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Here’s what we got for you today:

• ✍️ The 5 areas that drive crypto markets

• ✍️ Don’t fall for the 100x trap 

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Can Bitcoin Help You Escape the Global Debt Crisis w/ Tyler Neville

• 🍪 VanEck launches $30M venture fund for early-stage startups

THE 5 AREAS THAT DRIVE CRYPTO MARKETS 📈

Our Aunt Mary makes family members sign an NDA if they want her cake recipe.

(Not a joke).

But the Milk Man? The Milk Man ain’t like Mary.

We share our recipes freely, and totally unprompted.

Today we’re talking about the most important recipe of all – the five areas that drive crypto markets:

1. Innovation

2. Regulation

3. Macro 

4. Narratives

5. Wild Cards

Alright, enough dilly-dallying – let’s break these suckers down as simply as humanly possible…

1/ Innovation

Innovation = new use cases = new users = new token holders and/or more transactions = increased demand (plus more tokens burnt across blockchains like Ethereum and Solana etc.) = number go up over time.

🔴 Note: the inverse is also true. Lack of innovation can hurt markets.

2/ Regulation

Better regulation = less risk for users & institutions = more investment / funding = more use cases (see above) = more users = number go up.

🔴 Note: the inverse is also true. Poor regulation can be a gut punch to markets (looking at you, Gary).

3/ Macro

To put it simply: when people have more money, they can invest more of it into markets.

Fresh cash entering the market = number go up.

…ok, but how does fresh cash find its way into the market en masse?

The two biggest factors are:

• Rate cuts 

• Quantitative easing (QE if ya nasty)

Rate cuts = lower loan/credit repayments = more money in everyone's pockets / incentive for folks to take out loans and get-to-spending = a healthy economy = number go up

QE = central banks purchasing shares in major financial institutions = financial institutions' stock going up = the rest of the market following suit over time (number go up)

🔴 Note: the inverse is also true. A lack of liquidity can cause markets to stagnate and stumble.

4/ Narratives

All that fresh cash we were just talking about? It flows to where the attention is.

If certain tokens or use cases gain attention in the world via new narratives, money tends to flow in their direction (often regardless of fundamental innovation).

5/ Wild Cards (War, Currency Failures, Hacks, and Scams)

It’s about to get rough – brace yourselves…ready? Ok, let’s go.

War (on a large enough scale) has a habit of spooking market players into selling out of risk assets, including – but not limited to: crypto.

(Look at what happened last week with the news surrounding Iran/Israel).

Currency failures also have the potential to spook markets, but they tend to push investors towards scarce assets like (you guessed it): Bitcoin.

Meanwhile – failures, hacks, and scams can deter new users from entering the market, force harmful regulation and spin bad narratives.

No. Bueno.

Ok, so those are ingredients…but what's the actual ‘number go up’ recipe?

Think of new innovation, clear regulation, strong narratives, an increase in global peace, and a decrease in failures, hacks, and scams across the crypto space as a solid base for our crypto cake.

But the ingredient that makes it all work – the self raising flour (if you’ll allow us to truly beat this analogy to death) – is an increase in global liquidity (aka: cash floating around the system).

Global liquidity rises and falls over a four year period – helping to push asset prices up and down in the process.

The best part of all this?

Between now and September 2025, global liquidity is set to increase further:

(It’s beautiful, no? 🥲)

Is it a guarantee that ‘number will go up’? No. 

But our key ingredient is being delivered, the oven is preheated, and despite the recent decrease in global peace & murky regulatory environment – the market is still looking like it’s ready to cook.

It’s an exciting time to be in crypto!

DON’T FALL FOR THE 100X TRAP 🪤

Holy sh*t, it finally happened!

We just hit 100x on our Shmoopy Dooper ($SHMOOP) investment!

(The one we mentioned last month in our private Telegram chat).

If you’ve never heard of $SHMOOP, or our private Telegram group – that’s cause neither of them exist. We just made them up. 

But the announcement itself might feel familiar to you if you’ve ever spent more than two minutes on Crypto Twitter.

This kind of “[TOKEN YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF] just 100x’d, and I [AN ACCOUNT YOU’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE] called it” post is what we refer to internally as ‘exit liquidity farming.’ 

If you’re unfamiliar with the grift, here’s how it works:

• A small group of insiders will own the majority of a project’s tokens

• They’ll give a chunk of the supply to a handful of large Twitter accounts

• Collectively, they’ll hype the token/project up as ‘the next 100x opportunity’

• Retail buyers will come in and purchase the insiders’ tokens at inflated prices

Now, here’s what to look out for if you want to avoid being someone else’s exit liquidity:

1. Beware of influencers shilling the next 100x token – real investors don’t do that.

2. If someone’s actually making a ‘quick’ 10-100x, that’s a big red flag – you’re likely too late now to share in that same success.

3. All hype + no fundamentals = memecoin – memecoins can be fun, but they’re essentially lottery tickets, not investments (something to be aware of). 

And before you start yelling “well if that ain’t the pot calling the kettle black” at your computer screen – yeah, we have a paid private Discord channel and research newsletter…

But we only look at proven tokens/projects with real fundamentals – and our research team is painfully impartial.

(Seriously, you ask our head of research how his day is going and he’ll respond “Good. Or maybe bad. We’ll have to see how it pans out”).

If you’re in the market for unbiased research – join Milk Road PRO.

HOW TO OUTPACE CURRENCY DEBASEMENT 🏃‍♂️‍

The debt clock keeps ticking higher (~$100k every couple seconds), debasing the US Dollar’s value at every step…

So how do we protect our hard earned money?

On today’s episode of The Milk Road Show, we shed light on the world of sovereign debt with Tyler Neville, head of macro analysis at Corriente Advisors.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How governments manage massive debt loads.

• Tyler's insights on navigating the uncertain financial landscape.

• Why the current macro environment might be setting the stage for a boom in alternative investments.

Click below to listen now! 👇

YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Blockscout is your next-level block explorer. Multi-chain, highly configurable, and open-source, this essential DeFi tool gives access to all chain data and dApp functionalities. *

VanEck has launched a $30 million venture fund, VanEck Ventures, to invest in early-stage fintech, crypto, and AI startups. The fund aims to support projects focusing on tokenized assets, stablecoin-based payments, and next-gen financial marketplaces.

New HBO Documentary claims Peter Todd is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. Todd denies this claim both in the film and on twitter.

The US spot Bitcoin ETFs recently experienced $18.6 million in net outflows. Fidelity’s FBTC and Grayscales’s GBTC accounted for the majority of the withdrawals.

Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest sold $36 million worth of Robinhood stock. Despite the sale, ARK still holds a significant position in Robinhood and has larger investments in Coinbase.

* this is sponsored content

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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.