# Crypto Market Structure and Institutional Accumulation Trends

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-04-27

## Transcript

when whales are accumulating, I think there's been a little bit over 300,000 coins have moved from short-term holders who have held Bitcoin for 155 days or less to long-term holders who've held it for over a year.
So 300,000 coins are moving from short-term holders to long-term holders.
Saylor's buying, Tom Lee is buying, Wall Street's buying.
We saw, I think it was $1.2 billion of inflows into ETF products.
So there is a setup here where we do get a short squeeze.
We do flip ADK from resistance into support.
And we may see a beginning of a bull market much sooner than people anticipate.
What's up, everybody?
It's LGDZ here and welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that really hopes this rally.
hasn't just been one long and cruel April Fool's joke.
Today is April 27th, 2026.
We're back for another Monday episode where it's just John and myself shooting the shit.
And dare I say, and I wrote this a couple hours ago, not right when we're recording.
We might see 80K Bitcoin today, although right now it seems way less likely.
John is back to break it all down for us, talk about some news in the DeFi world, some cool things going on there, a couple of token pumps, and how this is an absolutely massive week in the economy across macro happenings and earnings.
If we have time, we'll get to that.
Plus, while we're preparing the show, he revealed to me that he doesn't even think that Bitcoin has been in a bull market at all, or crypto has been in a bull market at all since 2022.
So we'll break all that down and more.
Today's episode.
This episode is brought to you by CAPE, the privacy first mobile carrier, Pharos, the layer one built for RealFi, and Consensus Miami, where the next cycle starts.
What's up, John?
I don't know what you're talking about revealed.
I've been saying this for a long time.
Crypto has not been in a bull market.
I got to sell headlines, man.
I got to sell headlines here, okay?
I'm a merchant of narratives.
I'm a headline peddler.
So I got to make it sound exciting.
Like this is a new theory that John has that's never existed before.
Nobody said this ever, that crypto didn't experience a bull market at all in the last four years.
But I have a meme to share.
We'll be well aware of that.
I have a meme to share with you before we even start anything else.
Because, you know, last night, yes, 24 hours ago, I was excited to do the show because you were writing the Milk Road Pro Discord being like, oh, we got a Sunday pump.
Let's go 80K in sites.
And then like late last night, and I saw you patrolling in the Discord when I saw this as I went to bed.
There was like this sudden sell off.
And then we've seen it again this morning.
So we're recording this around noon Eastern.
And we're down back below 77K.
Bitcoin.
And here's a little meme I wanted to share with you.
And I'll read it out loud for the people listening.
Hold on.
What's the sock?
How it feels to own crypto while stocks paint a V-shaped recovery.
And it's a foot in a boot, but where the sock has slinked down to be only around the arch.
So you know where you're walking in winter or something like that, and your sock gets kind of weird and slinks down, and you just feel this gross feeling where your heel's touching the bottom of your boot?
And this specifically looks like a blunt stone.
That's how crypto feels at this current moment, according to this meme.
And I would say I agree.
Although, listen, man, we're in a better spot than we were.
a couple months ago, so I really can't complain.
How are you feeling, Mr.
Noble Market, for the last four years?
I think that picture captures it really well.
Man, I'm going to have to take a minute for that one.
That's really good.
Yeah, we've seen one of the strongest and sharpest rallies in history in the equities markets, and crypto has come up some, but has not broken out at all.
And yeah, it's frustrating.
It's confusing.
A lot of people are frustrated, confused.
There's been a history of Sunday night scam pumps and then they sell off.
And that's sort of the pattern that we've seen.
So yeah, I think, you know, to go back to the comments that I made, that you made, Bitcoin had a bull market.
It did not ever have like a...
a euphoric runaway, like blow off top.
It made new all time highs, but it wasn't, it was like a kind of a steady grind higher.
The rest of crypto and digital assets, you know, we've seen some appreciation.
We saw a bull run in Solana.
We saw, you know, hype has done well, a few others here and there, but overall, the, the overall digital asset landscape and crypto landscape has never had a, what I would call like a euphoric bull run, any kind of like major blow off tops, anything like that from what we'd seen back in 2021.
So.
I think that there are a lot of people looking at things like gold and silver and the equities markets having these huge rallies and saying, when is that going to happen for Bitcoin and crypto?
Are we just going to languish in this bear market until the calendar says we can go up again?
So there's a lot of people asking questions about this and debating it a lot on Twitter and grave dancing on people who get it wrong and so forth.
But until we break some of these key resistances that Bitcoin is bumping its head up against right now, I don't think you can say that we've flipped back into a bull market for Bitcoin.
And if Bitcoin doesn't go back, to a bull market that I don't think the rest of crypto is either.
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How do you not consider this, what I'm looking at right now, like the weekly chart of the last five years?
How do you not consider this next, like these other legs up?
that almost double the high from early 2021.
How do you not consider that a bull market?
Yeah, so I think it's a bull market.
