# DeFi Resilience and Institutional Accumulation in Volatile Markets

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-04-20

## Transcript

You know, last week I said that Michael Saylor and Tom Lee were buying Bitcoin and Ethereum with bull market size during a bear market.
This week, they've both more than doubled the size of their purchases.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG DuSaid here and welcome to The Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show where we sometimes lose our minds because we're forced to record five podcasts in a single day.
And today is one of those days.
It is April 20th, 2026.
Bitcoin at 75.
thousand six hundred eth is at twenty three hundred and change last week we pumped this weekend we dumped today we're kind of green this has been the story every single weekend, every single Monday for months.
We're literally living in crypto purgatory.
And maybe this time isn't so bad, right?
The straight is closed, but the market is green.
The S&P is at all-time highs.
We're going to get into why and also ask the hard questions like, is ETH at risk after another big hack?
This time on Aave, which is supposed to be highly vaulted and impenetrable and it's supposed to be real DeFi.
And yet...
it finally got hacked.
We're going to dig into all that along with John today on the show.
Today's episode is brought to you by Pharos, the layer one built for RealFi, Consensus Miami, where the next cycle starts, and Nexo, earn interest, borrow, and trade crypto.
John, what's up?
Is your ETH okay?
Are you safe?
I just want to correct something you just said.
Aave did not get hacked.
Oh, come on.
Let me just have my fun.
That's a really important distinction.
And, you know, fun's fun.
You don't want to go telling people that Aave got hacked when it did not.
Aave is fine.
Okay.
Strike it from the transcript.
Good morning.
Hello.
So is my ETH safe?
I don't even know where my ETH is, but it's somewhere.
If you don't know where it is, then it's safe.
Yes.
It's safe.
As long as you can't sell it, then it's technically safe.
Non-functional, non-custodial wallet somewhere that only just got some L2s.
What did happen, John?
So tell me about this.
I mean, most people, maybe people that hang out on crypto Twitter and just spend their weekends criticizing each other, they probably already know.
But for the people that don't, what did happen on Aave?
Which bridge got compromised?
And is there any actual concern?
This is great.
You're going to make me give a live play-by-play breakdown.
You don't have to give a play-by-play.
You can just tell me in your own words.
You can summarize it.
If you get technical, people are going to stop watching.
You can TLDR it, and then we can get to the bullish stuff as soon as you want, man.
There was a hack for around $300 million on KelpDAO, which is...
A protocol that's in, yeah.
So basically what they did was they created around $300 million of bad debt on Aave.
Now, because they were using kind of like, I think it was RSTETH as collateral taking out loans.
And so they have $300 million or $293 million worth of loans that are made on collateral that is not real collateral because of the hack that they've done.
Aave, to their very great credit, froze the liquidity pools immediately.
They're still frozen as far as I understand, and they kind of contained the issue here.
But making up the shortfall is the interesting thing.
So Aave has something called the Umbrella Protocol or Umbrella Module, whatever the technical name of it is.
But it is a safety protocol to make sure that AVA is collateralized to prevent or to cover losses, rather not prevent, but to cover losses in the event of a hack or malicious activity or bad debt like this.
They only have around $50 million or so of Ethereum.
deposited in that right now.
And so there's roughly, I think the projections are somewhere around $140 million of a shortfall that has to be made up somehow.
There are a lot of actors in the system right now offering swaps for people to swap out of their Aave wrapped staked ETH if they don't want to be potentially subjected to that haircut.
There's a lot going on in the community and in the ecosystem right now to deal with this.
There's a lot of stuff that's still emerging.
But to me, I think the main takeaways are that there's a lot of fear that this has created, so we're seeing a lot of withdrawals generally from DeFi just across the board.
Not that anything has really changed on any of this, it's just fear has started to take hold.
Aave, I think, lost around $8 billion of total value locked on the protocol because of withdrawals, like Justin Sun, who's...
Anyway, Justin Sun withdrew from Aave, a lot of his Ethereum.
But I think that my view on this is that the long-term value creation of DeFi is still very strong.
The market demand for it and need for it is still very strong.
And Aave is still in a really excellent position to capitalize on that and to bring that to the market.
Their safety protocols, all the mechanisms that they've put in place to deal with this.
handled it.
