# Bitcoin, AI IPOs, and Fed Shifts Reshape Markets

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-06-01

## Transcript

before the end of the year, there's still a non-zero chance we could be at all-time highs.
That would be huge.
And it would really surprise a lot of investors.
michael sailor is selling his bitcoin which is confusing to the average holder but we're going to explain how that works today on the show and why not maybe maybe not related to him we could go lower before reversing it's the start of june and we're still trying to figure out if it's time to log off for the summer or stay inside the whole time and watch the charts today's episode is brought to you by cape the privacy first mobile carrier nexo earn interest borrow and trade crypto and calci where your takes finally pay out I forgot to mention that John is on the show with me today, which is also very exciting.
We always have a good time chatting.
John, how are you, man?
I am great, LG.
Michael Saylor is selling Bitcoin.
The war in Iran has kicked off again.
We're going to have a new chairman of the Federal Reserve who's going to hike rates at some point this year.
Everything is collapsing, and it's a great time to be here.
This is, this has been the theme of you and I hosting these shows.
And I say this so many times that Jay dipped right at the convenient time.
Jay was like, Oh, the market broke.
I'm getting out of here.
I'm going to go do something else.
And, and who knows when he'll be back when you, when Jay comes back on the show, that's the reversal.
Just, I don't even know what it's going to be or why.
It's probably when you and I go on vacation or something.
this summer when we need him to fill in but that will be the bottom and the time to buy back in until i'm calling it right now jay's first appearance back on the show will be the bottom uh and up only from there anyways uh john as we were talking a few minutes before we started recording uh we record this a few hours before you guys listen to it bitcoin was going on a nice little slide uh hour by hour ticking off like you know just under half a percent per hour the last several hours.
So we went from 74 K yesterday on a bright, sunny Sunday afternoon for me, at least now to 70, 700 as the price action fights for its life.
John, what the hell's going on?
Well, take a big breath for this one.
You can see John be like sucking in a lot of air.
So.
First of all, what had happened was, okay, so a couple of things have happened today as it relates to markets overall and to Bitcoin.
I think the first thing to say is that Michael Saylor has sold two and a half million dollars of Bitcoin, 32 Bitcoin.
I think he sold.
I think this was expected.
He'd been telegraphing this.
He talked about this in Strategies quarterly earnings reports.
And this is not a major sale, but it does seem to be inoculating the market, sort of normalizing this practice from strategy because they anticipate to do further selling to fund their STRC, their stretch Bitcoin backed product.
So that's kind of one thing that's happening.
A lot of people are angry.
They're upset.
They're disillusioned.
Some people are like, what?
He's selling?
I had no idea this was happening.
And they're just now hearing about this plan of his for the first time.
So that's one thing that's a big piece of headline news.
The other thing I think is driving the sell off, actually driving this in a much more larger sense, broader.
broader market dynamics here is that we've seen escalations in the conflict in the Middle East again.
So Israel has struck Lebanon, the United States and Iran have exchanged fire on a couple of places.
Like I think Iran attacked Kuwait and the US struck Iran and Iran has now backed out of the peace deal, backed out of the negotiations and kind of said they don't want to pursue a peace agreement at this time.
And they're going back to blockading the straight.
um the us is blockading the straight um and so it seems like a big reversion oil jumped i think eight percent on the news it's back up to about 95 a barrel um and the the stock market sold off bitcoin sold off the dollar index jumped and it's just kind of like the market's reacting overall to this uh kind of stark reversal from something that seemed to be close to a resolution and the straight opening and the ceasefire holding um to now kind of going back in the direction we're seeing escalations here so there's there's a couple of bad bad Bad headlines in the markets overall.
Some directly related to Bitcoin, some not.
But I think that's the reason for the sell-off here.
Okay, where in the market, not crypto, is there sell-off?
The S&P is like $20 off its all-time high, which was on Friday.
That's not selling off, John.
Is there anything else?
Am I missing something?
No, I think it's just like a general reaction.
Like it didn't dump, right?
Like crypto is much more sensitive to these things, I think, in general, because it's further out the risk curve and further out the liquidity curve.
