GM. This is Milk Road, your crypto dehumidifier (we remove fog and increase clarity).

Here’s what we got for you today:

• ✍️ Guess who’s back from the dead…

• ✍️ Why is crypto selling off today?

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

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: Bitcoin’s Golden Bull Run: Treasury Companies, Institutions & Macro Analysis w/ Charles Edwards

• 🍪 September rate cuts locked and loaded?

Chainlink is the global standard and platform integrating the world to the onchain economy. They just announced the “Chainlink Reserve”, read more about it here.  

PUMPFUN RECLAIMS THE THRONE / WE CATALOGUE OUR RECENT FAILURE 👑

Two weeks ago I made a small but increasingly frustrating mistake:

I didn’t hit ‘record’ on a particular weekly call that would’ve made me look like a big-brain-smart-guy by association.

See, most Thursdays I sit in on the Milk Road PRO research meeting to learn and get ideas for articles…

And two weeks ago, the topic of discussion was $PUMP.

At the time, its price/vibes were both in the toilet:

• letsBONKfun was ripping into PumpFun’s market share

• Pump’s buy back scheme was hard to track/get excited about

• And the platform felt like it was in dire need of a fresh incentive program

The basic gist of our PRO team’s discussion:

Yuh. The Pump team is going to fix all of that. It’s been like two weeks since they launched their token – it’s insane that the market is so impatient…there’s an opportunity here. 👀

Since that call, we’ve seen…

1/ PumpFun launch its new community token buy back initiative

Pump launched the ‘Glass Full Foundation’ (GFF if you’re nasty) – which buys up leading memecoins launched on the platform, and has injected $1.69M into community tokens so far.

So if you launch a successful token on PumpFun → you could see some of their $1.3B war chest thrown at your token. 👇

2/ They launched the $PUMP token buy back dashboard

Initially, PumpFun committed to using 25% of platform revenues to buy back $PUMP and re-distribute those revenues to token holders.

…but at launch, it was hard as hell to follow – you needed to be an onchain sleuth, or permanently glued to Twitter in order to track each purchase.

(Meaning these buy backs were largely hidden from public view, dampening the potential excitement.)

But boy has PumpFun since adjusted for this… 

They’ve not only created a public buyback dashboard, they’ve upped their daily purchases by an insane amount – from 25% of daily revenue to anywhere between ~80% and ~200%. 👇

As a result… 

3/ PumpFun has taken back its market share

Pump went from making up ~10% of daily Solana Launchpad Revenues on Aug 3, to ~76% Aug 13 (that’s a crazy turn around in just 10 days!) 👇

And so far, these steps have translated into positive price action for $PUMP…

It’s up ~42% since our PRO meeting took place:

Our (personal) takeaway:

WHY IS CRYPTO SELLING OFF TODAY? 🤨

Short answer? 

Producer Price Index (PPI) data just came in WAY hotter than expected (👇) and collided with two other contributing factors.

Long answer?

PPI tracks the increase/decrease in cost of wholesale goods.

And when wholesale prices go up, producers typically pass those costs on to consumers (so kind of them).

The problem for crypto in this scenario is: 

Increases in consumer costs are then reflected in Personal Consumption Expenditures data (PCE) – the metric the Federal Reserve uses to decide on rate cuts…

So here’s the potential daisy chain of events that the market is partly acting on here:

• Wholesale costs go up → pushing consumer costs up

• The Fed holds off on rate cuts in order to fight this increased inflation

• Higher rates = businesses/consumers spending more to service loans/credit

• Less money in people’s pockets = less money finding its way into risk assets (like crypto)

Now – take aaaalll of that and add the fact that:

Crypto prices were already due for a breather after this recent run up + Scott Bessent (Treasury Secretary) just said the US wouldn’t be buying additional $BTC for the Strategic Reserve… 👇

And boom! There you have it – the perfect recipe for a short-term sell-off.

The good news? This is likely just a momentary blip on the bull market radar. 

According to Polymarket, the likelihood of a September rate cut is still leaning comfortably in our favor:

Say it with me now:

“Ear muffs.”

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

Knowing where we are in the crypto cycle is crucial for capturing the best opportunities.

(The goal being to spot the bull market peak before the bear market hits your bags hard.)

So how is our PRO team reading today’s sell off, in the context of the overall crypto cycle? 

Go PRO and keep scrolling to find out!

ICYMI: We track 6 indicators 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 🍪

This DEX solves an actual UX issue! Milk Road Swap supports both Ethereum and Solana tokens in a single interface.

Uh-oh! The US’ existing Strategic Bitcoin Reserve holdings may be about to get cut by more than 50% — BeInCrypto.

September rate cuts locked and loaded? We’re in an unusual situation now that PPI came in hot…

Rumor: according to a since-deleted governance proposal, Stripe and MetaMask are about to launch a joint stablecoin called $mmUSD.

Bag Labs have released their first game called CRASH.FUN. If you hold $USDC on Base, go check it out.*

*this is sponsored content.

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