I think it's not...
like a runaway euphoric bull run and i think there's a distinction between those if you look at this on like a logarithmic chart you can see that the the price appreciation for bitcoin is sort of keeping up with the logarithmic growth um and that's what you're seeing on this chart and the the non-logarithmic chart but the the prior price history in bull markets usually sees it go to much higher levels of overvaluation and euphoric bull markets, right?
So I think there are bull runs rather.
So I think you could say that Bitcoin has certainly been in a bull market, but has not seen the euphoria and the kind of blow off tops and just like the overvaluation levels that we had seen in any of the prior Bitcoin bull markets, bull runs.
And so that's kind of what I'm getting at there.
It's like, it's clearly in a bull market.
We did get a bull market, but it was much more muted and much lower highs and less euphoria that we had seen in prior bull runs.
And you were saying too, I think you said this at some point that the rest of crypto definitely never went into a bull market.
Maybe you said that, maybe somebody else told me that on the show.
But this is the chart for the whole market cap, excluding Bitcoin and ETH, and I think stable coins as well.
So total three, I believe, yeah.
And I think that definitely has a better argument as well.
I don't know if you said that, John, so correct me if I'm wrong, but we never really went beyond the all-time high.
from the last cycle and obviously saw a huge rotation of tokens in terms of like what's making up this market cap, you know, especially with new income and it's like Hype and probably some others that were in the top 20 or top 10 that are no longer.
But definitely the rest of crypto never had a blow off top at all, right?
And that's what we always joke about that.
There is no alt season in this last cycle, if that's what we even want to call it.
But this to me is a much more damning chart that we never really got that run.
Do you think that we could even get that run, though?
Like, does this just tell you that there's no juice left to squeeze or that the next run is going to be the big one because maybe we just weren't ready?
So I think this is a really good question.
A lot of people are wondering about this, too.
I think that people have been very frustrated with this bull market's performance from altcoins.
Obviously, there were some that performed very strongly, but only for certain periods.
And a lot of that has retraced in certain areas and in certain assets.
I do think that now, you know, the setup for the next bull run is we've got the Genius Act passed.
So stablecoin legislation is through and people know how to launch those.
And that's a much more adopted thing that brings more capital into the digital asset ecosystem.
Overall, the Clarity Act is, you know, you know, God willing going to pass finally in May.
That's the estimates now from the committees and from the Senate and from most people that I've heard comment on this.
Novogratz, for example, just had an interview recently saying that he does believe it'll be law in June.
So if we get the Clarity Act in, that gives people rules of the road in terms of taxonomy, rules for DeFi, for developers, for launching different kinds of crypto-centric or crypto-native products and services in the United States.
So that allows a lot more people to come to market with things there.
And then we've seen, I think the big thing that I've been calling attention to recently is that Michael Saylor with Strategy has iterated, I think at this point, 18 different kinds of products to bring to market based on...
Bitcoin is digital capital backing those products.
And this STRC stretch is the one that's finally found product market fit.
And because of all the capital that he's pulling into strategy with that product, that's been the sort of forcing function for the rest of Wall Street to start launching their own products, bringing things to market and trying to compete with him so that they don't lose a lot of capital to strategy.
So in that.
set up that environment you're going to see a lot more capital come into digital assets the other thing i think is going to be important in the next bull run is the rise of the agentic economy so you're not just going to have human beings adopting digital assets in crypto but you're going to have agentic operators launching products launching services leveraging a lot of the infrastructure that has been built because that's what a lot of has been built in crypto is, is just infrastructure for use cases, for applications, for users that have not really come in size.
We've built a lot of this stuff to be scalable, fast, and secure.
But I think the agente economy is what's going to bring the actual users in.
So in that environment, you're looking at a much more constructive thesis, I think, for the digital assets and space overall and for a lot of altcoins, because while they're leveraging all of this infrastructure, if it's cheaper or more efficient, effective to leverage infrastructure that it's comes from an alt, an alt L1 or an alt L0 or whatever, whatever option they they have, they're going to not really be bound by friction or other hurdles that human beings would not really care about.
They're going to go where they can get efficient infrastructure to accomplish what they want to do and create the economic activity they're trying to do the transactions they're trying to do.
and just create value through whatever means are available.
And there are a lot of means available in the digital asset ecosystem.
So I could see a setup for a much stronger alt season and crypto bull run, not just Bitcoin bull run in the next cycle.
But I'm not even convinced that, look, this setup we have right here, right?
We're bumping our head up against resistance on Bitcoin.
There's a lot of people going short because they're expecting Bitcoin to collapse down and continue into a deeper bull market.
Well, bull markets or bear markets usually end.
It is similar.
Some of the thing happens when bull markets end as when bear markets end.
When a bull market ends, usually there's a lot of bulls who get super enthusiastic and over leveraged and they get wrecked.
That's a lot of what you saw on October 10th.
Everybody was expecting the most bullish Q4 of the entire bull run.
And so everybody got levered long on Bitcoin and then they got wrecked and they got liquidated.
A lot of capital changed from the hands of the bulls to the bears.
And that was kind of the top of that bull run.
In a bear market, the bears get overconfident in shorting and they take out leverage and then the bulls flip that and then they liquidate them.