But I do think that the reaction from oil kind of speaks to the market reaction here and look i think this is something i've got an interview with jim bianco from bianco research um that's coming out tomorrow on the macro channel we talked about this exact thing the the largest force in the economy right now is the the ai trade that is overwhelming the the the fears and uncertainty from the straight of hormous being closed and it's so strong that we've seen the largest energy shock in the history of the of the globe And the AI trade is still going so strong that the markets are still going higher in most places.
And in most cases, the concentration is heavily in AI centered stocks and activity.
I think it's like 48% now, something like that of the S&P 500 is concentrated in AI related trades.
So in any event, that concentration is very strong.
It's going to continue, but it's overwhelmed the strongest energy crisis we've ever seen.
And so the S&P 500 is kind of like shrugging this off right now.
I don't know if that'll last but um yeah i don't know people are kind of looking through this still for the moment we are at a very crucial point in time right now ai stocks have ripped they're gonna keep ripping our analysts on the ai side are up like literally a hundred percent or more on quite a few calls and crypto is about to boom again or at least it feels that way if you want all the insight on what we're buying what our analysts are doing what's on their watch list all of that is in milk road pro so join at the link below Two major forces battling out for S&P direction supremacy.
And it's clear that AI is winning, man, because you mentioned before, the S&P is what, on its ninth week?
It concluded its ninth week last week of green?
Yes, correct.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Straight up, up only.
And yeah, you know, there's no reason to think that this will ever slow down.
It's just going to go up into the right forever, forever and ever and ever and ever.
I do want to talk about Bitcoin, but I think let's just let's just talk bigger market things first.
What do you expect from here for that market?
Because let's assume that both of these narratives continue because clearly the situation in Iran, no matter what is said on Friday afternoons or Monday mornings or whatever, there's still something going on.
And let's assume that that remains this kind of quasi stalemate for a little while.
Right.
Hopefully not.
But it feels like it would stay that way.
Let's actually talk about things that we know.
And I want you to kind of give me your take on everything.
But just to recap what we know, at least about the market, Iran stuff will remain kind of ambiguous in terms of how it's going to end and when it's going to end.
Could get worse, could get better, may not end soon.
We have three giga IPOs coming very soon.
SpaceX in just a few weeks.
It is June.
So it's coming up very soon.
Open AI shortly after, probably in September.
And then we don't know about Anthropic yet, but that is coming as well.
And we talk about that a lot on our Milk Road AI show with the rest of the team, which comes out on Wednesdays.
And like you said, the S&P, with all that in mind, is now up to 48% in AI plays, AI companies.
is now sitting just below all-time highs and really doesn't seem to budge too much at these reignitions of the war.
You know, it bottomed in late March when things seemed really bad and has been up only since then.
So, John, given that, it's the first day of June.
We're going into, for a lot of people, it is summer.
This is when summer really begins.
School's out for most places where you live.
What do we look at between now and Labor Day?
Oh, boy.
Okay.
Big breath in.
Yeah, once again, you ask big question, few word, big question, big answer.
Okay, so I'll try to kind of like spell out a little bit of what I'm seeing and what I think might happen here.
So first of all, I think the main thing to say is that it's true that this AI trade is a juggernaut.
I don't think that the trade is over.
I don't think that I'm not calling a top here.
I'm not saying that this is all over.
However, I think that this recent escalation in the conflict presents a much more...
let's say, dire risk in several ways.
And I'll kind of explain what I'm what I'm saying here.
So the way I'm looking at this.
Iran knows that they're getting close to Trump's breaking point economically.
We have been running a lot of reserves.
There's been a lot of changes in the global consumption of oil that have happened in order to accommodate this loss of flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz.
And it's not just oil, it's other things.
It's liquid natural gas, it's helium, it's fertilizer, urea, a lot of different things.
But in any event, we've been running down reserves pretty rapidly.
I think we're getting to a point now where we've got about one month left before we hit operational minimums.
on these reserves.
So like when you have a reserve, if you know you're going to be well below your demand for a long time, you would ration those reserves to sort of like, you know, make sure that you're planning for the long term.
The way we've kind of looked at this is like seeing this as a short term situation and kind of globally, we've been rationing our reserves as a way of trying to control the prices as a short term strategy as opposed to planning for that long term loss of supply.
Well, it looks like Iran is saying like we're going to push just draw this out as long as we can.
They're refusing to negotiate on anything.
They've, they've walked away from the table.
