GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that makes wasabi taste like a cucumber.
Hereβs a taste of this weekβs menu:
- π₯ SpaceX is basically a $2T memecoin.
- π₯΅ Deflation is coming and the Fed is going to fold.
- πΆοΈ Saylor is both the floor and the ceiling for Bitcoin.
Squid now powers instant cross-chain access for RLUSD across XRPL, Ethereum, Base, Optimism and beyond. Stop bridging. Start Squidding.
HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK π₯
SpaceX is basically a $2T memecoin π
Our Head of Research, Kyle Reidhead, dropped a contrarian SpaceX take on this week's AI roundtable:
It's trading like a giant memecoin and it's probably about to become the most valuable company in the world, even though it shouldn't be.
His reasoning is all about the float - only 4.2% of SpaceX shares can actually trade right now, so it doesn't take $2T of fresh money to double it, just a few billion of retail FOMO running into almost no supply.
Kyle figures it could rip past $5T and grab the crown for a minute, then roll over once the lockups expire and insiders can finally sell.
Same setup as Circle last year, which ran from $35 to $600 on the exact same low-float dynamic.
ποΈ Listen to the full episode here.
Deflation is coming and the Fed is going to fold π
Mel Mattison (a veteran investor and fintech executive with 20-plus years in financial services) thinks we're about to print month-over-month deflation.
With oil collapsing from over $120 to around $75 and gas dipping under $4 a gallon, plus the CPI's notoriously soft summer seasonal adjustments, Mel sees negative headline prints landing in the August and September data.
His read is that once Trump is posting "we have deflation" on Truth Social, it gets very hard for Kevin Warsh and the Fed board to keep pricing in a hike, so the cuts come by year-end.
(Mel loaded up prediction-market bets on rate cuts last week and they're already up 50%.)
ποΈ Listen to the full episode here.
Saylor is both the floor and the ceiling for Bitcoin π§±
Hassan Basiri (Head of Trading Strategy at FalconX) believes Michael Saylor is both the floor under Bitcoin and the ceiling over it.
Hassan thinks the market has to test him - the same way pegs and liquidation levels always get tested - by dragging Bitcoin toward $55K until Saylor finally comes out and admits he sold a billion or two of BTC to shore up reserves and re-peg Stretch.
Right now nobody wants to step in front of what everyone assumes is inevitable, so buyers are frozen and the price keeps leaking.
Once Saylor rips that band-aid off, Hassan says the overhang clears and the market resolves higher.
His advice in the meantime: buy when everyone says it's dead, sell when it's on MSNBC.
ποΈ Listen to the full episode here.
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HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK (P2) π₯
The most painful move from here is up π
Matt Crosby (analyst at Bitcoin Magazine Pro) came armed with charts and a contrarian gut punch: with the market this furious at Bitcoin, the most painful scenario is more upside.
Matt points out that supply-in-loss just crossed the 50% threshold, the exact zone that's marked the bottom in every prior bear cycle, while U.S. consumer sentiment just hit its lowest reading in the 73 years of available data.
Matt says people screaming they βcan't wait for Bitcoin to hit $50K, so it can dieβ is not what tops are made of.
Matt's putting his money where his mouth is, DCAing every single day, sitting on a sub-$65K average.
His year-end base case for Bitcoin is still right around $100K.
ποΈ Listen to the full episode here.
Onchain perps markets out-priced Goldman Sachs π
John Gillen (Milk Road macro analyst and host) had the most crypto-pilled SpaceX take of the week:
The perps markets priced the IPO better than Wall Street did.
John points out that perpetual futures had SpaceX pegged at roughly $175 before it ever went live, which is almost exactly where it was trading at the time of recording - while the "sharp" analysts were saying they'd only get interested down at $90.
His takeaway is that decentralized perps exchanges are pulling off faster, more accurate price discovery than the underwriting desks at Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan.
He expects the next mega-IPOs, Anthropic and OpenAI, to run the same script, with liquidity parking before the print and flooding back into risk assets, crypto included, right after.
ποΈ Listen to the full episode here.
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD πͺ
Your Bitcoin can hand you cash without selling a single sat β That's Ledn's whole pitch, and our full review breaks down everything you need to know about the platform.
Saylor: The Strategy trolls are basically a side effect of running the most transparent Bitcoin treasury operation.
Matt Crosby: We just saw the 7th biggest rotation OUT of risk-on crypto assets ever recorded.
Looong road ahead: What Elon Musk needs to achieve to access his SpaceX compensation package is genuinely insane!
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.
Stop bridging. Start Squidding.
MILKY MEMES π€£
