GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that's more reliable than your dad's love for the S&P.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ Is John sleeping on SOL?
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: How Aztec Network Could Make Ethereum Privacy's Biggest Winner.
- 🍪 Vitalik's 2030 vision doc.
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IS JOHN SLEEPING ON SOLANA? 😴
A Milk Road PRO member put our crypto analyst John on the spot last week:
"I don't think you are bullish enough SOL. Am I correct or misunderstood?"
John’s answer: "I am very bullish on SOL."
He's got a bag. He wants a bigger bag. But he doesn't feel any need to hurry.
(Bullish, but chill about it - even with SOL's summer looking lumpy. 👇)
His reasoning starts with where Solana is right now, which is halfway through a pivot.
Last cycle, Solana grew on retail traders and memecoins… but it's now chasing institutional money and RWAs (real-world assets).
It's taken a while, but John says it's working.
Here's what's backing that up:
- U.S. spot SOL ETFs just pulled in a record $188M in a single week.
- Validators (the operators who run the network) voted in August to make new SOL issuance fall twice as fast (restricting the supply).
- Wallets holding tokenized stocks on Solana just hit a record ~900K.
- Alpenglow went live on testnet last week, an upgrade that cuts finality (the point where a transaction can't be reversed) from ~12.8 seconds to ~150 milliseconds.
And John has been early on SOL before (he bought it at ~$10 in the last bear market).
Which raises the question… why is he now sitting on his hands?
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IS JOHN SLEEPING ON SOLANA? 😴 (P2)
John’s approaching SOL (in its current state) with caution, because the bull case still has holes in it.
Price has been lagging the fundamentals, and network fees shrank hard as memecoin mania cooled off.
Hell - back in May, Hyperliquid briefly out-earned Solana on weekly fees - $12.6M vs $11.8M.
In John's words, HYPE and Robinhood "stole a lot of their retail thunder."
The Robinhood part shows up most clearly in tokenized stocks.
Solana handled ~95% of that trading in Q2… then Robinhood launched its own chain on July 1.
Solana has clawed back to ~35% this month, but Robinhood Chain now sits ahead at ~39%.
On top of that, the upgrades John is most excited about aren't live yet.
Alpenglow has no mainnet date, and the issuance cut still needs a technical rollout before it kicks in.
Then there's the baggage SOL always carries. It tends to swing harder than BTC in both directions, and its old network outages still stick in institutional memory.
Which brings us back to our PRO member's question around John’s bullishness…
He sold a big chunk of his SOL in May at ~$82, planning to buy back lower (he was hoping for ~$60).
SOL bottomed near $66 and ran instead…
… it's up ~46% since that sale.
But John's patience comes from the Milk Road Macro Index (our weekly gauge of whether the economy and markets favor taking risk). It’s still sitting in RISK OFF.
And most of his capital is already working on other bets he likes more right now.
All told - John's view on SOL hasn't budged. Bullish long term, no rush short term, since SOL "hasn't found a catalyst or narrative to pull the energy back into it."
Alpenglow landing on mainnet is the obvious one to watch.
Btw - John isn't the only one on the team with SOL exposure.
Vincent (our lead AI analyst) bought SOL at ~$83 in March, betting AI agents will pay each other in tiny stablecoin payments on a chain built for fast, cheap transactions (aka: Solana).
He's comfortably in profit (up ~45%), and SOL is still ~59% below its $293 all-time high.
If you don’t want to miss Vincent’s next entry, try Milk Road PRO for a buck for 7 days.
ETHEREUM TO $10K? THE SETUP IS FINALLY STARTING TO MAKE SENSE
John just sat down with LG to discuss ETH’s road to $10K.
In this episode, they cover:
- Vitalik’s New Ethereum Vision: From Blockchain to “World Computer”.
- Is Ethereum Finally Ready to Break Its Multi-Year Range?
- Could Ethereum Trigger the Next Altseason?
Watch the full episode here.
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Bullish on AI but can’t pick the winner? Buy the whole theme onchain. 🤖*
Vitalik's 2030 vision doc: the old ETH pitch, faster payments and programmable dollars, is officially dead.
Backpack's next move: CEO Armani Ferrante wants one regulated exchange linking crypto and real U.S. stocks.
Chain valuations are broken: ETH trades at 5,100x TTM revenue, more than any other major chain.
*this is sponsored content.
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