GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that's your lighthouse in a storm of crypto noise.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ Where’d all the BTC buyers go?
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: The Real Reason Bitcoin Keeps Losing Momentum… And Where It Bottoms Next w/ John Gillen.
- 🍪 Another case for DePIN.
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WHERE'D ALL THE BITCOIN BUYERS GO? 😰
It’s Monday, and as always, we're letting you sit in on our weekly team meeting.
It's the same call where we trade rumors, argue over charts, and try to map out the week ahead. This week, one question hung over all of it:
Where did all the Bitcoin buyers go?
It started with Michael Saylor.
Last week he sold $2.5M of Bitcoin. Which, if you've followed him, sounds like heresy. This is the guy who's said to sell a kidney before you sell your Bitcoin.
So why's he selling?
John, who runs our macro market analysis, talked everyone off the ledge. The sale was planned, and the market had been warned prior.
Saylor's company runs a product called Stretch (STRC) that pays holders 11.50% annualized dividend yield. And that product has let him scoop up billions in Bitcoin.
The $2.5M is just him selling a sliver to cover that yield. He's still a massive net buyer.
It's "really bad optics" in a week when Bitcoin's already shaky, John said, but it's not the fire alarm it looks like.
Except it points at something real. When the most committed Bitcoin buyer on the planet is the only name still (net) buying, and even he's trimming - it points to a demand problem.
That's exactly the problem M0xt had laid out on screen.
He built a Bitcoin demand index that tracks three things:
- Strategy’s BTC treasury.
- People holding coins in their own wallets.
- Money moving in and out of Bitcoin ETFs.
Source: Milk Road
The read here?
Barely anyone's home.
Wallet holders are selling, ETF money is weak, and Saylor's the lone green light.
… so where'd the money (demand) go?
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WHERE'D ALL THE BITCOIN BUYERS GO? (P2) 😰
M0xt’s one-word answer to the question of “where'd Bitcoin’s demand go?”...
AI.
Every spare dollar that might've chased Bitcoin is instead piling into Nvidia, data centers, and anything AI touches.
Bitcoin's sitting in the low $70,000s, and John now thinks it gets worse before it gets better. He's watching for it to lose $70,000 and slide toward $65,000.
His reasoning comes in three parts:
1. The stock market has climbed nine or ten weeks straight and is overdue for a pullback, which traders call "mean reversion."
2. Kevin Warsh (the new Fed chair) speaks soon and will likely have to project hawkishness, meaning he'll lean toward keeping interest rates high.
3. The looming SpaceX IPO will likely lead to investors pulling huge sums of cash out of their existing risk positions (including, but not limited to crypto/Bitcoin) to fund their allocations.
From here, the conversation took a sharp turn.
The thing eating crypto's lunch (AI) might be overcooked itself.
I chimed in with some hearsay I found on X:
A month ago the game was "token maxing": burn through as much AI usage as possible.
Some even ran internal leaderboards, so of course staff ran up the tab.
Now the mood's shifting from "spend as many tokens as you can" to "spend as many as you need."
Nobody in the call was labelling this a meltdown - hell, Anthropic reportedly just turned profitable, which is a real milestone for the sector.
But turning all that AI spend into actual profit might be proving harder for some than the hype promised.
So is there anything that flips the script for Bitcoin?
One thing we're watching: a U.S. government Bitcoin Strategic Reserve.
The base case is dull: they formalize the coins they already hold into an official stockpile.
The bull case could be huge: the government actually starts buying.
If that lands, Martin reckons it could turn sentiment around overnight. There's also the CLARITY Act, which could/should show real progress next month.
But for now, we're playing it cautious.
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Another case for DePIN: If agentic AI takes off, every SaaS company suddenly has to buy GPUs to power the tools their customers rely on…
Andreas Steno: This upcoming wave of mega-IPOs could be the signal that this cycle is in its final year.
Niiiiice! How our AI analyst doubled his money - and it's not even his biggest winner!
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