A lot of capital goes from the bears to the bulls.
And then that brings prices higher.
It brings attention.
It brings more capital in and that carries momentum that leads to a bull market.
In this environment that we're in, that setup is forming.
It's not to say that that's guaranteed to be the outcome, but I think there is an increasing risk because of all of the accumulation that we're seeing from major players.
Long-term holders and whales are accumulating.
I think there's been a little bit over 300,000 coins have moved from short-term holders who have held Bitcoin for 155 days or less to long-term holders who have held it for over a year.
So 300,000 coins are moving from short-term holders to long-term holders.
Sailors buying.
Tom Lee is buying, Wall Street's buying.
We saw, I think it was $1.2 billion of inflows into ETF products for spot crypto products.
Bitcoin obviously got the lion's share of that.
So there is a setup here where we do get a short squeeze.
We do flip ADK from resistance into support.
And we may see a beginning of a bull market much sooner than people anticipate because it's not just going to follow the calendar.
I don't care what anybody says.
This is not going to work out just the way everybody expects it to.
Look at your watch and it's going to play out that way.
It's going to deviate a little bit.
Bitcoin is going to zig when you think it's going to zag at least a couple of times somewhere in here.
I don't know if that'll be now, but I do see the potential for that happening.
And I would say that could be the catalyst that pushes Bitcoin back into a bull market and it could follow equities and gold and other risk assets higher.
Alt season could come with that.
But at this point, it all remains to be seen.
All this has to be proven.
We're still in a Bitcoin bear market for now.
And all I'm doing is watching very closely and paying attention because this is, I think, a key decision point for the market here.
What do you think is the biggest...
the most consensus narrative right now.
Cause I think that that's why I asked people that a lot on the episodes that I do.
Maybe you asked them, you probably asked smarter questions, but I asked them these retail questions, but no, but like, you know, I feel like I'm going to use Q4 2025 and what we anticipated for that.
I'm going to use that for the rest of my career.
You know what I mean?
That this idea that as a perfect example of like everybody.
It was like, this is what's going to happen.
It's coming.
Look at the past.
It's exactly what happened.
And only right near that top did some people start to call top.
But even then, those little signals were drowned in the wave.
And Michael Netto, who's come on from DeFi Report, he had a few newsletters before 1010 saying that.
I think Ben Cowan was one of the first people to...
to be like, wow, that was bad.
We're screwed.
We were going to bear market.
But, and maybe one or two others, but across the ocean of analysts, even despite, even after 1010, people were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that doesn't matter.
Something just broke somewhere in finance or whatever.
And we're going to, we're going to rip back up as soon as they fix that, fill that hole or whatever the problem is.
And to me, that's, that's always going to be a fantastic example of like literally 99.9% of the people think this one thing is going to happen.
And as a result, you actually have, I feel like there's a higher probability that it will be the opposite because it's not a debated enough issue.
And this is male astrology kind of stuff I'm just talking about right now.
I don't have any metrics for this, but I'm just saying that it's always a warning sign to me now and both in crypto and markets and in the past as well for other stuff that I've traded is that when there's just not enough.
push back on the narrative and the idea of what's going to happen, that's actually, that can be a pretty big flag, right?
And so, and I know what you would answer to this question, John, but let's keep it to crypto because there's a clear other big thing that I know you're going to say feels like that in the economy.
But in crypto, what would you say?
And this doesn't have to be the one I'm talking about.
I don't think that there is a thing like that right now because I think even dipping down to 30K or 40K for Bitcoin, that doesn't have nearly enough.
consensus.
That's a huge debate.
That's a 50-50 split.
But what would you say is the most agreed upon narrative out of all the things that go on that we say right now in the crypto space?
I don't know what other thing you're alluding to that I would say.
I'm curious to know what that is.
I think that the big consensus right now...
It's the thing you need these devices for.
It's the thing you need this kind of...
AI.
Gotcha.
Okay.
Yeah, so I think that one of the biggest consensus opinions that I've heard is that because Bitcoin tops when the four-year cycle said it was going to top, then it's going to bottom when the four-year cycle says it's going to bottom.
So a lot of people are waiting to buy the Bitcoin bottom in October or November of this year.
And they're just like very sure of themselves and comfortable with the idea that that's where that's going to happen.
I don't think that that's actually the case.
And I think we're going to see a bottom sooner than that.
There are a lot of reasons why, but I think that's one of those things.
Look, I think markets are, you know, there's been a lot of talk about prediction markets.
Markets of all kinds are information generating machines.
This is something that's a natural feature of a market, right?
It's a way to distribute risk, it's a way to aggregate capital, it's a way to do a lot of different things.
But one of the things that is a feature of all market is that it is an information generating machine.
So it tells you what the general consensus is on a lot of things in the market, or in people's minds or in just the collective consciousness, right?
What the market is telling you is that it thinks that this pump is shortable.
It thinks that Bitcoin has not bottomed yet, and it's telling you that that's what people expect to happen.
It's something you want to be careful about because just because everybody gets all aligned on one thing doesn't mean that they're wrong.