It's a much larger shortfall than their reserves had planned for, but they'll find a way through this in some form or fashion, I'm sure.
But the gist of this is you kind of have an opportunity here to get an entry on Aave if you still believe in Aave for the long term, which I do.
So I'm kind of looking at this closely and saying like, okay, I want to see what the actual resolution is, where this stabilizes and so forth.
What are the impacts of this?
But I think this might be an opportunity to accumulate Aave if you still believe in DeFi and the long-term value there.
But yeah, a lot of this is just fear created by this $300 million hack.
And we're still kind of in limbo while we wait for what a final resolution to this looks like.
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So they went, their TVL two days ago was $26.5 billion and now it's 17.
So that is a near, yeah, like eight and a half, like you said, $9 billion haircut.
And that's, what is it about a third?
That's about like, yeah, it's about 30%, 33%.
of their total TVL.
So that's how much money is fleeing it.
Although their fees are up.
This is actually what I like.
The protocol to 3x its revenue during that time from fees as people got out.
So good for them.
An extra 10 million bucks in the bank.
Damn, I mean, I guess that makes sense.
So what are they doing that's keeping people's funds safe then?
Or how does this not affect?
Maybe you can just circle back on that and keep it super basic for us.
I mean, the only things that were exploited was this bridge, and there was a loan taken out with bad collateral.
But nothing else, none of the other pools, contracts, nothing else on Aave or around Aave has been compromised.
The problem with this is that if you have...
a very large DeFi protocol like this, all of the different participants themselves become additional attack vectors on the ecosystem.
So Aave has got top-of-the-line security and quality and a lot of, like I said, this umbrella module, the protocols in place to help cover losses in the event of things like this.
But they're only able to cover and control what they can cover and control, and they can't really protect themselves against external vulnerabilities from other participants in the ecosystem.
So again, Aave is fine so far.
It's just a sentiment shift and a fear thing that has come in because of this.
But they're working on resolving this.
And I think that there will be some kind of resolution.
And then from there, I don't know.
I think it's one of those things where it might take a while for demand for faith to come back into the market here or for people to feel comfortable with this again.
But my two cents is that this just feels to me like a lot of this like This happens often in crypto where there'll be some kind of hack, some kind of market event.
People will panic sell and freak out and then the fundamentals haven't changed.
So eventually the market recovers and the capital comes back.
It's not quite the same thing, but it's a little bit reminds me of what happened.
With FTX and Solana, like FTX going under, everybody sold all their Solana and it dumped really hard.
And I bought a ton of Solana under 30 bucks.
I got one bid filled at $10 because I realized that this doesn't have anything to do with the fundamentals of Solana and this chain will come back and so will this asset.
But yeah, the market is still kind of like sussing through the news on this and figuring out how it feels.
And there's just a lot of fear at the moment.
So when was the drift hack on Solana?
Was that like two weeks ago?
Right?
That was like a social engineering hack and everything.
But I'm just curious if similar protocols, like something like Jupiter or Radium, or at least the DEXs, I guess, in this case, on Solana experienced a similar drawdown around that time.
Yeah, I guess so.
I think it was around end of March, right?
I think it was like, maybe it was April.
Oh, yeah, it was on April Fool's.
It was April Fool's that they announced the hack.
So, yeah, so there was a dip.
Let's see.
Jupiter lost.
went from 1.9 about 2 billion to 1.6 okay yeah so they lost 20 so it's not not the same amount it was a smaller protocol but very similar um somewhat similar kind of idea um john is this um this is something you mentioned before and you've been talking about in pro uh all weekend from for milk milk road pro members uh and for the milk road pro curious the dollar trial is back just you can get it for seven days for just a dollar so if you want to go check it out and see what john says on saturday nights when john is actually most active you can go check that out in the milk road pro discord or see his recommendations um but you did you have been talking about ave as a potential buy here and i actually didn't even realize the price of Aave until you mentioned it this morning.
I honestly still thought that Aave was still at like $200 or something like that.
I didn't realize it had fallen to like a $1.3, $1.4 billion market cap and had fallen sub $100, although it was on a rally last week with the rest of the space, but has now fallen back to like a pre-rally price and actually going to dip below to like a could is seeing a low that hasn't been seen since August 20.
2024 right now.
So an almost two-year low, 18-month low, around $87.
You can see tons, tons of volume over the last couple of days as this happened.
