GM. This is Milk Road, the daily newsletter that's the pit crew keeping your portfolio race-ready.
Hereโs what weโve got for you today:
- โ๏ธ Saylor vs. Tom Lee.
- ๐๏ธ The Milk Road Show: The One Thing That Could Save Solana w/ Carl Vogen.
- ๐ช Could the SpaceX IPO hurt crypto?
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TOM LEE COPIED SAYLOR'S PLAYBOOK - AND ETH MIGHT MAKE IT WORK BETTER. ๐
Tom Lee's Bitmine (the world's biggest Ethereum treasury company) just priced a new stock offering.
And it's lifted straight from Michael Saylor's homework. ๐
The product is a preferred stock, which is a weird middle child between a regular stock and a bond.
You collect a fixed cash payment on a set schedule (like a bond's interest) and you sit ahead of normal shareholders if the company hits trouble.
The trade-off is you give up the upside that comes with owning the common stock.
Here are the terms Bitmine landed on:
- 9.5% annual dividend, paid out weekly in cash.
- $100 face value, but the shares are selling for $80.
- At that $80 price, buyers are pocketing closer to 11.9% a year.
- It's "perpetual," so no end date - it runs until Bitmine buys it back.
- About $280M raised, trading under the ticker BMNP.
The plan for the cash is simple: buy more ETH, and feed the staking setup that earns yield on the pile Bitmine already holds.
If this rings a bell, it's because Saylorโs Strategy (MSTR) did it first.
They run a near-identical product called Stretch (STRC) - a preferred stock anchored at $100, paying a juicy dividend, with all the proceeds funneled into Bitcoin. ๐
Strategy's been running it since mid-2025, cranking STRC's dividend up to 11.5% along the way.
Bitmineโs BMNP is essentially the same thing, but with ETH instead of BTC.
And that swap changes thingsโฆ
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TOM LEE COPIED SAYLOR'S PLAYBOOK - AND ETH MIGHT MAKE IT WORK BETTER. (P2) ๐
Our lead macro researcher John Gillen got into exactly this in yesterday's debate with Bankless's David Hoffman (worth a watch btw).
The two rarely agreed on anything ETH-related during the podcast, but on this one they landed in the same spot:
Bitcoin just sits there.
It doesn't earn a dime, so to cover those fat dividends, Strategy has to sell more stock, or, in an ugly market, sell some of its actual Bitcoin (which it did last week).
ETH is different, because you can stake it for around 3% a year. That means Bitmine's ~$8.6B stack isn't dead weight - it throws off income that can go straight toward the dividend.
That hands Bitmine options Saylor doesn't have.
It can lean on staking income to help ride out a downturn, or pay holders even more, instead of dumping its stack at the worst possible moment.
And before you say it - yes, I agree: the timing feels super weird.
The market is brutal right now! Bitmine is already sitting on roughly $10B in paper losses, having bought 5.4M ETH near $2,000 while ETH now trades under $1,600.
(All while Strategy's own product is getting stress-tested live.)
On the flip side:
Launching when money is tight and scary is the disciplined way to do it. It's the cheap-money days that get treasury companies over their skis, the same way easy capital blew up Terra/Luna.
That said - the low nโ slow approach will likely cap the upside (at least in the near-term).
$280M is pocket change next to Bitmine's multi-billion-dollar ETH pile - so this raise won't move the price by itself. It's a proof of concept more than it is a needle-mover.
What matters is whether the model holds:
If ETH's staking yield can reliably fund the payments - Bitmine has a self-funding flywheel that Saylor can't build with Bitcoin.
Adding heavily to the case that ETH is the better treasury asset.
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD ๐ช
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Could the SpaceX IPO hurt crypto? Bloomberg's Seyffart thinks it's a real concern.
Speak of the devilโฆ MicroStrategy's unrealized loss on its Bitcoin holdings just rose to a record -$12.7B.
Jim Bianco: The market has been wrong about the Strait of Hormuz for 90 days straight.
DeFi Saver turns Aave v4 into a trading bot for your loans: Stop losses, take profits, and one-click loan migration - we broke down the pros, cons, and fees so you don't have to.*
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