It's usually the opposite.
If everybody thinks something's going to happen, well, it generally tends to happen.
But why that happens… you see tops and bottoms is that once everybody agrees, there's nobody else to convince.
And so there's like theoretically no more additional capital to pull in.
So that's why when everybody flips bullish, it's usually around a top because if everybody's bullish, there's not anyone else to flip from bearish to bullish and there's no more additional capital to bring in for a marginal buyer.
Same thing at the bottom, right?
Like I said, one of these episodes recently, I said, it's just me and the cockroaches left in Bitcoin and I don't even know where the sell button is.
There's a lot of very long-term holders in this asset specifically.
And I think it's something like 16.5 million coins out of Bitcoin's total supply is currently in the hands of long-term holders.
So it's one of these things where it's like the longer we go on with this, the fewer and fewer bears there are left to sell.
And at this point, it's kind of like, yeah, you can short Bitcoin expecting it to go back down.
But at some point, there aren't going to be any bears left.
And that's when things will turn around and go the other direction.
That may have already happened.
And we could see this being the beginnings of a slow build towards a bull market.
But yeah, I think you want to be careful about saying like, oh, this is too popular.
It's wrong.
Because generally, consensus is correct.
But you're usually top or bottom when there's nobody left to convert one way or the other.
And I think right now, there's a lot of disagreement about a lot of things in the market.
So that's kind of why we're seeing this grind, right?
Like in the equities market, you saw like basically a year of slow grinding down sideways chopping price action and then a sudden gigantic bullish reversal.
I'm not saying that's what's going to happen for Bitcoin, but the bears are getting very confident right now.
And I think that that's – I'm paying attention.
No, but that is what you're saying about crypto.
That's where your money is.
That's where your portfolio is.
You want to be the biggest ETH holder at Milk Road or in the world or whatever you want.
That is what you're saying.
That is 100% what you're saying, though.
I am basically saying my portfolio is a thesis of saying that eventually this number go up, right?
So like I'm, I'm, I'm, my thesis on Ethereum and Bitcoin are very strong and they're not invalidated by a couple of months of, of price action.
And I'm just willing to be patient and wait while this plays out.
That's, you know, an opportunity cost I'm making with my capital that other people aren't.
And, you know, everybody has to do what they think is best here, but that's, that's just my strategy for navigating the markets and for getting through these kinds of periods.
But I mean, like.
Yeah, I am leaning bullish.
Michael Nadow is a great analyst who I've followed for a long time.
I did an interview with him, I think last week or the week before, and we talked a little bit off camera, and he asked me what I think was going to happen, and I told him some stuff.
I'm not saying I changed his mind or anything, but I know that Mike has also started accumulating some alts, so he's starting to get nervous about the bull case too.
So some of the bears are starting to come around and say, like, I don't know, maybe Bitcoin's going to break out here.
So we'll see.
It's a non-zero chance, and I'm rooting for it.
But if it doesn't happen, I'm just going to accumulate.
If we make new lows, I'm just going to buy more.
So I really don't care which way things go here.
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I really like Michael.
And if he listens to this or watches a clip from it, shout out to Michael.
Great analysis.
Your recent bag of alts is freaking crazy.
That's straight out of Milkrow DJ and some of that stuff.
Okay.
That literally tokens me out of there.
There's stuff that I'm like, yeah, that's a normal one.
And there's other stuff in that list that I'm like, you're wild, man.
You're really betting on some kind of...
crazy frenzy that's going to happen here.
Shout out, Michael, for bringing diversified ideas to their portfolio.
For anybody who was listening to John talk and actually wants to know what's in John's bag, you got to go pro.
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You want to see what's in John's bag?
Just a dollar for seven days.
You could just pay a dollar, go look at it, and go, meh, and then just move on.
Move on with your life.
ETH, wow.
Revelation.
I needed to pay a dollar to see that John.
There's more in there than just Ethereum.
Yeah, there's five other things.
Yeah, we could do a family feud of what they are and most people would get them.
So anyways, we'll play that someday on the show.
Clarity is still, I just want to go back to Clarity.
Clarity is still kind of in the doghouse though, man.
Like on Polymarket, it's still like a sub 50% chance.
So and that that a polymarket is, you know, that I don't know how connected that is to lawmakers or if there's any insiders there for that kind of stuff.
But it definitely, you know, markets are information machines, like you said, it's telling us that it's it's still a pretty big split on whether that would happen or not.
Yeah.
And and the general warning I've heard is that that doesn't get done in the next couple of weeks.
You got summer recess and you got midterm season after that it's cooked like it's done.
It's not coming back for a while.
And we have some people come on the show, tell us that that doesn't matter if it goes away, it goes away and, and, you know, we'll find a way, but, but others saying like, that's, that's not going to be very good if that, if it does not make it through.
So there is a.
There is a Republican senator on the United States Senate Banking Committee who has been saying that he is not going to allow Kevin Warsh's nomination to go forward until the Trump DOJ drops their investigation of Jerome Powell.
