside Robinhood Wallet, which still offers Lighter perps to users outside the U.S.
LIT lost the extra value traders had put on a U.S. deal (for an approval Lighter never asked for).
… and that fits a pattern. As we've mentioned in the past, Robinhood wants to be a financial super app (its product VP describes the goal as one account for stocks, crypto and prediction markets).
Super apps keep the customer and the fees, which means a protocol that depends on a super app for its customers has built-in platform risk.
On top of that, HYPE (Lighter's biggest rival) made Robinhood's list of eight perps.
The thinking was: if Lighter got adopted by Robinhood, LIT could get valued a lot closer to Hyperliquid. Unfortunately, the two have moved in opposite directions…
Hyperliquid is now worth ~20x Lighter.
To John's credit, he laid out this risk himself. Market makers (the firms that keep buy and sell orders on an exchange) move to whoever pays them best, he wrote, so "LIT could win big, fast, and it could also lose big, just as fast."
M0xt had a similar worry back in July, calling Lighter the better product with worse tokenomics (how the token's supply and rewards are set up).
So why’re we airing our dirty laundry in public like this?
Because there’s no such thing as a ‘winners only’ portfolio - and anyone who tells you otherwise is full of it.
The goal is to make consistent, calculated bets, in which more pay off than lose out.
And that’s exactly what you’ll find in John’s portfolio - of the twelve assets in his portfolio, ten are currently in the green, and two are in the red (one of which is Lighter).
P.S. Milk Road PRO members see every one of John's trades (and the reasoning behind them) the moment he posts. Try Milk Road PRO for $1 for 7 days.
CALLING ALL CRYPTO NERDS 🥛
If you wake up and check Bitcoin before the weather, spend too much time on Crypto Twitter, and can actually write, we might have a job for you.
Milk Road is looking for a crypto-focused writer/content creator to join the team.
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
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