🥛 The two things holding back the crypto market 🪙

GM. This is Milk Road, the newsletter that doesn’t take a day off.

Here’s what we’ve got for you today:

✍️ What we’re watching this week.
🎙️ The Milk Road Show: The Real Reason Ethereum Keeps Losing Momentum w/ Haseeb Qureshi.
🍪 Are alts making a comeback?

Arc is an open Layer-1 blockchain built for real-world financial applications. Public testnet is live, App Kits are here, and mainnet is getting closer. Start building on Arc.

Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by Coingecko.

WHAT WE’RE WATCHING THIS WEEK 📅

Every Monday morning, the Milk Road team gets on a call and argues about what's happening in markets.

And today, it was a showdown between John and Martin.

The U.S.-Iran deal was back in the headlines over the weekend. Trump says an agreement will be coming very soon while Iran says a deal is “not imminent.”

Source: @KobeissiLetter

Source: @Polymarket

So. The usual.

We’ve seen this exact movie play out about seven times now:

Trump signals progress.
Iran pushes back.
Oil dips.
Crypto and stocks tick up.
Nothing gets signed.
Rinse & repeat.

But here’s why John is keeping a close eye on the deal:

A deal means energy starts flowing again → Lower oil prices → Inflation cools → The Fed has more room to cut rates → More liquidity flows into risk assets like crypto → Number go up.

But Martin has a more critical view on Trump:

"Whatever he says, it's just not true. Like, ever."

His frustration isn't really about Iran, it's about the broader pattern. He thinks this uncertainty around Trump’s tweets makes it nearly impossible to trade with any conviction right now. 👇

"I think we are in times where it's really hard to read the market and have high confidence about where it's going to be in 30 or 90 days."

Either way, they both agree that a U.S.-Iran deal will be a bullish catalyst for the market. There’s just no clarity on when it’s actually going to come.

GET READY FOR ARC MAINNET. START BUILDING NOW.

Building real financial apps on most chains still means dealing with volatile gas fees, “probably final” transactions, and developer tooling stitched together by duct tape.

Arc is an open Layer-1 designed by Circle to fix that.

Public testnet is live, Arc App Kits and Circle Agent Stack are here, and builders can start testing stablecoin-native workflows before mainnet — with USDC-denominated fees, sub-second deterministic finality, opt-in privacy, and native Circle-stack integration across USDC, CCTP, Gateway, Wallets, and developer services.

Start building now.

👉 Start building on Arc

WHAT WE’RE WATCHING THIS WEEK (P2) 📅

The next thing they argued about on the call was Ethereum. Specifically, the Ethereum Foundation (EF).

Lately, several high-profile contributors (like Carl Beek & Julian Ma) have left the Ethereum Foundation.

Here’s what John thought about this:

He pointed to a post Vitalik Buterin put out explaining his thinking.

Vitalik wants the Foundation to play a smaller and less central role. The goal is to spread decision-making across many independent teams instead of concentrating it in one organization.

And despite the criticism lately, Ethereum’s fundamentals still look strong:

Network usage is at all-time highs.
Fees are near all-time lows.

But Martin’s concern is more institutional:

When a big bank or asset manager is doing due diligence on Ethereum before allocating serious capital, they want to see a stable & credible team. Names they recognize. Researchers with track records.

"If the best people are leaving, it's not sending a good message, whatever the reason."

His view: you scale down the central organization after the product is battle-tested and mature. Not while you're still building.

Despite all the back and forth, here’s one thing they both did agree on: Bitcoin.

BTC dipped to around $74K at one point last week before bouncing back to the high 70s. Now it's sitting around $77K.

The key number to watch is $75K. If that holds, we're fine. If it breaks on another test, the next level down is $70K.