They're not giving up their, their nuclear materials, which Trump has also said as a red line for him.
So because of this now Trump's time window to resolve this is shrinking because the economic impact of this, the severe economic impact of this, um, that, that, that, that cliff is, is much closer than it was that.
kind of pressures him to either cry uncle or you know basically escalate militarily to get the resolution he wants to extract the the nuclear materials that he wants or whatever the case may be that to me brings an elevated risk of iran retaliating by striking critical oil infrastructure in the region, resulting in even longer term impact to the global economy, global oil markets, global energy markets, and just the long term health of the global economy.
And that's a big risk.
And I think that's becoming more material now, especially as this has gone on longer and longer.
So, yeah, the risk of this now escalating.
really messing up the whole global economy in all markets, I think is much higher now than the market is pricing in.
Another thing to add into this, we have a new chairman of the Federal Reserve.
The first meeting of the Federal Reserve under Warsh is scheduled for, I believe.
the 14th through the 17th of June.
And I think he does his press conference on the 17th.
This is going to be really important because it's the first time we've had a new chairman of the Fed in eight years.
Now, historically, going back to Paul Volkler, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve has always have always voted basically along with whatever the chairman of the Federal Reserve wants to do.
That is not going to be the case this time.
Bill Barr is a member of the Board of Governors.
He's already said he opposes Kevin Walsh's plan for how he manages the balance sheet.
So he's going to have to fight a battle there.
Then Chris Waller has already made a speech in Germany, I think last week.
Basically saying that a dovish position on monetary policy right now is crazy and that we need to be talking about hikes and starting to get the market more accustomed to that with our forward guidance.
Jerome Powell did not step down.
He's still on the board.
So all this kind of subverts Warsh's ability to present himself as the leader of this institution.
It's also been, I think, over a year now since he's made formal public comment on his views on monetary policy outside of his committee hearing for his confirmation process.
So this is really going to be the first time that the market tests a new chairman of the Fed after eight years.
who is coming into a Fed that is more divided on policy than it's ever been.
Maybe not ever, but certainly in recent memory, like many, many decades.
And he's going to have to come out and make comments to the market and get them to believe him on what he says.
Now, what he says matters a lot, because if this war isn't concluded.
This acceleration, this economic shortage, the impact of this has been an energy crisis that's driven inflation higher.
So if he comes out and says, I think we need to get hawkish here and we need to hike rates, the market is pricing in at least one rate hike already.
So they're kind of expecting this, but it depends on if that happens just once this year or maybe multiple times this year.
That depends a lot.
If the market thinks that he's going to take away the...
turn on the lights at the party hike rates and kind of shut down this bull run you could see a lot of fear and a sell-off as a result of that if he doesn't do that right if he says like hey we're looking through these inflation scares this war is going to be over soon and you know a lot of the board says that they want to hike rates but i'm trying to be dovish and lean against that whatever then that might signal to the markets that okay maybe this chairman is going to try to keep rate hikes to a minimum and not do that so much.
And we might see the markets go into an extreme, overheated, overvalued bubble phase, even more so than we already are.
And there's risks that come from that, too.
So I just think there's a lot of uncertainty with some of these things.
And then there's these IPOs that are going to happen.
So SpaceX is going to have it.
I think it's sometime in early June, mid June, that SpaceX's IPO is going to happen.
I can't remember the date now off the top of my head.
But in a couple of weeks, SpaceX is going to have its IPO.
That is going to suck.
75, 80 billion dollars of initial liquidity for the, you know, however much, however many shares of equity they bring into that IPO, put that on the markets.
That is going to drive a lot of attention.
It's going to pull a lot of capital from retail.
I think a lot of institutional investors have already gotten their positions in a lot of these.
IPOs like SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, and many others.
But in any event, that's going to take a lot of attention.
And then at some point, you know, in a couple of weeks after that, there's a potential for them adding SpaceX into a lot of these QQQ indices.
And then once they do that, then there's going to be rebalancing.
There's going to be selling, repositioning, just broad based repositioning across the board.
This is a really large, I think it's estimated right now to be a $1.8 trillion IPO, but it could go to $2 trillion.
And that's just like a huge belly flop Elon Musk is taking into the US capital markets at a time when there's already a huge amount of concentration around this one theme.
And so, yeah, just I don't really know where I land with all of these things.