Please share your thoughts, John.
Is this a legendary buying opportunity for Aave with the FUD?
The total value locked on the protocol has exploded since it was last at this price level.
The fundamental value of the Ethereum and the DeFi ecosystem has exploded since it was last at this price level.
And the only thing that's pushed it down here is lack of attention and fear.
So I think it's a buying opportunity.
I think it's kind of up to you to decide if that's, you know, look, it's like, how long does it stay at these levels?
I don't know.
You can see it chopped around here a long time.
Last time it was here.
The upside potential to me has never been stronger.
So to me, I have a position in Aave, and rather than looking for an exit here, I'm considering accumulation and trying to pick what level I think I'm comfortable at to start doing that.
But everybody has to kind of make their own choice about these things.
This protocol is not dead, though.
It's growing, it's innovating, it's adapting, it's launching new things, it's bringing in new capital, new markets, new users, new products.
So it's just, to me, I think it represents one of the stronger...
investment opportunities in the digital asset ecosystem.
But this is something I've been saying a lot, right?
I'm not recommending people buy this or not buy this.
Like I said, I have a position, so I'm clearly biased.
But what I would say is that we have this huge gulf between this institutional bull run and all this capital and demand and products coming from the institutional side and then retail being completely checked out and not really paying attention.
As a result, I think the digital asset ecosystem is just littered with projects like Aave.
that represent a huge amount of value that is completely mispriced and misunderstood by the overall market right now.
So that, to me, is an opportunity.
Now, I'm not saying that Aave has to be that specific opportunity and whatever.
Maybe this kills the whole dream of DeFi forever.
I don't know.
Maybe a $300 million hack was all it took, right?
But the other side of that is that...
The project has never been stronger.
The valuation and the thesis for it has never been stronger.
And so for a capital that's patient and understands that thesis, I think this presents an opportunity.
So I'm looking at that here.
But there's a lot of risk and reward in all these things.
And the market is telling you right now that it's scared.
But I think buying fear is a good deal at any price.
I've gotten pushback on that from some investors.
But generally speaking, If it's a strong asset, it's a strong thesis, and it's a strong market overall, you want to look at huge extremes of fear causing price swings as opportunities.
And that's what people mean when they say buy when there's blood in the streets and fear, even if it's your own.
So yeah, I don't know.
That's just how I'm looking at this right now.
Maybe a pretty decent one on Aave here.
That's a good perspective.
And that's, you know, all rules of investing would tell you that this is a good opportunity.
All irrational fears of the current market conditions would give the irrational idea that it's going to go below its last bear market low, which it revisited four times before coming back, just like probably a lot of tokens around $50 so that you're due for that kind of drawdown at some point.
And what if it never goes back up ever?
What if that never, what if, what if it's all sham?
What if Fidelity and Schwab, they're all lying and they just want you to buy these shitty tokens and then they're going to send them all to zero and get you so good.
And what you should have bought was NVIDIA.
It's all a psyop just for us, John, just to shake us out of this kind of stuff.
I might be a buyer.
I like this.
I don't like this.
You can see this big double top that the market did 24, 25 from, I guess, a very loose technical aspect, but not something to be afraid of long-term.
So I like that.
Was there a bridge powered by Layer Zero?
Was that a Layer Zero bridge?
I think it was involved in some way, but I'm not sure the exact specifics of how.
They tanked.
I've been watching Layer Zero.
I love Layer Zero.
I think they're a great part of the infrastructure of a lot of the bridging.
I use them a lot in Last Bear Market and Bull Run and stuff.
And they've really integrated a lot into a lot of products.
It's not a Layer Zero shill.
I'm just saying that I've been...
tracking that token for a while and it saw it's a huge, huge haircut about like 20% or 25% or so on this news.
I'm assuming it was a layer zero bridge.
I just haven't had time to look into that today.
So I think that's correct.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely.
I would assume so.
Otherwise I don't know why people would sell the token.
Okay.
Well, this has been your investigative report with John Gillen, who's secretly Zach XBT.
Thank you for the alpha.
Let's jump to, I mean, John, you know, last week people really loved our bullish takes.
We loved hearing you tell us why there's good reasons to stay bullish.
And I feel like we're going to keep needing that as we navigate through this bear market and navigate through these uncertain war times.
