Today's edition is brought to you by Choice -- the #1 Rated Retirement App that lets you buy bitcoin (& other digital assets) in your IRA.

GM. This is Milk Road, your personal crypto genie. Rub the virtual lamp and let us grant you three wishes: wealth, knowledge, and a Lamborghini.

It’s Thirsty Thursday, gang. Let’s get it:

• BTC surges to $30K+ w/ TradFi Takeover 📈

• Tools of the week 🔨

• Trademark Thursday: Here comes Mastercard 📝

• 3AC founders launched a VC fund 🍪

CRYPTO PRICES SURGE W/ TRADFI TAKEOVER 📈 

There I was on Wednesday morning. Coffee was hitting, my cat hadn’t yacked on the rug (yet).

Then all of a sudden I saw a light. It was green and blinding - I had no idea where it was coming from…

Until I checked crypto prices. The whole thing was lit up like a Christmas tree.

Why? The TradFi giants have entered the ring.

Plus, Jerome Powell (Federal Reserve chairman) said yesterday that Bitcoin/crypto “appears to have some staying power. “ He also said the Fed sees “stablecoins as a form of money.”

Investors are apparently PUMPED.

Here are the big winners:

• BTC is up 8%. The OG cryptocurrency cracked $30K for the first time since April.

• ETH is up 5.6%.

• Litecoin (LTC) is up 17% since its lowest point in June.

• Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is up 25%.

Each of these tokens is available on the new EDX market and has avoided the wrath of the SEC. (AKA they haven’t been named as securities, for now.)

It’s like when you’re on the fence about going to that new restaurant. But then the foodie of the friend group gives it their stamp of approval. 💯

Institutional investor involvement + “safe” tokens = more trust from retail investors to buy.

Plus, a Dark Horse has emerged: GBTC. This is Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust.

It lets people gain exposure to Bitcoin without the hassle/risk of buying it. GBTC has been in the shitter for a while now, partly because the company sued the SEC. The agency rejected its Bitcoin ETF application.

But BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF proposal is giving GBTC some LIFE. GBTC’s daily trading volume has gone from $16.1M on June 14 —> $172M as of yesterday.

The jury’s still out on how centralized finance giants getting in on crypto will play out in the long run. But at the moment… we’ll be thawing our good steaks tonight. 🥩

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TOOLS OF THE WEEK 🔨

Crypto tools are like cheat codes in a video game. If you use the right ones, the game can go from hard → easy.

And lucky for you, the Milk Man always finds a way to cheat the system. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Whether it’s 8th-grade biology tests, video games (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A), or crypto - he’ll always find a way to make things easier.

Here are two cool tools that the Milk Man recently came across:

1/ ETHERSCAN CODE READER

Etherscan is an Ethereum blockchain explorer.

It’s like a search engine for Ethereum that has info on everything from the latest transactions to new smart contracts being launched.

It just dropped a new AI-powered tool called Code Reader.

The new tool lets you “chat” with any smart contract to better understand it. It can also give you valuable info on whether a smart contract is legit or not (i.e. if it's a rug pull.)

This is cool because although the Milk Man is smart, handsome, and funny, he has a big weakness: reading smart contracts. It’s his Achilles’ Heel.

This new tool puts the game in “easy mode.” *phew*

2/ DEFILLAMA CHATGPT PLUGIN

DefiLlama is a decentralized finance (DeFi) analytics platform. It has a bunch of info on different blockchains, tokens, upcoming airdrops, etc.

It just dropped a new DefiLlama ChatGPT plugin.

It lets you easily get the info you want without having to stare at multiple graphs and charts to get it. All you gotta do is ask ChatGPT.

Check out the demo below.

(P.S. - big shoutout to Kofi, a Milk Road friend and crypto data wizard, for creating it.)

QUESTION OF THE DAY:

TRADEMARK THURSDAY 📝

Welcome back to another TradeMark Thursday, Roaders. Where we talk about cool Web3 trademarks that companies are filing.

Today we’re just talking about one though: Mastercard.

The payments giant filed a patent to create software for crypto & blockchain transactions.

Now, these trademark applications aren’t uncommon. But this one is noteworthy because of the timing…

It’s part of the traditional finance wave that’s crashing over crypto right now (it was filed last week).

The process for approval takes a bit. But a 57-year-old company with $38B in AUM? That people have trusted for decades? Wanting to make trading crypto easier for folks?

Sign us up.

MILK & COOKIES 🍪

Three Arrow Capital founders Kyle Davies and Su Zhu just launched a new VC fund. Davies tweeted yesterday, “3AC Capital is dead, long live 3AC Ventures.”

There’s a new U.S. crypto crime task force that includes the Postal Inspection Service. It’ll investigate how criminals in Arizona use crypto.

There are more than 420M people around the world using crypto, per one data set. That’s 4.2% of the globe’s population.

MILKY MEMES 🤣

HIT THE INBOX OF 250K+ CRYPTO INVESTORS

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.