GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that comes in so hot it needs its own sprinkler system.
Hereβs a taste of this weekβs menu:
- π₯ The trade everyone's sleeping on.
- π₯΅ DeFi's $100B stealth asset.
- πΆοΈ The bear in the room.
HOT TAKES OF THE WEEK π₯
Arbitrum is the trade everyone's sleeping on π€
Geoff Kendrick (Global Head of Digital Asset Research at Standard Chartered) came on the Milk Road Show this week to drop one of his biggest calls yet:
A $10 Arbitrum target by 2030 (thatβs roughly a 70x from here!)
His logic: Robinhood Chain alone has already 5x'd Arbitrum's monthly revenue just from tokenized equities, and Arbitrum pockets 10% of all of that at a 90% margin, with zero token buybacks even turned on yet.
He says L2s like Arbitrum trade at a 30x discount to L1s like Ethereum and Solana on a market cap to fees basis, which makes zero sense once more "Robinhoods" start stacking onto the same rails.
Geoff's basically saying the market hasn't clocked yet that tokenized equities are about to turn Arbitrum into a toll booth, and everyone's still staring at Bitcoin.
ποΈ Listen to the full episode here.
DeFi's $100B stealth asset is already live π¦
Greg Feibus (Global Head of Capital Markets at Sky Frontier Foundation) explained exactly why Galaxy just parked $100M of sUSDS on its balance sheet, and his prediction for where this goes is kinda nuts.
Greg's thesis: sUSDS, Sky's yield-bearing stablecoin, is shaping up to be the default "liquidity sleeve" sitting next to every tokenized asset that can't be redeemed same day, like RWAs or private credit, because it can be pulled out instantly when things get messy.
If tokenization scales into the trillions over the next five years like he expects, Greg says sUSDS alone could "easily become a $100B asset."
He's not even counting Sky's own token in that, just the stablecoin doing boring treasury management plumbing in the background.
ποΈ Listen to the full episode here.
The bear in the room nobody wanted to hear from π»
Martin Toman (Lead Researcher at Milk Road) was the lone voice of caution on a panel full of AI bulls, and his argument is hard to wave off.
While Kyle and Melvin were pointing at OpenAI's revenue going from $40B to $70B in a month and a half, Martin kept pointing at airlines, machinery, homebuilders and the Russell 2000, all of which keep grinding lower while the AI trade carries the whole market on its back.
His read: if retail and the rest of the economy aren't holding up, ongoing CapEx alone can't push everything higher forever.
He's sitting on 20% cash right now and said he's actually considering derisking even more into a market still chasing all time highs.
ποΈ Listen to the full episode here.
Zcash's pump might not have legs π
Joe Andrews (Co-founder and CEO of Aztec Labs) came on to launch zk(dot)money and ended up taking a direct shot at crypto's hottest privacy trade.
Zcash has ripped from roughly $450 to over $1,500 this year on pure privacy hype, but Joe doesn't think that holds.
His argument: Zcash's whole pitch is hold the asset, get privacy, which makes it purely speculative since the price only moves if more people buy and hold the token itself.
Aztec, by contrast, earns from actual transaction fees as real applications get built on it, which Joe calls a completely different thesis, one tied to usage instead of narrative.
He didn't hold back either, saying flatly he doesn't think Zcash can sustain another 5 to 6x from here.
ποΈ Listen to the full episode here.
Micron's margins keep exploding and the market still won't care π
Melvin (AI Analyst at Milk Road) walked through why Micron just posted one of the craziest earnings beats of the entire AI cycle and the stock barely budged.
Revenue is up 379% year over year, gross margins have rocketed from 38% to 87% in a handful of quarters, and Micron now has 26 strategic supply agreements locking in over a third of its revenue through 2030.
To the "memory is just cyclical" crowd, Melvin had this to say:
Customers are already asking for deals past 2030, and new fab capacity in Idaho, Japan and Singapore won't meaningfully come online until 2027 through 2030, so this shortage isn't ending soon.
He's holding a $1,400 to $1,500 price target, still 25% to 35% upside from here, and says the real unlock that very few people are pricing in is AI agents, whose token usage is already outpacing humans and needs WAY more memory per task than a person ever did.
In Melvin's view: the stock still has room to run and the market hasn't fully caught up to how different this cycle really is.
ποΈ Listen to the full episode here.
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD πͺ
Securitize is the company quietly powering BlackRock, Apollo and KKR's move onchain. Here's how we broke it down in our article.*
A viral claim says tokenized RWAs grew 483x since Jan 2025, faster than AI. The real story is a lot messier.
Pyth Network's ARR hit $10.14M in August, fueled by first-party price data from exchanges and trading firms.
U.S. 10Y and 30Y bond yields spiked to 5.33% and 5.68% on Thursday, the highest levels since 2002.
*this is sponsored content.