And I feel like we always, I think people are going to come to rely on you every Monday to give them that dose.
This morning in our creator meeting, Chevy, who writes our newsletter and our Milk Road X account as well.
Shout out to Chevy.
he did point out the bear flag concerns right while we're talking technical levels uh and i think this is this is the best i mean i'm not i don't want to start drawing on a chart i think that's the last thing anybody ever wants me to see do on a podcast is me drawing on a chart uh but i'm assuming these that he's that they're referring to these two look and i found this tweet from a totally unknown person uh which i'm going to take as gospel um from this person Basically showing us these two kind of like similar pattern, bear patterns, comparing what we saw after 1010 at the end of Q4, early Q1 this year where we dropped and then we kind of went up.
And this is, if you do any technical trading, this is a very classic obvious pattern where you dip and then you kind of go upwards at about like a 45 degree-ish angle before the next big.
leg down uh and naturally it shakes people into thinking that it's like hey we're rallying it's time to buy more let's get going right before that huge snap that brings you back down john uh i don't know if you're much of a technical person are we in a double bear bear flag pattern here Yes, but I think there's a lot of caveats to that, right?
So number one, I think that these are all probabilities and percentages.
These things do not always break down.
In a Bitcoin bear market, they usually do.
This is generally what happens.
Ben Cowan talks about this a lot.
He says that bear markets in Bitcoin make fools of both the bulls and the bears because for most of the time, you see the market just sort of like slowly chopping higher and the bears all look wrong and the bulls start to celebrate as they go to challenge new resistances.
But then eventually the bulls run out of gas, they hit a resistance level they can't break, the market breaks down, and you put in new lows, and then the bulls will look ridiculous.
So it's a difficult market environment to trade in, but it's all probabilities, right?
Because there's no law that says that just because we've hit the top of this bear flag range, we have to...
go down to the bottom of it or to break down lower.
That may be what happens, but I, you know, like, Ooh, I'm shaking my boots.
We might go to 68 K again.
Big deal.
Right.
So like the other side of this is that there's a significant risk that it breaks to the upside and surprises a lot of people.
And everyone, you know, thinks that Bitcoin is going to zig and it zags instead.
And I think that there's a lot of reasons to think that might be the case.
The clarity act is materializing on the horizon.
We've got a new federal reserve chairman having hearings this week.
He could say something very bullish about Bitcoin in the hearing and.
something off without meaning to.
I think that there's a lot of reasons to think that the macro landscape is getting better.
We've seen an enormous amount of tax refunds come back into the market recently.
Some people are saying that might be partially responsible.
We just had tax day in the United States.
So some people say that might be partially responsible for this huge short squeeze we've seen in the equities market.
So it's hard to look at the enormous strength of positive bullish market action that we've seen recently.
and get super doomerish at this moment for me.
A lot of people can say it's a top.
Sure, maybe it's a local top.
But I think that this market trend, this momentum will probably continue throughout the rest of the year.
And so even if Bitcoin does find some resistance here, it hasn't collapsed or broken down.
We're still over 75K, so it's not been like a firm, strong rejection and collapse.
There's also a possibility that Bitcoin goes back and retests the top of the range again before it gets rejected.
That's not unheard of either.
So I think it's important to not get super dogmatic about calling what must happen here.
Cause that, that bear flag is concerning.
I've been watching it for now almost two and a half months.
Yeah.
It's been a long time.
Yeah.
It's been going.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, since, since February 5th was that, was that mega candle down around then.
And now we've just been, you know, that's when we touched 60.
Right.
And then we've been doing this thing back up and we're, we're at the top of the range again, roughly now, or the other day around 77.
But yeah, it's, it kind of shows you that.
Right.
It's been a long time.
It's been, it's a long ass bear flag.
Yeah, and I'll bring this back up because this is something I'm still watching because it's getting kind of – it's really getting wild now.
Michael Saylor – last week I said that Michael Saylor and Tom Lee were buying Bitcoin and Ethereum with bull market size during a bear market.
This week they've both more than doubled the size of their purchases.
Tom Lee and Bitmine bought – $235 million of Ethereum, I believe, and then Michael Saylor bought over $2.5 billion of Bitcoin.
That is a huge amount of buying support for these assets.
One man can't lift up the whole market, but he has found a different product that has product market fit that is generating organic bull market level demand for Bitcoin during a bear market.
