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GM. This is Milk Road. Our love language is gift-giving (and they come in the form of crypto insights).

Here’s what we got for you today:

• ✍️ Largest crypto acquisition ever!

• ✍️ What’s next for institutional crypto investors

• 🥛 PRO “Where are we in the cycle?” indicators

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Coinbase’s Head of Strategy Explains Why Institutional Investors Are Going All-In on Crypto

• 🍪 Trump spoke at Blockworks' Digital Asset Summit!

THE LARGEST CRYPTO ACQUISITION EVER! 💰

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) sound boring as hell on paper…

But they’re worth getting excited about – ‘cause M&A is a large driver of innovation!

• SoundJam MP – Music syncing software (2000)

• Fingerworks – Multi-touch display tech (2005)

• Beats Electronics – Hardware and music streaming software (2014)

These acquisitions brought us iTunes, the iPhone, and Apple Music (without them, these products wouldn’t exist).

The US-based crypto industry has largely avoided M&A in recent history due to the opaque regulatory environment. 

(Crypto companies feared they’d get sued into oblivion if they acquired other financial services businesses.)

But with this new administration came an easing of regulatory conditions – and now we’re starting to see M&A pick the hell up!

Coinbase acquired the web3 adtech platform Spindl, Stripe made the largest crypto acquisition in history when it bought the stablecoin start-up Bridge for $1.1B…

And today, Kraken is kindly asking Stripe to hold its beer:

NinjaTrader is a U.S. retail futures trading platform – telling us that: 

1. Kraken wants to bring more TradFi assets to its platform.

2. The race is now officially on between Coinbase, Robinhood, and Kraken to see who can become the dominant ‘everything app’ in the asset trading space.

And none of this is happening in a vacuum. According to Yano, reporting in real-time from Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit in New York – this is happening industry-wide. 👇

Translation:

1. US crypto exchanges want to start supporting stock trading

2. The US is now seen as ‘open for business’

3. Crypto exchanges have all the money they need to go on a shopping spree

4. Traditional fintech platforms want to support a wide range of cryptocurrencies

5. Everyone wants to launch their own stablecoin

6. Even the old guard, fuddy-duddy stock brokerages want in on crypto

And all of this has the potential to happen this year (starting in Q3/Q4).

Our takeaway?

AN OUTLOOK ON INSTITUTIONAL CRYPTO INVESTMENT IN 2025 💰

You know what would be cool?

If someone collected the contacts of all of the big-dog investors out there and surveyed them to figure out where we might be headed for the rest of 2025.

With the amount of low-brow cultural references we make – it might be hard for us to get a response.

Good news is: we don’t have to!

Coinbase and EY-Parthenon have already done the heavy lifting for us and surveyed a range of institutional investors to get a temperature check on 2025.

Here’s what they found…

1/ The majority of participants are either already in, or plan to be in this year

Keep in mind what ‘in’ means for these guys – even a small allocation of Assets Under Management (e.g. 1-2%) can mean billions of dollars of investment.

2/ Speaking of AUM…

The majority of investors surveyed said they plan to allocate over 5% of AUM in 2025 – this could mean hundreds of billions of dollars invested cumulatively.

3/ It ain’t just Bitcoin that’s on the menu

The vast majority of investors surveyed currently hold one or more altcoins (our guess is that’s mostly made up of $ETH, via the ETFs).

4/ Institutional hunger for DeFi is peaking!

Remember yesterday when we harped on about how the big-dogs want to see Real World Assets (RWAs) – like stocks – become tradable onchain?

We now have the data to back that up. 💪

Ok, now – did you notice it? 

The fly in the ointment…the tiny stone that could knock us off our proverbial skateboard?

Yeah. This data was collected ‘As of January 2025’.

A lot has changed since then – and these plans/outlooks may have changed along with it.

…but you don’t have to worry about that.

‘Cause we have a man on the inside by the name of Jason ‘Jay’ Hamilton – host of The Milk Road Show.

Jay just sat down with John D'Agostino, Head of Strategy at Coinbase Institutional – aka: the guy who helped conduct this survey.

So if you want fresh, up-to-the-minute insights on everything we just covered, you only need to do one thing…

Click the link below 👇 

YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

PRO “WHERE ARE WE IN THE CYCLE?” INDICATORS 🤔 

Sure, crypto markets have been holding steady over the past few days…

But the question still remains:

Is this a pullback, or the beginning of a bear market?

Knowing where we are in the crypto cycle can help us answer that question, and we use a variety of indicators to plot out our cycle position.

Below are the 6 indicators we track, with a color-coded system to show how close they are to signaling the market peak:

🟢 Plenty of room to run 🏄

🟡 Getting closer to the top signal, but haven’t yet reached the mark ⚠️

🔴 We’ve hit the market top indicator 🚨

Every Thursday, we update these 6 indicators exclusively for PRO members.

Our advice? Don't wait for all of them to hit 🔴. It's better to take profits as they get closer to that point.

Let's dive in and see if we're anywhere near the top of this bull market. 👇

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Looking to get exposure to $BNB on TradFi rails? Check out $OBNB! It’s the first tradable ticker for a security that provides exposure to $BNB on the US stock market.*

Pump.fun launches the PumpSwap DEX! All coins that reach ‘migration’ will now launch directly on PumpSwap — allowing PumpDotFun to gobble up even more revenue!

Trump spoke at DAS! Well, not physically, but he addressed conference attendees through a recording.

Toly apologizes for the Solana ad. No PR, no explanations, just straight up accountability. We respect that.

Banks and payment networks better watch their backs! Foresight Ventures just laid out how stablecoins are coming to eat their lunch.

Want a cash loan without selling your crypto? SALT lets you lock up your crypto as collateral and get fiat loans in return. Yep, this is a thing—and it’s pretty genius.**

*this is sponsored content.
**this is partner 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.