🥛 One week till we bottom? ⏰

GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that's the metronome keeping your crypto brain in rhythm.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

✍️ One week till we bottom?
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: The Third Leap: Why Solana Could Hit New All-Time Highs.
🍪 Tom Lee: Crypto feels dead right now.

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.

WE'VE GOT ONE WEEK TO FIND OUT IF THIS IS THE BOTTOM ⏰

Every Monday the crew gets on a call to talk about what we're watching. And as always, you get the fly-on-the-wall seat.

This week, Martin opened on a grim topic:

Coldcard, the Bitcoin-only hardware wallet, has been getting drained since July 30 - with loss estimates hitting $114M as of this morning.

The cause was a 2021 firmware bug in seed phrase generation, where, instead of pulling randomness from the hardware chip, the device fell back to a software shortcut that spat out guessable numbers.

Meaning attackers could rebuild private keys offline (i.e. cold storage could be cracked from a laptop).

What’s worse is, whoever pulled it off found the flaw about 30 hours before researchers did.

John reckons AI likely found the vulnerability, given the bug was around for five years and was only found/exploited once the likes of Anthropic’s Fable 5 existed.

Source: CoinDesk

Then we moved to Japan (topically, not physically).

The Treasury bought yen last week alongside the Japanese authorities (the first coordinated intervention of its kind since 2011) after the yen hit four-decade lows against the dollar.

That stoked worries around the carry trade - i.e. the practice of borrowing yen at low rates and parking the money in higher-yielding assets elsewhere.

When the yen strengthens those rates rise, and that money gets called home - meaning investors have to sell assets to pay off their loans.

Too much selling and global markets can take a hit.

In John's words “it’s generally not bullish.”

Though he doesn't think much leverage is left in crypto to unwind, so forced selling isn't the real threat. Momentum is. If tech and global risk bleed, we bleed too.

All of which argues for sitting on your hands.

That is, unless we get a very specific surprise this week…

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.

WE'VE GOT ONE WEEK TO FIND OUT IF THIS IS THE BOTTOM (P2) ⏰

The potential surprise this week lies in the CLARITY Act - the bill that would settle how crypto is regulated in the U.S…

It cleared the House in July 2025 and has been stuck in the Senate ever since.

As of this morning, there's no vote on the Senate's Monday schedule, the chamber leaves for recess on Aug 10, and getting past a filibuster takes 60 votes (with Republicans holding 53 seats).

So it's this week, or it's cooked until 2027.

Nobody's pricing it to pass, which is exactly why John's watching it. If it clears and the market doesn't immediately sell the news, he's treating Bitcoin as bottomed.

Source: Polymarket

After that, the only thing pushing us lower is apathy - and that shapes John’s bids: anything under $60K on Bitcoin and he buys without thinking.

So far he’s been filled twice at $60K and once at $58K, with another bid resting at $55K.

He's not buying the $30K–$40K calls doing the rounds either:

"Who's holding Bitcoin now who's going to be like, you know what, f*** it, time to sell?"

The weak hands left ages ago.

But John’s not ready to call the bottom - and he's holding capital back from alts on purpose, because a potential $55K Bitcoin would mean better entries on everything else.

When he does deploy, it goes into five or six names (not fifteen).

Here’s what he’s looking at outside of Bitcoin:

Solana he wants under $70, ideally closer to $60.
Chainlink he'd add on weakness without much hesitation.
Ethereum he's holding rather than adding, because the bag's already ‘fat and happy.’
Sky he's buying on dips, while they run reduced buybacks to build their cash reserves.

So we're watching two things this week:

The Senate calendar, and Polymarket odds on the bill.

If anyone gets wind of a deal early, prediction markets will likely move before the vote.

Long story longer:

We've been chopping sideways for a month.

This week decides whether we keep chopping.

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Raoul Pal: The #1 law of the universe is to maximize intelligence per unit of energy. Every observable process flows from this single master gradient.

Bitwise: Can too much staking actually hurt a network's security?

Tom Lee: Crypto feels dead right now - that's exactly what a bottom looks like. "Price drives sentiment."

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