So you're seeing these bear market technicals playing out on the charts at the same time that you're seeing bull market demand from certain and market participants starting to come back in with strength and size.
Tom Lee, to his credit, has also been buying four weeks in a row, and they're aggressively accumulating.
They're now at, I think, 4.1215% of the Ethereum supply and trying to get to 5%.
So there's a lot of things here in the markets that are in favor of the bulls as well, which is why we've seen Bitcoin gravitate to the top of the range that it's been in.
I haven't flipped totally full-on bullish because it hasn't broken out of that range, and until it does, there's still a chance it goes down to the bottom.
I've still got...
bids to buy bitcoin at 60k and 58k just in case the bears are right and we do go sweep those again here so um but my bags are packed either way so i'm not really hung up so much on which way it breaks i'm just trying to be prepared for for either direction and you have to kind of like weigh these probabilities like i did a podcast with michael nadal last week he lays out why he thinks it's going to go lower i you know learn a lot from michael i respect him a lot but i'm a little bit more biased on the bull side right now just because of you know a lot of other things in the macro, and we'll see who's right or wrong, but it doesn't really matter so much to me materially.
Michael and I both agree directionally, and we do a lot of the same analysis, but this is kind of like a little bit of a coin toss one way or the other.
I think he's 60-40 bearish, and I'm like 40-60 bullish, so we'll just see how it plays out, but I wouldn't get too hung up on this one's particular flag.
It could go on for another two or three more weeks too, so we'll have to just watch here.
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What about sell in May, go away?
Come on, listen, your analysis is fantastic.
but I'm a retail trader.
I live by simple rules from simple people.
Sell in May, go away.
Is that true?
Nursery rhymes are not an investment thesis.
Wait, what's your little nursery?
Don't you have a little haiku?
What's your little investment haiku?
Stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish.
It's like the end of Sesame Street.
You know, I like to meet my audience where they're at.
No, I'm just kidding.
Look, I think that that's a historical trend that people have observed, that the summer months tend to be lower volume, lower volatility.
That's also a myth, I think.
I don't think this is totally borne out by the data.
It just sounds right.
We do sometimes see corrections through May.
This doesn't always hold, though.
Look, I think that there's reasons to say that there will be continued volatility.
I think that's what I'm expecting.
Conviction lies in elevated volatility is something a guest of one of my podcasts said recently that's stuck with me.
The only thing I'm sure of is that the market's not going to do what everybody thinks it's going to do, and it's going to continue to be extremely volatile.
We've seen historic volatility in all markets, and I think that's going to continue.
What was the thing?
What was the quote?
Conviction lies in elevated volatility.
Okay.
Okay.
I thought you were saying that.
Okay.
Conviction lie.
Okay.
So I thought you meant lies as in like you're lying.
No, no, no.
The only thing.
It sounded like your conviction.
I was like, what do you mean conviction lies to you when something happens?
And your conviction, it lays, it lays.
It resides.
It resides in high volatility.
Who said that?
Who said that?
Nikki Shields.
She's a gold analyst.
But I also did an interview last week with a great guy named Bob Elliott who is – he used to lead Ray Dalio's investment analysis team at Bridgewater.
And I asked Bob because I was reading his writing.
He has a subset called Non-Consensus.
It's a free plug for Bob.
Everyone should follow Bob.
But Bob wrote a piece where he said that – This entire market lacks conviction.
And so I asked him, do you have conviction in anything right now, in any trade, in any market?
And his flat answer, one word, was just no.
And I think that speaks for – that tells you volumes, right?
Like if one of the best macro analysts in the world is telling you that there isn't strong conviction in anything, nobody can see beyond the weak in front of them.
We could have a deal reached with Iran by the end of business today, or we could see escalation and bombings of their power plants and infrastructure and bridges.
We really are not sure.
It's hard to see into the future.
Nobody could have told you two weeks ago that the S&P 500 was about to go on a 99th percentile bullish tear.
But that's what happened, right?
And I think the NASDAQ traded positively for, I think, 14 days in a row, 13 days in a row, which is another market anomaly.
So look, I think that what I'm trying to get at here is that it doesn't pay to be dogmatic.
It doesn't pay to get super bullish or bearish one way or the other.