But as a crypto investor, right, there are a huge amount of changes.
of rapid changes of unknown outcomes in the macro landscape right now, all of this attention and capital is on other things.
Bitcoin and Ethereum and the digital asset industry overall are still valuable, still building for the long term, and these things still have really strong fundamentals and a strong thesis, but they don't have any enthusiasm, any euphoria.
or any attention right now.
And so I think that we've seen weakness from Bitcoin.
I expect that to continue, unfortunately, here for the short term.
But yeah, I don't know.
That's just a big tangle of answers about all these different macroeconomic things and how they're all pulling capital and attention away from crypto right now.
And so that's kind of what I see happening.
And a lot of these are unknowns.
We have to see how all these things play out because we've never seen a $2 trillion IPO.
We haven't seen a new Fed chairman in eight years.
We haven't seen what it looks like if Iran decides to blow up all the world's oil infrastructure.
over over the conflict over this this nuclear situation so i don't know there's a lot going on lg it's going to be a busy summer you know a while back when we when i started doing more of the ai podcast we had looked up or i had researched a bit of when was the last time a when when was the last year where there were such big ipos coming into the market um and i think it was like in the early 2010s on like the japanese stock market those companies i didn't i didn't really know that well so it was like this is it's not as relevant to like my interest so but but The last time there was a company that debuted as a top 10 company was Tesla.
And that's the last time that that has happened.
And now you have three potential companies that could do that, right?
Although being a trillion dollar company is not that new anymore.
If you thought a billion dollars was cool, I guess a trillion is now.
How quickly things change in finance.
And that's something that I, you know, I've found interesting is just like what, you know, and you kind of gave us a really good kind of view of that.
It's just, but I've been saying that for a while.
It's like, what, what is going to happen when these companies come out?
And when, not just when, when's the last time companies this big came out?
When's the last time companies IPO'd with these types of potential future returns and or vision, right?
Where it's like SpaceX, we're going to put data centers on the moon and launch them from there, you know, and put, put satellites around the sun to harness the power.
open eye and anthropic it's like they're just beginning this whole thing and there's all this marketing and propaganda about like all the jobs are going to disappear and here's a ubi and all this different stuff you're going to do so when's a lot it's not just these big giants coming on the market it's also like i don't remember that many companies with that that large of a promise in terms of five, 10, 20 years down into the future, debuting at the same time at such high valuations.
Right.
So I think that that's what's really interesting.
And also in the case of OpenAI and then Anthropik.
with so many users, right?
Like these are, these are like, this is high, high topic stuff, man.
This is high mindshare stuff.
Like you go to the library, even your librarian is like, oh yeah, I've been using Claude, blah, blah, blah.
You know, and it's like, this isn't, these aren't like obscure companies that people don't know that are IPO-ing.
These are like really well-known tools that everybody uses.
So anyways, that's, that's enough for me.
So that's, that's, we'll cover it on this show.
We'll cover it on Milkroad AI.
We'll cover it everywhere else.
You guys will cover it on Macro as well, John.
I want to flip to Bitcoin.
Because to me, that's also the big story.
And we are a crypto show.
So I want to stay glued to that.
I want to understand a little bit better from you, John, and for people that maybe haven't followed the, I guess, the products that strategy has put out, Michael Saylor's strategy has put out.
Him selling this 32 bitcoins is part of the plan, correct?
And this is something that he said he was going to do and will continue to do in the future.
Can you maybe just give us a bit of a one-on-one or a refresher on how that works?
Yeah, so Michael Saylor and Strategy have been iterating on different kinds of Bitcoin backed products to try to find what has product market fit and what has demand.
So I think he went through, I could be wrong on this, but I think he went through something like 18 different ideas for a Bitcoin backed product to see what got traction in the market.
And the one that seems to have worked really well other than MSTR, which is just direct exposure to his treasury company, is this STRC product.
stretch pays an 11 and a half percent dividend It's a preferred equity offering that he calls credit, but it's not actually credit.
It's a preferred equity offering.
In any event, in order to pay that 11.5%, he has to have dollars in cash to pay to people.
He can do that in one of two ways.
He can sell Bitcoin off of his balance sheet or he can issue MSTR stock and raise it that way.
