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GM. This is Milk Road, when your friends ask if you’ve heard about that buzzy new crypto development – we’re the reason you answer “yeah, ages ago”.

Here’s what we got for you today:

• ✍️ What are Internet Capital Market tokens?

• ✍️ Top 3 craziest crypto schemes in recent memory

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: The DeFi Bet: Institutional Capital Will Ignite DeFi Summer 2.0 w/ Sid Powell

• 🍪 Onchain stablecoin volumes on Ethereum just hit a new ATH

INTERNET CAPITAL MARKET TOKENS = MEMECOINS ON METH ⚗️

What the hell are Internet Capital Market (ICM) tokens? 

(And why is EVERYONE talking about them all of a sudden!?)

In short: ICM tokens = memecoins on meth.

But honestly, that’s doing them dirty (they go WAY beyond online meme culture)…

Here’s everything you need to know about ICM tokens and their potential impact:

1/ The concept 🧠

Have a business idea, app, project, article, meme – pretty much anything that can exist (or simply be described) online – that you’d like to fund and/or make money off?

Post about it on Twitter/X → tag @launchcoin in the comments, along with a token name and ticker → Launch Coin will (you guessed it) launch a token for you.

They’re all fair launches on Solana, with no presales or staking requirements – where, instead of getting token allocations, creators earn 50% of fee revenue.

2/ The step change 🏃‍♂️‍➡️

Making ideas, products, and content ‘tradable’ isn’t new (hell, that’s pretty much the basis of the stock market) – the big shift here is how freakin’ easy it is to do. 

One tweet – and BOOM! Your idea/concept/work is now tradable.

Here’s an A/B comparison between traditional and ICM fundraising…

Traditional fundraising (months/years):

Start with an idea → create a pitch deck → shop the idea around → get funding → hire a team → build a minimum viable product (MVP) → get more funding → hire more people → launch…

ICM Fundraising (hours/days):

Use an AI service like Cursor to code an app MVP → make it public → post about it on X → tag @launchcoin → buy your own token cheap (or just collect the fees) → fundraise in real time….

See how three MASSIVE barriers to entry are now all-but gone thanks to AI/crypto? 

• Knowledge barrier: You don’t need to know how to code ❌

• Time barrier: You don’t need to spend months courting traditional investors ❌

• Cost barrier: Coding an MVP requires a $20/mo subscription, not a full dev team ❌

That said, all of this comes with a catch. Multiple catches.

3/ The red flags 🚩

Let’s start with the obvious:

Launching an asset which is expected to grow in value based on an idea that you’re responsible for making a reality, without registering that asset with the SEC?

That’s what we used to call ‘securities fraud’ back in the day (2024).

Plus – the traditional fundraising method we listed above is not for the faint of heart…but that’s kind of a good thing. 

It helps to filter out the weak-willed, watered down, and outright crappy ideas before they can even start. In the world of ICM tokens – those filters are completely removed. 

Meaning sorting the good ideas from the bad may be about to become a whoooole lot more work.

All jokes aside – we’re pretty freakin’ excited to see where this goes, what people create, and how it will affect the crypto market.

And if you’re the type of person that’s thinking to yourself “how do I invest in this” then we’ve got just the thing for you:

Every weekday, LG Doucet host’s a live show on X called Milk Road Degen where he battles through the trenches of crypto to find what’s hot, so you don’t have to. 🫡

Check out his coverage on LaunchCoin here!

TOP 3 CRAZIEST CRYPTO SCHEMES IN RECENT MEMORY 🤯

If you’ve never tried to:

• Defraud a multi-national corporation

• Fake your own death to escape scrutiny

• Sell an organ in order to buy an overhyped NFT

Then we have bad news for you…

You will never make it on this list. 👇

1/ Coinbase data breach (2025)

Scammers have been bribing Coinbase support agents to get customer data (names, numbers, addresses) – data that would allow hackers to:

Call the customers, impersonating Coinbase support → use the stolen data to convince the customer they’re legit → convince the customer to send them crypto.

But the scammers haven’t released the data. Instead, they’re trying to use it to blackmail Coinbase for $20M in $BTC.

But Coinbase ain’t playin’ ball (at least, not with the scammers).

They’re not only offering to reimburse anyone that gets hacked because of this data leak – they’re also putting up a $20M reward for any information on these scammers that leads to an arrest.

2/ Founder of the AI token $ZEREBRO faked his death live onstream

This may well go down as “The craziest event of 2025 (that no one really talked about)” – here’s what you missed:

When the market crashed in early 2025, the $ZEREBRO token was not immune (crashing 90%) → as a result, the founder (Jeffy) copped a whole lot of online hate.

So to escape it, he did what any reasonable person would do…

He faked his own death live onstream → had a memecoin made in his memory → (seemingly) made a bunch of cash off it.

Only problem was, Jeffy left a paper trail and did very little to hide himself after the fact.

As a result, he was found alive and well at his parents’ house just last week.

3/ This dude sold his kidney to buy a Bored Ape

Look, we have no way of confirming if this is legit…but the crazy part is, we wouldn’t be surprised if it was – 2021/2022 era of crypto was a wiiild time!

Did we miss a scheme that deserves a spot on this list?

Respond to this email and lettuce know!

“$BTC TO $200K BY YEAR-END” – BITWISE 💪

We don’t play favorites when it comes to guests on The Milk Road Show.

…but if we did – the Bitwise boys would be up there!

Yesterday, we sat down with Bitwise’s CIO, Matt Hougan, live on the exhibition floor at Consensus, to unpack where crypto is heading next.

Here are three of the eight key takeaways we pulled from this conversation:

• The macro overhang is fading: Recession risks are overblown. Matt argues that any negative macro shocks are likely to be buffered by stimulus or rate changes.

• We’re still in a bull market: Crypto fundamentals are strong – the current lull is just macro noise suppressing a coiled spring.

• Bitcoin remains core: Matt is even more confident now that Bitcoin will hit $200k by year-end.

Click below to watch the full episode and unlock the five remaining takeaways!

YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Put your stablecoins to work and grow your stash. We just dropped a new page covering the best platforms for lending stablecoins.

BTC ETFs are now back at all-time highs (ATH). In just 16 months, they’ve pulled in over $41 billion in inflows. That’s a wild stat.

We’ve lost count of how many FTX repayment headlines we’ve seen. In the latest update, FTX creditors are set to receive $5B by May 30th.

Onchain stablecoin volumes on Ethereum just hit a new ATH. Why does this matter? Because the network with the most stablecoin movement = high user activity.

Is spot trading a little too boring for you? dYdX lets you trade perpetuals onchain with zero gas fees.**

**this is partner content.

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