And I think he's also the same senator, Tom Tillis, who said that he recommended we wait two weeks on the Clarity Act for markup in the committee until they can reach a resolution on stablecoin yield, which I think was another.
turning of the screw so this guy's not up for re-election he's trying to force the trump administration to kind of do what he wants basically before he goes out the door to me i'm reading this as another way for him to hold up the president's agenda and kind of turn the screw to get the DOJ to drop the investigation to Powell.
They did drop that investigation into Powell.
So the Kevin Warsh nomination for chairman of the federal reserve seems like it's going to move forward.
And it also seems like that same committee, the Senate banking committee is the one that's going to do the markup on the clarity act in the Senate.
And so now it seems like he's going to comply and go along and allow the president's administration or the administration's, uh, legislative agenda to move forward.
So that means that maybe they will actually get a discussion on the clarity act.
But to me, that was a cop out.
It was like, he was saying, Oh, we need two weeks to talk about this stable coin yield thing.
They've been talking about this for years.
They've been disagreeing about it for years.
We've delayed the clarity act months and months and months while they've been talking about it.
So to me, that was like, I didn't believe him.
I was like, that's, you're just using this as another way to, to.
you know, get the administration to do what you want and to wield the little bit of power and leverage you have over the Trump administration to get, get what you want done.
But he, he got what he wanted.
The investigation has been dropped.
So maybe we'll see the clarity act come through, but I have been bullish on the clarity act passing for a long time.
But once I found out it wasn't going to come out of the committee in April, I flipped from, you know, 70, 30 that it passes to now like.
4060 that it doesn't like i now think it is unlikely even like they could get this through committee in may and get it into the senate and get it passed and it could be a law by june but it's like this is like you got very very very little margin of error here at this point and so to me i think it's it's less likely than likely that it passes so this is like a big loss to a lot of people obviously the sec and the cftc are collaborating to try to do everything that they can from a regulatory perspective to you know, normalize and lay out policy and like give people the basic things that they would want from the Clarity Act.
But there is still a big value add to having something passed that's in law because that's much harder to change than just regulation.
And it can formalize a lot of things, codify a lot of things in language that can't be just, you know, changed and interpreted later.
Now, you've seen a lot of critics in the Clarity Act also say that future administrative ambiguity in the legislative language to use that as loopholes to like...
create waiting periods of years or more on things and make it an impossible maze of bureaucratic nonsense for crypto projects to get through anyway.
In other words, the crypto, the Clarity Act as written might be used as another trap to tangle up the industry and prevent us from doing business in the United States.
That's as may be.
But I think, you know, one way or another, like we've got to move forward with this industry.
And I think that this is a first step.
So I don't know.
I have a lot of mixed and conflicting feelings about this.
We'll see what happens.
I don't know if it's going to make it out of committee or not, but it's been a long, messy, frustrating experience watching this process play out.
What about the Trump crypto conference?
What's that all about?
Is that related?
I saw them announce that a couple of weeks ago as the Iran stuff, as maybe he lost interest in Iran.
And I was like, okay, it's going to be some kind of...
way for him to plant the flag of victory when Clarity passes and he's just getting ready for that and to sell us another meme coin or something like that.
But I'm assuming at this point it's kind of, I think that's like right now or this week.
And they put the guest list out last week and it's some names we know, some names that John loves like Kathy Wood and Pomp and stuff.
So clearly it's some kind of real event.
I believe it already happened.
I believe it did.
I could be wrong.
I believe it already happened.
And I don't think that there were any major headlines that came out of it.
And that's kind of the extent of anything I'd like to say about that.
Like, I think the president feels some sort of obligation to this industry to like support it because there were a lot of people from the industry that were supporters of his and his family's in the business.
But there are a lot of critics who say that a lot of what he's doing is actually counterproductive for the industry and is like seen as a grift and a conflict of interest and a whole bunch of the negative things.
So to me, this is like.
It's going on.
I don't really have anything to say about it.
And, you know, next question.
Aren't you excited that Mike Tyson was there?
It was yesterday.
I'm sure Mike Tyson is excited that Mike Tyson was there.
We'll get him on the show one day.
That's my dream guest.
Is you and I interviewing.
No, it's not.
I think I'll spit that one out.
You can have Mike Tyson on your show.
We'll have a full bout.
Mike Tyson versus Cathie Wood.
That's what we're going to do with this show is eventually just put like a, you know, you put two different insects in a jar.
I feel like that's the future of the show.
So we're going to find the two most random people and put them together, which is what crypto conferences typically tend to do is find like a smart investor person.
And we're going to pair them with the most unknown or the most like non-expert.
celebrity possible on this.
It's like a dancing with the stars, but it's for finance.
That's basically what crypto conferences are.
I wanted to ask you, John, we were talking earlier about other tokens.
Last week, we discussed Aave and everything that's going on with their hack from KelpDAO.
And I think that was, we discussed like a potential, you know, would this be a good dip buying opportunity?
A story that I've seen, or at least I've seen develop in this past week as Bitcoin kind of did a little move there, tried to break 80k twice and has failed so far.
I definitely feel like I've tracked a few alts looking good, especially alts that have like some of the basics covered.