The most important thing to do right now, I think, is to keep your options, maximize your ability to be flexible and be tactile in this market environment.
Take in new information as we get it because the market is going to be...
Everyone's going to be getting new and really important information from the market as these things, these events play out and we start...
to get actually some more certainty.
Things like the new chairman of the Federal Reserve being confirmed, the Clarity Act being passed, the war being concluded, a lot of other things falling into place, the tariff negotiations being worked out.
Maybe a deal with China happens in the next month or so too if Trump goes over there to talk to Xi.
So there's a lot of things that could bring some more certainty and that gives us a much clearer road to ride in terms of investing and strategy.
But for the moment, I think it just pays to pay attention and learn as much as you can, but then maximize your ability to be tactile once certainty does.
Is he going to go?
Who?
Trump to China.
That's the plan.
Yeah.
Isn't that supposed to happen like on the 30th?
It was supposed to happen in April.
They postponed it once because of the Iran war, and they may postpone it again.
But yeah, it's pretty imminent.
Basically, I think as soon as they make this peace deal with Iran, Trump's going to go to China to meet with Xi because they have business to conduct as well and deals to make there.
So I think that there's a lot of major things that could move the markets coming here, and they could move it in a positive direction because it'll sort of give investors a lot of clarity, certainty, some things more chiseled into stone as opposed to just being batted around.
around on twitter um so i think there's some positive catalysts on the horizon okay okay so so a long roundabout way of saying that we shouldn't sell in may unless there's an obvious reason to i'm saying let's get to may and see right like look you know if bitcoin breaks like gets firmly rejected drops below 60k yeah you should have sold in may i don't know um It's hard to tell you.
I'm not going to firmly say that one way or another.
I think probably the most...
pertinent thing or let's say prudent thing would be to try to look through whatever the volatility is going to be in the summer months and say, what are the assets that I want to hold throughout this and into 2027 and beyond?
Where do I actually have conviction?
And find that for yourself because you can't borrow it from Bob Elliott or from me or from anybody else, right?
You can't borrow Michael Saylor's conviction on Bitcoin.
You have to have your own.
And one of the biggest mistakes you make in this market is looking at someone else, borrowing their conviction, investing, and then volatility comes.
You get scared, you get certain, you puke your bags and you're getting chopped up by the market.
So you have to kind of develop your own thesis that makes sense for you, for your capital, for your timeline and et cetera.
But yeah, there's going to be volatility no matter where you put your capital.
Stay bullish, safe, safe.
Stay John Gillen.
Listen to him in your sleep.
I have an announcement to make people that don't know this.
If you want to know more, if you want to hear more John's thoughts, I'm not going to plug milk road pro yet.
I got to do that later, but I'm going to do it.
I'm not going to do it again.
You're going to plug the plug.
That's very, this is free.
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I don't have to pay anything for it.
You can get John's thoughts on the macro stuff for free.
Now, John is now writing our weekly macro newsletter.
It's twice per week.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, it comes out.
He wrote two fantastic editions last week.
Obviously, there's kind of just one major story to really cover these days, but John's doing a really great job of kind of covering a few different aspects of it.
So if you guys want to tune into that, I don't know if the link will be in the description.
We don't usually link to the macro newsletter, but if you head over to milkroad.com, you should be able to find it.
Just try and find the newsletter somewhere on there or go to the Milkroad Macro X account where we're going to start.
We're going to try and post some of those on there as well as articles so you can read them just directly on X.
if that's where you hang out.
But you can also subscribe to the newsletter if you want to get John directly in your inbox talking about all the geopolitical stuff.
You want to hear him.
I'm assuming if Trump and she meet, you will write a newsletter about that or preemptively write about that at some point as well.
So John, thanks for sharing your words every week, man.
It's something we love to see and we love to see in Milk Road Pro, but also now the public.
You know, all macro enthusiasts can read your thoughts on a regular basis as well.
On top of listening to you on the podcast, you do two podcasts a week on there too, which are always fantastic.
So kudos to you, John.
Maybe give us a preview.
What's going to be on your mind this week on the macro side?
Obviously, there's one big story, but what's the angle that we can read about tomorrow?
I think one of the things the market's going to be watching the closest is the hearings for Kevin Warsh's confirmation.
Those are supposed to be, I believe, scheduled for this week.
