🥛 The old DAT trade is dead 💀

GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that's your compass in the crypto wilderness.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

✍️ The old DAT trade is dead.
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Tether Co-Founder on Who Really Wins the Crypto War.
🍪 Morgan Stanley's bottom-up hyperscaler compute model.

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.

THE OLD DAT TRADE IS DEAD 🪦

ETH is 68% off its peak.

SBET is down 88% from its high.

And judging by the price action, the market has already written the eulogy for DATs (Digital Asset Treasury companies).

Which is why one of our PRO members put the question straight to our crypto analyst John Gillen this week:

Are SBET and BMNR lost causes?

Source: TradingView

John's answer: no.

But the trade most people think they're making no longer exists.

The old DAT playbook was pretty straightforward:

Buy the stock at a discount to the crypto on its balance sheet, wait for the gap to close, collect.

I.e. If a company holds $1B of crypto and the market values the whole thing at $700M, you're buying dollar bills for 70 cents.

But over time, the spot ETFs kinda broke the machine.

When anyone can get 1:1 exposure with almost zero drag, nobody pays a premium for a corporate wrapper.

The discount stopped being a mispricing that you could harvest, and became the market's fee for taking on extra risk.

Which risks, exactly?

Three of them...

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.

THE OLD DAT TRADE IS DEAD (P2) 🪦

What that DAT discount is actually pricing in:

1. Dilution: Sharplink just ran a $75M registered direct offering (selling new shares straight to investors) and used part of it to buy 10,000 ETH at ~$1,611. Using equity as a printing press keeps the stock suppressed against the coins it holds.

2. Operational drag: You're buying management overhead and staking execution risk along with the tokens.

3. Index beta: BMNR joined the Russell 1000 on June 26. These names now move with macro equity flows, on top of whatever crypto is doing.

But while the market was busy pricing in the risks, these companies turned into something else entirely.

Bitmine now holds 5.77M ETH. That's 4.8% of the entire supply, projected to generate ~$242M a year in staking revenue through its MAVAN validator network.

Sharplink holds 886,725 ETH, has repurchased over 4M of its own shares since August, and just made its first ETH buy in eight months.

And both co-funded Ethlabs (a nonprofit Ethereum R&D lab) alongside Joe Lubin to pull institutional capital onchain.