A lot of stuff that we talk about in MilkRib Pro, like good revenue, might be doing some form of buybacks and obviously hyperliquid leads in both of those.
But this morning, I think, or yesterday we had Lido.
Lido?
Lido?
Lido?
Which one is it?
Which one's the cruise ship place and which one's the this one?
Lido.
Lido.
The Lido deck is on a cruise ship and Lido is the DeFi protocol.
God, I sound like an idiot.
So it does not sound like I've been here for like six years.
And when we look at the Bitcoin dominance chart, it's actually the opposite of what I'm saying.
The Bitcoin dominance is actually rising, is back up above 60% in the past week.
So what I'm saying is definitely not proven, at least on the Bitcoin dominance chart.
But I feel like we're definitely seeing like arrows.
Aerodrome is another one.
We are seeing some of those other tokens that are maybe top 50 tokens, market cap.
Start to see some life.
John, are there any legs to kind of like a little DeFi season here, a little alt season that we may see if Bitcoin maybe stagnates around this range?
How do you see that playing out?
I really think that a lot of this is going to depend on what Bitcoin does and whether or not it breaks out.
Because in my view, there's a lot of value.
I've said this many times.
There's a lot of value in the digital asset ecosystem.
There are a lot of great projects, a lot of great protocols, and a lot of great value being driven to these tokens.
But the market is mispricing and undervaluing a lot of it.
And so long as Bitcoin stays in a bear market, I think that's likely to continue.
You're not going to see alt season or a lot of these protocols and projects go to overvaluation levels if Bitcoin gets rejected off of 80K and goes down to Goblin Town below 60K.
So I think that that's what I'm watching for to deploy more capital into the alt space.
There are a lot of great projects.
Some of them you listed.
Some of them I'm watching that aren't on that list.
that I would like to deploy more capital into.
But before I do that, I want to see Bitcoin break 80K, 85K, somewhere in there, flip it from resistance to support.
In other words, go through, break through, hold it.
I'm not looking for Bitcoin to just poke its head through and then maybe get clobbered back down again like whack-a-mole.
I would like to see some sustained action at a certain price level over some of these key resistances.
And then...
you know, you're not going to get the absolute bottom in a lot of these alts, but you have a much stronger thesis, much stronger confidence to say, okay, it's now time to go start allocating.
There are some projects like, you know, Ethereum, where I just, I don't do that at all.
I just accumulate ETH, I hold ETH, and I don't care what Bitcoin's doing.
I'm just going to be holding that.
But then there are a lot of other projects that I think could appreciate rapidly and appreciate a lot more.
But I think you do need to wait for confirmation for Bitcoin to be in a bull market in order to get that thesis confirmed.
I think that there are some people, you know, like...
like our friend Michael Nadal, like a lot of other people who are just saying like, hey, this is close enough for me.
I don't know where the exact bottom is going to be, but this is in that ballpark.
And so I'm accumulating.
And I think that that's fine too, because I've done that as well.
But yeah, it's going to be interesting to see which ones of these break out and how much and whether or not they can hold that ground that they gain if Bitcoin does get rejected here.
In the last 30 days, you've got, I'm just going to rattle some of them off and we have them here on the Milk Road Pro dashboard.
It's kind of hard to see it.
And then there's tokens here that I don't even really follow.
But even the notable ones in here like Zcash, which I wouldn't really say something we talk about too much, but that's up 62% 30 day.
Algorand, 44%.
Arbitrum, 36% up.
Jupiter having a nice rebound from they were ranging for a really long time, around $0.15.
Now back up almost to $0.20, 30% up.
And a lot of other DeFi tokens kind of experiencing similar rises.
So yeah, good explanation there, John.
I think it's something we'll keep an eye on as well.
And if you want to know what's in John's portfolio, you can go to Milkroad Pro and see which one of those alts that he holds.
It's none of the ones.
I want to ask you another thing while we're on this Milk Row Pro dashboard.
Sorry to just advertise Pro the whole time.
Fear and greed.
So this is obviously my kind of metric.
You know, everything you're looking at is very in-depth, but I like this kind of thing where I didn't realize until I was doing a show, I forgot who it was, maybe with Natalie Brunel last week, that fear and greed was back at 47, right?
And we talked about this.
This red area here is you and I doing the podcast every day.
This starts pretty much when Jay left.
It's just the sea of red where we went all the way down to like five at one point during those big dip days.
But now I didn't realize that the fear and greed index over crypto had risen all the way back up to almost like halfway up the scale.
I feel like that's actually kind of unjustified.
How do you feel?
I feel like it should still be lower.
Like, I don't know if like just going back up to almost 80K is enough.
to really make me that optimistic.
I think that this will continue to wiggle.
I think that it's high time that we saw some of this fear start to pass.
And we're 20K off the lows on Bitcoin.
It stands to reason that we'd be more in the neutral range to me.
It's not like we're in greed territory.
So to me, I think that's kind of reflective of where the market is because there are a lot of bulls who think we're going to go much higher.
And there's a lot of bears who think that this is a great time to go short.