So I'm probably going to be, just like most of the rest of the market, tuned in pretty closely to that because I think whatever he says or doesn't say, people are going to read the tea leaves.
They're going to try to draw conclusions about how he's going to govern as the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
That's probably the biggest thing happening in macro right now.
I think the other thing, obviously, is the Hormuz situation, the straights still being closed.
the U.S.
blockade still being in place, peace talks supposedly happening in Pakistan again, and what the conclusion is of that.
I'm definitely going to write about whatever Trump and Xi agree to if that meeting happens, when that meeting happens, because I think you could make a strong argument that all of this conflict with Iran, with Venezuela, with everything has been about trying to...
give one side or another greater leverage in those negotiations.
So there's a lot that's going on in macro to cover right now.
This week, I think it's Kevin Warsh, but in the near future, it'll be something different.
I think the thing I wrote about in the last report was the straight is still not open.
The market doesn't care yet.
I'm writing in that about how there has been this huge bullish movement in the markets, but the real impact of this conflict on the economy has yet to have its impact has yet to really be felt.
And it's unclear yet.
if, when, or how the markets were going to react to that because it still hasn't really come through yet.
So I was talking to some of our pro community members in Discord this weekend about this exact thing.
They're like, I don't understand why the market is getting so bullish if there's all these economic impacts that still have to come through.
And that's sort of this gap.
But one way of looking at this, everyone's talking about the price of oil and watching that very closely.
But the price of diesel and jet fuel are at all time highs, not like near all time highs at all time highs.
Europe, I think, is like three weeks away from running out of jet fuel.
And so there's going to be a lot of rationing, a lot of inflation, price hikes.
There's going to be a lot of impacts on the economy of other countries first, but that will eventually filter through into the United States and into all the things that we do here.
Just because you don't drive a diesel car doesn't mean you don't buy things that get moved on diesel trucks or flown around on jet planes.
So like I said, there's a lot happening in macro right now.
And the lag between the impact of this on the economy and whether or not the market market actually finally responds to that or not uh is something that i'm paying attention to because there's there's sort of this like it's a sort of a economic sword of damocles that's hanging over this bull run now and we'll see how this all settles out but in the meantime you know all-time highs and you know no no all gas no breaks and it all feels great until it doesn't so um there's a lot to watch and i'm going to try to cover it for our community Wall Street is here.
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We don't have that kind of outlook, man.
We don't know that, like, listen, people, I think that's one of their biggest faults as humans is that we don't, we don't, we only take things at face value.
So you're totally right that you're just like, well, I don't drive a diesel fricking car.
So why would I give a shit about diesel?
I don't have it.
I don't have, wait, what are other things?
I don't have any, I don't use anything that's copper every day.
I don't hold any copper in my hand.
Why would I care about the price of copper?
We just don't really understand that kind of stuff.
Copper is not really as related here, but you know what I mean?
I don't think we're like, well, I'll just drive less.
It doesn't really affect the price.
I'll take my bike to the grocery store.
What if you need a new tire?
How is your tire made?
Exactly.
You know, like it's stuff like that.
People don't really realize.
How's your tire delivered to the store?
So we don't really, we're not able to really see that.
So anyways, we're tracking that on Milk Road for everyone who wants to be ready for that.
What did you call it?
The app?
not apocalypse, cataclysmic something.
Sort of Damocles.
It's a, it's a Greek thing.
There's this, there's a King who is ruling and there's a sword that's dangling over his head by a thread.
And it's like this anxiety of like waiting for the other shoe to drop sort of thing.
And economically, that's, I think a little bit where we are right now.
We've got this historic bull run in the markets, but the economy is on shaky, shaky ground by certain metrics, but it's like this.
It's the K-shaped thing, right?
Like some parts of the economy are doing incredibly well and growing and thriving, and some parts are struggling, but pretty severely.
So we'll see how this plays out.
Which Greek figure are you in all this?
Who are you in all this?
Mythos.
That's who I am.
I'm Mythos.
Is that a good answer?
Claude Mythos, like from Anthropic?
That's the joke, yes.
I didn't have anything better off the top of my head, so I went with that.
It's so dangerous.
We can't let anybody have it.
It's so amazing, but you can't see it.
You can't touch it.
We don't have enough compute to support this if we gave this to you, and also it would hack the planet.
