🥛 Is crypto cheap... or a trap? 🥴

GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that's the flashlight in crypto's darkest corners.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

✍️ Is crypto cheap... or a trap?
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: This One Catalyst Could Ignite Crypto’s Next Rally.
🍪 Raoul Pal: We may be living through the 1990s all over again...

Securitize is the platform institutions trust to tokenize their assets onchain. See what nine years of regulated tokenization looks like.

Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.

IS CRYPTO CHEAP RIGHT NOW… OR A TRAP? 🧐

Every Monday morning the Milk Road content team gets on a call and argues about what actually matters for the week ahead. As always, you get the notes.

Bitcoin opened around $65,000 today. That's about 48% below where it topped out last October, and the Fear & Greed Index is sitting at 30.

Cheap, in other words.

Source: Alternative

And this week, we’ll start to see whether ‘cheap’ is an opportunity or a warning…

Oil pushed through $100 a barrel on Thursday after Houthi attacks on two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, and the rates market repriced fast.

The Fed meets Wednesday. A week ago traders gave a rate hike roughly a 1-in-10 chance. It's now closer to 4-in-10.

I asked whether the Fed can actually do anything about the price of oil. John's response: not directly.

It can't drill wells or add barrels, so all it can do is make borrowing expensive enough that the economy wants less of everything, oil included.

(A demand tool pointed at a supply problem.)

John’s view: a hike would obviously be bearish, but a hold could see us finish the week strong.

That said - he doesn't think Wednesday is the main event…

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.

IS CRYPTO CHEAP RIGHT NOW… OR A TRAP? (P2) 🧐

The main event in crypto right now isn’t rates, but the CLARITY Act.

(The bill that decides whether your favorite alt counts as a commodity or a security.)

It's passed the House and cleared committee, but it’s still yet to hit the Senate floor.

The Senate leaves for recess on August 10. Miss that window and it likely waits until September, with midterms starting to eat the calendar.

Estimates on passage are all over the place. Prediction markets have it around 38%. Galaxy Research calls it a coin flip. John's point was that the disagreement itself is what's capping the market, because a firm answer in either direction gets people off the fence.

Parts of the market aren't waiting for one.

Ethereum is back near $2,000, up 4.3% today. Aave reclaimed $100, up 9%. Bitcoin is holding above $64k…

Source: TradingView

Money is positioning for passage while sentiment still leans fearful. One of those two is right.

Then Martin turned the conversation around…

Robinhood dropped 6.6% on Friday and reports earnings Wednesday after the close. Coinbase is down roughly 36% this year, sitting near its 52-week low, and reports this Thursday.

Martin's writing our Robinhood update this week and he's not sold on the price even after the recent fall. It trades near 50x earnings, meaning you pay about $50 for every $1 the business currently earns.

(I.e. even with its recent discount, it’s still not screaming ‘bargain’.)

Which only bolstered the view John has been touting for weeks now:

Pure-play crypto blue chips are the cheapest thing on the radar right now, and he'd rather hunt there than pile into an AI trade that's already packed with buyers.

He’s also clear-eyed about how this could go wrong in the near-term.

A hike on Wednesday plus a dead bill by August 10, and crypto could get hurt twice inside a fortnight.

That said, in the medium-to-long term, he thinks we’ll eventually be looking back at these price levels and wishing we’d bought more.

To quote my saint of a mother: “patience is a virtue.”

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

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Raoul Pal: We may be living through the 1990s all over again... if AI does to this decade what the internet did to that one, the same playbook runs again.

CZ: AI is about to become crypto's biggest unlock. When AI agents start making global payments, crypto is the fastest rails to support it.

Lyn Alden: Bitcoin's greatest feature is also its greatest frustration. "The most powerful attribute of Bitcoin is that it's very hard to change."

Get 15% off with code “MILKRO_15.” The European Blockchain Convention is back in Barcelona on September 16-17.**

**this is partner content.