So you net all that out and you end up somewhere closer to neutral.
But yeah, I think that that.
I think that's going to move a lot, though, because if Bitcoin does break out here, people are going to lose their minds.
And if it doesn't hold these levels...
On either side.
Yeah, well, I mean, look, if we lose 70K, people are going to get terrified.
Everybody's going to freak out.
So I think that's going to change a lot and it's going to shift.
But it's nice to see that come out of this deep red crimson months and months stretch that we've been in because I don't think that's been justified either.
It did seem, I agree.
It felt like the fear and greed was like an overreaction.
You know, we talked about that a few times on the show, it's probably with guests and with each other that, you know, you had the fear and greed being at the lowest level ever.
Like people were like, it's never gone to five.
And yet Bitcoin was at 66K, right?
That it's like, it's not at eight or at 10.
or anyway, it's still 4X up from the lows from the last bear market.
And yet the fear and greed is lower somehow, right?
So it is definitely a novelty scale to watch.
But one that I'm always, I'm always, you know, again, I like what you said earlier, markets are information machines or whatever, then I don't know what the fear and greed is, but I was kind of correlate that as well.
It's definitely, let's just say when it's deep in the red, it's usually a good buying opportunity.
I think that that's the general lesson.
And when it's consistently at the very, very top of the green, that maybe that's also a good time to sell.
I like to say buying fear is a good deal at any price.
So whenever you see it, look, the presumption of that sentence is that you're talking about an asset that you do believe in, that you have a long-term thesis on and that you're like solid on that.
But if that's the case, Doesn't matter if that asset is good or bad.
There are going to be periods in the market where there's euphoric enthusiasm and where there's terror and dread.
Whenever you see that happen in one of those assets you have a long-term thesis on, buying fear is a good deal at any price, especially if you're one of these longer-term accumulators on something like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
I think that's a great opportunity to be entering.
And so that's what I do, man.
When we have these huge panics, see, when you're going up like this.
The market will climb this wall of worry and everyone's like, oh, we're going to break out.
Are we going to roll over?
Well, I don't care either way because when it started to crash and collapse and everybody was terrified and wetting their pants, I was buying at that point.
So I've already bought at 65K.
I've already bought at 70K.
I'm like, if it breaks out, great.
If it goes lower, great.
I got more dry powder for you.
So like, yeah, I think.
You just wait for extreme terror to seize the market and then, you know, calmly accumulate the assets you believe in.
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I haven't wet my pants in a couple of years, man.
Okay.
So I haven't.
Congratulations.
Yeah.
Thank you.
You gotta get deeper into crypto.
You're not using enough leverage.
My moon bird go from a, you know, whatever, just six figures to like 10 bucks.
That was that thing.
I wet my pants a couple of times.
Especially when I saw that Kevin Rose was taking ketamine to keep himself going on.
Anyways, totally different rant.
I have not, I have not.
Maybe if hyper liquid has, maybe if Jeff from hyper liquid.
does something terrible and leaves hyperliquid and it goes to zero, then maybe I'll wet my pants at that point.
John, let's wrap this up.
Big week in the economy coming up.
I'm sure we'll cover it on Milk Road and on the Macro Show and on the AI Show.
Let's talk macro for a quick minute.
This is the last Jerome Powell summit meeting or whatever.
It's going to be his last speech.
So that's a big deal.
There's unemployment coming out this week.
There's, I think, a few different banks, not American banks, but the Bank of Canada, at least over here.
We have our report coming out.
I think it's a quarterly report.
And a few other banks, I think Japan as well.
And there's also earnings.
I think you told me earlier, 40% of the S&P 500 is reporting earnings this week.
And that's something that's high interest, especially on the AI channel.
If you guys want to catch up with what Melvin is talking about, both on X.
And in the free newsletter for AI, that's a great place to track a lot of that stuff because obviously the AI stocks and the MAG7 are a huge part of that market cap for the S&P.
So I feel like we're going to cover that really well over there.
John, across all that, to you, is this situation in Iran still the central nugget, the thing to watch, at least in the short term, or do these other things kind of have the potential to rock the boat a little bit?
I think the boat can be rocked by anything at this point.
The Trump administration, to the last I heard, was holding a meeting today in a Situation Room to evaluate a new proposal from Iran.
I don't know what the circumstances will be with that.
I expect that to be ongoing.
As of the time of recording, last I heard, the U.S.
blockade is still in place.
And I think that, like you said, there's the last FOMC meeting from J-PAL.
I'm hoping it'll be a nothing burger and they just hold rates and he says, have a great life.
And then, yeah, the rest of these things are going to matter a lot.
I think you're going to see a lot of reaction from the market on these earnings because I think you're going to see a lot of companies revise their earnings down.
So right now the bigger thing is driving a lot of the stuff in the market is scarcity of energy and of compute.
And so if you're a company that benefits from being able to meet the demand of scarcity for one of those things like oil or compute, you're going to benefit a lot.
Your earnings are going to be revised higher.
You're going to do well.
You're going to perform well.