So we're just going to leave this in a box for right now, even though it's smart enough to get out of the box.
We wrote a blog a couple years ago how it might be self-aware, and then it read it, and now it thinks it's self-aware.
Wow.
That's amazing.
Okay.
Last thing I do.
Okay.
The end is a plug, but it's mainly to plug John.
Okay.
So a new thing that we have in Milk Road Pro, I'm going to get you guys to preview it, is now Watchlist.
And here you get a little preview of the leaderboard where John was once again recently flipped.
You were in second place at the start of the show.
We started recording.
Now you're in third place.
Melvin moving up the ranks with all his...
is uh i won't tell you what he's buying uh but melvin's moving up the ranks really fast with his purchases lately uh john solidly in third place though with a great portfolio which you can see in milk road pro just a dollar for seven days anytime you want but we just added this feature called watch list so now instead of uh if there's anything that you guys are thinking about buying uh you add it to the watch list all pro members get a notification via email If you opt in or in Discord or wherever you want to get that notification or just check in on the website.
So John has added Ave to his watch list, not a purchase yet.
And you have not added a target price because I don't think it's that simple.
And there's a few other assets on this list, some crypto ones, some non-crypto ones from the rest of the team.
So we started to populate the watch list.
So if you want to check that out, head on over to the link below Milk Road Pro.
There's just the dollar to get in here.
And I'm really telling you guys, if you have nothing to do on Saturday nights, that's when John's in the Discord ready to rumble.
Okay.
That's, that's, you want to, you want to get his pure thoughts on what's going on.
Total rambles.
That's the time is Saturday.
You pay a dollar.
You can talk to John all night, Saturday night, come this weekend.
Okay.
John, I think we got to wrap up here.
Any final thoughts for us going into this week besides stay bullish, stay safe.
I'm not sure that's the great sales pitch that you think it is, but I generally try to be responsive to our community.
People love you.
People, look at the comments from last week's episode, man.
People, you want me to read comments from last week's episode?
I know what I'm just saying.
I am available at times other than Saturday night too, okay?
It's not like Saturday night.
Let's go talk to John.
No, but that's where you get your most pure form.
That's where we get the raw John.
Otherwise, this is a polished John.
This is noon on a frigging Monday.
John is caffeinated.
He's level, everything.
I want Saturday night too.
morning john that's that's the time in in the in the watch list i also wrote out a detailed analysis of the hack that that happened on kelp dow and why i think that alve is handling this well what the thesis is there so i wrote those those those thoughts in much more detail and clear language um so that's there for the community to review as well in a more structured way but i like these functionalities because it allows me to kind of communicate directly with our our community about these things in a way that's a little bit more structured than just a discord message and a podcast.
And it kind of allows me to lay out some of my thinking on that.
So I like this.
I'm enjoying it.
I think the community is liking it too, but yeah, you can, you can send me questions anytime.
It doesn't have to be Saturday night at 1am.
Here's some comments from last week's episode.
People love John.
Okay.
There's one give John more airtime with three heart emojis.
So I wrote that one.
And that person also wrote, that person also wrote buy low, sell high.
That's why you buy in bear markets.
So, so this might, that, you know, that, that thank you person for writing that.
Okay.
The next one though is way more important.
Best duo ever.
Always my favorite shows with those two, John and the other guy.
I keep forgetting his name.
That's a real, I like the other guy too.
The other guy's trying his best.
That's how they don't even know who I am.
Oh, and whoever, somebody from our team, I don't know, maybe this is Chevy.
I don't know who wrote this, but maybe it was our podcast producer, Adrian.
They wrote, they responded, his name's LG, and I'm glad you're enjoying the duo.
So thank you, whoever the Milk Road team responded to that person.
And shout out that person.
I'm happy to be the other guy alongside this wonderful human in front of me here.
John, let's wrap up.
If you guys have comments about John, put them in the comments this week, okay?
And if you listen to this on any other platform, go over to YouTube, write your little comment for John.
I guess you can leave comments in Apple Podcasts too.
You can actually leave a comment there too.
So make sure you rewrite how much you love John and the other guy that he hangs out with every Monday.
Okay, that's it.
I'm going to wrap up right there.
Bye, John.
That was great.
Another unawkward ending to another great episode.
Thanks, other guy.
It was great talking to you this week.
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