GM. This is Milk Road, the crypto newsletter that gives you more “I knew it” moments than a season of Love Island.
Here’s what we’ve got for you today:
- ✍️ Wall St picked AVAX. Why isn’t it pumping?
- 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Bitcoin Just Hit a 3-Month Low While Wall Street Goes All-In on Crypto.
- 🍪 Pendle is now DeFi's top tokenized stock venue.
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Prices as of 2:00 p.m. ET. Powered by CoinGecko.
WALL STREET PICKED AVALANCHE… SO WHY ISN'T AVAX PUMPING? 🏔️
On Monday, Ava Labs announced that the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) had picked Avalanche to settle trades on its planned 24/7 tokenized stock platform.
Here's how the setup works:
An NYSE affiliate is building an alternative trading system where tokenized stocks can trade around the clock.
NYSE's own engine still matches buyers and sellers, then Avalanche records and settles the trades for the clearing firm (the middleman that makes sure both sides get what they're owed).
It still needs regulators to sign off, and there's no launch date yet - but AVAX traders didn't wait around for the details…
The token ran from ~$7.82 to ~$9.10 on Monday (a ~16% jump), then slid back toward ~$8.10 over the next day.
So even after landing the NYSE, AVAX is still trading below where it sat two weeks ago: 👇
The reason for the sluggish price comes from a specific detail in the announcement.
The NYSE platform will run on its own dedicated Avalanche chain, separate from the C-Chain (Avalanche's main public network, where most of the activity and AVAX fees happen).
Two days before the news, John (our crypto analyst) broke down exactly this kind of setup for PRO members.
His view is that Avalanche's network can keep winning big customers while the AVAX token barely benefits.
As he put it, the institutional headlines make Avalanche look unstoppable, while the AVAX chart "looks like a ghost town."
So how does the NYSE build on Avalanche without doing much for AVAX?
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WALL STREET PICKED AVALANCHE… SO WHY ISN'T AVAX PUMPING? (P2) 🏔️
It comes down to how Avalanche charges for dedicated chains (it calls them L1s), which is the kind of setup the NYSE is using.
Before Avalanche's Etna upgrade in December 2024, every validator on one of these chains had to lock up 2,000 AVAX.
Etna scrapped that rule, and each validator now pays ~1.33 AVAX a month instead, which gets permanently removed from supply.
That's * counts fingers * ~$11 a month at today's price.
These chains can also charge their own transaction fees in a different token, a stablecoin or nothing at all, so most of what happens on them never touches AVAX.
As of Nov 5, there were 578 paid validator seats across 71 of these chains, which works out to ~9,200 AVAX burned a year (~$78K).
And that fee only starts climbing once the network passes 10,000 validators: 👇
Source: Avalanche Glacier API via CoinPaprika (Nov 5, 2026); Avalanche docs (ACP-77)
John compares it to a software company that cut its prices by 99% to win customers.
Great for growth, but each new customer sends very little back to AVAX.
Hyperliquid shows what the other model looks like.
Less than two weeks before the Avalanche news, ICE (NYSE's parent company) struck a deal to build a U.S. perps market (bets on future prices with no expiry date) on Hyperliquid's tech.
Anyone launching their own markets on Hyperliquid (which is how ICE's market would work) has to lock up 500,000 HYPE (~$36M at today's price), and 99% of the protocol's cut of trading fees goes toward buying HYPE back.
(Two very different deals.)
Avalanche still has things going for it though - like the ~$1.4B in tokenized real-world assets on the network, and the fact that Charles Schwab now offers AVAX trading for its U.S. clients.
If that money starts flowing into the C-Chain, where every transaction burns AVAX, the token can finally start getting paid.
John's watching two things:
- Validator seats climbing toward 10,000, where the fee starts rising.
- Real-world-asset money showing up in C-Chain DeFi (the lending and trading apps on Avalanche's public network).
Until then, his verdict is "not bearish, but not bullish on AVAX... yet."
He'd rather let Avalanche prove the model pays AVAX holders than buy ahead of it.
Btw - John's AVAX breakdown landed in PRO two days before the NYSE news hit the Wall Street Journal. If you want his calls before the headlines, try Milk Road PRO for $1 for 7 days.
WALL STREET BUILDS, CRYPTO BLEEDS
The NYSE just picked Avalanche to settle its tokenized stocks. The same week, Bitcoin hit its lowest level since August.
Kyle (our Head of Research) and M0xt (our Lead Analyst) joined John to make sense of it all.
Here's what we covered:
- Whether companies like Securitize and Galaxy are a better bet than AVAX, ETH and SOL.
- A closer look at why AVAX barely moved after NYSE chose its tech.
- Where Bitcoin needs to be before Kyle and Martin spend their last bit of cash.
👉 Watch the full episode now.
YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts
BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪
Bitcoin miners made money by owning the machines. What if you could do the same with AI? B3 Labs lets investors own Nvidia GPUs and get paid when AI labs use the compute.*
Pendle is now DeFi's top tokenized stock venue: It holds $60M of the $323M in DeFi tokenized-stock TVL, though its RWA markets total $789M.
Securitize is buying River One: The warehouse-financing shop links stablecoin capital to traditional lending. Terms are undisclosed, with close expected in Q4.
Base cuts block time to 200ms: Denim is live on mainnet, down from 2 seconds to five full blocks a second, and Flashblocks is retired.
*this is sponsored content.