If you're a company that relies on compute or energy and you have to be a price taker in this situation, your earnings are going to get revised down.
It's going to put downward pressure on your projected growth and your stock.
So I think there's going to be a lot of companies reporting and people watching closely to see what those numbers look like.
I think some of the biggest ones are Google, Meta.
Microsoft, Amazon.
I think those are this week.
There's some other ones, but those are the big ones people are watching.
There's going to be a lot more though.
And so, yeah, there's going to be a lot that moves the market this week in terms of data, in terms of geopolitical things.
And then the earnings from some of these big hyperscalers will be a big deal as well.
So just a lot of, a lot of news and macro this week.
Those sirens, man, they're iconic.
You have so many good lines, so many John isms and you have the sirens and it's like, it's the, it's the trademark.
And also there's a bit of a red glow outside.
Is Kenny Rogers chicken just opened across from you?
It's spring.
It's spring on the East coast and is a nice, lovely glow out the window.
Okay.
I got curtains up, but it's still pretty.
I don't know.
Definitely looks like Kenny Rogers chicken for anybody who gets that, that, that reference.
We've all seen Seinfeld.
Yeah.
Well, maybe not.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I had those at Jet Z.
That's just some old ass TV show to them.
Just like us with mash or, or whatever they played in the seventies.
So a quick shout out, a couple of things to watch on Milk Road, and these are not, one of them is Milk Road Pro.
John is writing his first ever Macro Pro Report, which is a big juicy report.
And John, I don't know if you want to give us a preview, but John's been working all weekend that pretty much gives you a whole view of the state of macro.
John, do you have anything to say about that before I go to the next plug?
Yeah, I'm going to try to figure out how to organize my thoughts on all of this stuff.
I have like 22 pages of things so far and a bunch of charts and things.
But yeah, I'm just trying to give people a picture of what's happening because obviously there's been this big bullish breakout.
But let's drill in a little bit more, see what's going on there.
What's the story?
What's the outlook?
Is this a blow off?
Is it a new leg of the bull run?
Who benefits?
Who doesn't?
And what is the impact economically going to be of this huge energy shock that we're seeing?
You know, like there's been a 46% rise in farmers in the United States filing for bankruptcy because the fertilizer price increases on and on and on.
I'm not going to go super deep in the weeds in some of these things, but I want to give people a bit of a deeper sense of context around some of these things and the implications economically, what that means for the markets, and just kind of give more of a perspective on that.
Great.
We can't wait to read it.
That comes out, I think, at the end of the week in Milk Road Pro.
And then also today on the Milk Road AI channel, I have an interview coming out with Dr.
Alex Wisner-Gross, which we did an episode with him a couple months back.
He is part of the Moonshots podcast, which is kind of the biggest AI show that there is out there.
He's the last person to ever do three undergrads at the same time at MIT.
And after that, they banned it, where he finished at the top of his class.
in i think it was advanced mathematics like advanced physics and like chemistry or something like that so the three hardest degrees you could probably ever imagine he did all of them at the same time uh and then they banned that practice because they're like we can't let other people like him do that and i don't think anybody else could but still they banned it after that um He has a daily newsletter, Substack, that he puts out about what's going on in AI and how he sees the future.
He and the main guy from Moonshots, Dr.
Diamantis, they just put out a huge kind of, it's literally a book-length report, whatever you call that, about...
tangibly how they see AI impacting different industries over the next 10 years and what those effects could actually be.
I find that a lot of people speculate that like, here's how AI is going to change things, but it's kind of like, it's very hollow.
These are probably two of the best people to actually give you an in-depth look on that.
It's a free book.
It's literally just a page online.
So it's very, you know, they're not trying to grift or anything like that.
They're both very good at...
building themselves up and being very popular.
But we kind of went through, I went through it with him on the show.
And you can listen to that today.
It's on the Milk Road AI channel.
I think it's 53 minutes.
So it is a slightly longer show.
A few other things to note about Dr.
Alex.
He has turned into, he's been a VC for a couple of years.
And he recently funded the first robotics race in the US, which was held in a parking lot in Boston a couple of weekends ago.
He got jealous a year ago when he saw, a video out of China that was showing all their different robotic, like humanoid robots racing each other and fighting each other or something like that.
So he decided to fund a company that was going to do that.
So they hosted their first one ever.
So he works on a lot of kind of funny, quirky projects like that.
Anyways, it's a great interview.
Dr.
Axe is a total Gemma and somebody I think is a big up and comer in terms of the AI space and someone's going to continue to be a big name in the future.
And I think we're very lucky that he makes time for Milk Reddiff to talk to us.
So go check that out.
John.
You're a legend.
Lots of great interviews coming out this week on macro and on crypto.
So make sure you guys keep an eye out for that.
And I guess I will, I will, I will talk to you in a few minutes, John.
I'm going to keep chatting after this.
Anyways, you guys have a great week.
Thanks for listening to Milk Road and let's go 80K, man.
Next Monday, we want that 80K.
Thanks LG.
Great job.
Beautiful.
Beautiful landing of the plane as always.
Wonderful.
No, no.
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