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GM. This is Milk Road, the newsletter that outperforms (like a fair launch token in a bull run!).

Here’s what we got for you today:

• ✍️ The last week’s top performers

• ✍️ What to look out for this week

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Why AI Agents Are Crypto’s Biggest Opportunity (And How to Invest) w/s4mmy 

• 🍪 Ethena is rolling out a new stablecoin

TOP PERFORMERS OVER THE LAST WEEK 🚀

Another week, another round of face melting gains!

Here are five top performers from the crypto top 100 (aka: the best of the best of the best) over the last 7 days. 👇

1/ Hyperliquid

Don’t know what Hyperliquid is about? Say no more, Kamo’s got you:

Hyperliquid just pulled off a rare stunt – they ran an airdrop that didn’t infuriate everyone.

Here’s how they did it:

• Their $HYPE token launched with a fully diluted market cap of ~$4.2B (pretty darn small given the size of their trading platform)

• This incentivized airdrop receivers to hold their tokens (reducing sell pressure)

• Outside traders then bought up the token, pushing the price up ~6x since its launch two weeks ago.

2/ Virtuals 

We wrote about Virtuals (the ‘build your own AI agent’ platform) just over two weeks ago.

Since then its price has checks notes doubled!

While its seven day performance of +109% is impressive, it’s $VIRTUAL’s three month chart that really takes the cake.

This thing has damn near 100x’d since late September!

3/ Aave

What’s the secret to Aave’s 40% gain over the last seven days?

Simple: they have an awesome product that people are using more and more. 👇

Oh, that and the incoming president’s DeFi platform (World Liberty Financial) recently added it to its balance sheet.

4/ Ondo and Ethena

Speaking of World Liberty Financial – Ondo (a tokenized securities platform) and Ethena (the decentralized stablecoin protocol) were just added to the very same balance sheet. 

The result? A nice little 20%+ bump over the last 7 days (👇) Not too shabby for a couple of multi-billion dollar assets!

Alright, that’s the lot of them!

WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR THIS WEEK 📅

We just entered ‘personal assistant mode’ and compiled all the important calendar events for your week!

Here’s everything you need to keep your eye on. 👇

1/ Macro 📊

• November Retail Sales data - Tuesday - are consumers still buying stuff? A healthy retail sector is often a reflection of a healthy economy.

• Fed Interest Rate Decision - Wednesday - is Jerome Powell going to bless markets with another rate cut?

• Q3 2024 GDP Data - Thursday - did the US economy grow/retract in the third quarter? If so, by how much?

Tuesday and Thursday’s macro events are all well and good – but let’s be honest:

The market is only going to really focus on Wednesday’s rate cut announcement.

Good news for investors: the current data is showing we have a 99.1% chance of a 25bps rate cut!

2/ Token unlocks 🔓

If you’re an Arbitrum insider, you’re about to get paid baaaaby! Roughly $96M worth of tokens are about to be unlocked for the Arb team and its early investors. 👇

3/ Pudgy Penguin’s $PENGU launch

The Pudgy Penguins ecosystem token, $PENGU is set to launch on the Solana blockchain tomorrow (Tuesday, December 17th) – and Crypto Twitter won’t shut up about it!

Here’s how the token supply is being divided up:

“Hey Siri, remind me to check my wallets tomorrow”

4/ Milk Road PRO AMA

“Hey Siri, me again – I’ve got another reminder for you…”

When our lead PRO researchers, Kyle and Martin, sit down together it’s as if Voltron is forming.

(If Voltron was a super nerd).

If you’re a PRO member – you’re going to want to mark this one in your calendar! Alpha is inevitable.

5/ The Milk Road Awards 

The winners of the second annual Milk Road Awards will be announced this Friday!

There are 9 categories in total, including flagships like this:

And more importantly, fun ones like this:

Ready to cast your vote? Click below to make your voice heard. 👇

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Forta and Conduit join forces to bring security to rollups, enabling 1-click integration for clients. You never truly feel safe in crypto but news like this is a step in the right direction.* 

MicroStrategy buys Bitcoin again. They just keep buying again and again and again. They’ve now purchased a total of $27.1B of Bitcoin. Madness.

Ethena is rolling out a new stablecoin. This time, they’re partnering with Blackrock to launch USDtb.

Bitcoin hit a new ATH of $106,000 today. We’re now 150% up from the start of the year. Our friends over at DL news break down the 3 main drivers behind this price surge. - DL News

We’re growing our team! We have 5 open positions across Milk Road and Impact3 (our parent company). Think you’ve got what it takes? Click above to explore the roles and apply.

DeFi Saver wraps all your DeFi positions into a single dashboard. Got positions in Aave? Maker? Compound? Managing them is a pain, but DeFi Saver brings everything under one roof.

* 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.