GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that makes wasabi peas taste like breath mints.
Here’s a taste of this week’s menu:
- 🔥 Quality didn’t matter. It does now.
- 🥵 JPMorgan just ended the “is ETH safe for banks” debate.
- 🌶️ Neocloud down, GPU rents up?
Nvidia's GPUs are sold out. B3 Labs found a way to get them to individual buyers anyway. Watch the interview.
HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK 🔥
Quality didn’t matter. It does now 🔄
Jamie Coutts (Chief Crypto Analyst at Real Vision) backtested the top 200 tokens since 2022, and the results are rough:
The highest-quality third (real fees, tight supply, actual payback to holders) is down 50% while Bitcoin is up 82%.
I.e. for four years, doing your homework on alts got you exactly nothing.
This year it flipped, with that same top third up 49% YTD while BTC is down ~6%.
And Jamie’s acting on it, moving from a portfolio that ran 80-85% Bitcoin for years to ~30-35% in L1s and ~20% in DeFi (up from zero).
He admits one year of data isn’t statistically significant, but he’s not waiting around for year two.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
JPMorgan just ended the “is ETH safe for banks” debate 🏦
David Duong (Head of U.S. at Ethereum Institutional) says JPMorgan putting its deposit token on Ethereum mainnet settles things:
The debate over whether public chains are safe for big banks is over.
JPM already pushes ~$7B a day through its private network, and it still picked Ethereum.
So why is ETH stuck around $2,500?
David says price follows usage with a lag, and right now Ethereum is “where everyone’s coming to shop.”
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
Neocloud stocks are tanking while GPU rent goes up 🤨
Melvin (AI Analyst at Milk Road PRO) noticed a strange setup:
CoreWeave, Nebius, IREN and Cipher are down 27-44% since Sept 30, yet the price to rent an H100 jumped ~15% (from $2.71 to $3.12) over the same stretch.
(Stocks down and rent up is not what a dying business looks like.)
That same night, Meta said it can’t launch Muse globally because it doesn’t have enough compute, while spending up to $145B on CapEx this year and posting its first negative free cash flow quarter since at least 2015.
Melvin’s calling Nebius a buy around $172 with a $250-300 target, but he also thinks most neoclouds go bust and only the top of the pile makes the money.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
THE NEW MINING RIG
Early Bitcoin miners made money by owning the machines and getting paid for the work.
AI has its own version now. The machines are Nvidia GPUs, and the customers are AI labs that can't find enough compute.
We sat down with Victoria Hying, co-founder of B3 Labs, to talk:
- How individuals can own a commercial Nvidia node
- The "GPU mortgage": 30% down, with rent from AI labs helping pay off the rest
- How B3 gets GPUs when everyone says they're sold out
- Why she thinks crypto's real AI play is infrastructure, not agents
HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK (P2) 🔥
Your checking account is a tax on being lazy 💸
Sam MacPherson (Co-founder & CEO of Spark, the biggest capital allocator in the Sky ecosystem) just went straight at the banks.
If your cash sits in a checking account paying zero dollars, you’re carrying the bank-run risk and getting paid nothing for it, which he called a tax on people who aren’t nimble with their money.
His bet is that AI agents kill that friction, because once you can tell an agent “here are my accounts, make me more money,” idle cash goes looking for yield onchain (and yes, Spark would very much like to be where it lands).
With GENIUS kicking in this January, he’s on board with calls for stablecoins going from $300B to $3T by 2030.
He’s also talking about Bitcoin breaking $100K by year end.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
Martin thinks AI’s endgame is layoffs, full stop 📉
On the PRO analyst roundtable, Martin Toman (Lead Researcher at Milk Road PRO) argued that the AI trade ultimately comes down to AI replacing humans, because nothing else justifies trillions in CapEx.
Kyle Reidhead (Milk Road PRO analyst) pushed back hard, saying revenue per worker going through the roof is a signal to hire more people, not fewer.
Martin didn’t budge: customers only have so much to spend, so AI-native winners take the business and the losers do the layoffs.
His words were “labor market is gonna suffer, like, 100%.”
His play is to lean in on AI-first teams like Bending Spoons, which he and Vincent bought in the low $30s before Berkshire doubled down and it ran to nearly $60.
🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
Every $BTC to $ETH swap is a taxable event. But inside a crypto IRA, it generally isn't. Here's how Roth and Traditional crypto IRAs work (and the catches).**
China wants the UK's 61,896 BTC: UK police seized the coins, worth about $5.1B, from fraudster Qian Zhimin, who scammed 102,000+ investors.
Germany's Sparkassen gets into Bitcoin: The cautious banks switched on crypto trading in their app Oct 19, with 30-40 more banks set to join each month.
Two big holder groups are at breakeven: Glassnode says treasury companies paid ~$80.2K per BTC and U.S. spot ETF holders ~$81.5K, vs. ~$81.8K now.
**this is partner content.