So what he's doing here is because he doesn't want to completely obliterate the value proposition and attractiveness of his equity, his common stock master, MSTR, he's kind of saying, okay, I'm going to balance some of the ways that I raised this liquidity by selling a little bit of the balance sheet too.
Now he sold only 32 Bitcoin.
So it's not because he needs the money.
He has a balance sheet with $900 million of cash on it right now.
He doesn't have to sell the Bitcoin, right?
But he's doing this in a bear market.
He's doing this only a few.
$5,000 above his entry.
I think his average sell price was around 77K and his average entry is around 75.
So in any event, the point is that he's just trying to get the market used to this idea because he wants to be able to continue to offer this STRC product.
Now, the reason he wants to offer that and why he's willing to sell some Bitcoin in order to do that is because that product has enabled him to buy, I think, something around six, like, I don't want to misquote this, I think it's around $60 billion of Bitcoin.
He's gotten a lot of capital specifically from that product.
billions of dollars worth of buys he's made.
And he's done a lot of that during a Bitcoin bear market when a lot of other people who are trying to raise capital to buy crypto or to invest in the digital asset markets have been unable to do so.
So he's found product market fit with something.
It's working really well.
The market has shown a strong demand for it.
In order to fund it, he's willing to part with a little bit of his balance sheet so he doesn't obliterate MSTR and so he can still offer this product.
So he's remaining a very, very strong net buyer of Bitcoin.
And he's been spending several months trying to say like, hey, this is what we're going to do.
He's tried to tell the markets this, and yet a lot of people are still surprised by it.
But I think that's kind of what's going on there.
And I think that the weakness on Bitcoin here is we got rejected off of the bear market resistance band.
We've seen a drop.
We're now, I think, testing 70K, which is kind of where I thought we would go.
I'm a little bit now more concerned that we're going to go lower just because of all these headwinds and uncertainty.
If we see the S&P, like you said, it's been up nine weeks in a row.
if we see a red week for the s p you know like a three to five percent pullback i'm not calling for a crash by any means but i do think at some point you know just statistically you have a mean reversion you're gonna have to have some kind of a slowdown at some point um you know if we see a weakness on on risk assets i think that may not be constructive for bitcoin and michael saylor is is switched from you know buying a billion dollars every week to being like a little bit more neutral on this right now Although I do think we'll probably see an announcement of a Bitcoin buy from him in the near future to kind of like balance that.
Like, hey, I'm selling a little, but I'm buying a lot more.
And that's what you should expect from us going forward.
In any event, that's kind of where we are.
I'm thinking that we're going to probably see some continued weakness from Bitcoin here.
But I do think we will find strong support here at 70K.
Just like we found support at 74 on the way down, we bounced there.
But I don't know how strong the support is.
I don't know if this is going to be a bottom for us here, if we'll hit this and hold it.
But I think we'll bounce off of it.
I just don't know how high we'll go or if it'll ultimately hold if we come back and retest 70K.
But I'm paying attention pretty close to here because I think this might be one of the last best times to accumulate Bitcoin is wherever this dip kind of settles to, whatever bottom we ultimately do find here.
This might be the best.
entry price on Bitcoin you get for a multi-year time horizon.
So I think this is a really important time to pay attention at a time when everyone's paying attention to all these other things we just talked about.
Bitcoin might be giving you the best buy in its history, or at least for the next several years.
And this could be a really good opportunity if you're willing to lock in and pay attention here.
And we cover that all the time on the show, right?
That it's like there's a lot of great things happening in crypto and on Bitcoin and everything else that, and Ethereum, you got to mention Ethereum, that indicate that things are healthy in the industry despite price action reflecting that.
John, what are the chances you're giving us an estimation?
You said this a few weeks ago.
You said, you know, we're bouncing off in the low 80s.
We may go down to 70K.
That's kind of happening right now.
Now you're telling me that maybe that's happened a little faster than you thought as well.
So that indicates, and with all the factors we kind of covered today, that we could go lower than that into 65.
What prevents us from...
from marking a bear market bottom in the coming weeks that goes below 60.
I don't know if there's anything that necessarily prevents us.
I've said for a long time that I think that if you've made it through the last six months of this apocalyptic sentiment and bearishness on Bitcoin, it's unlikely that you're going to suddenly be like, ah, let's just give up.
Now, I think that there will be some element of that, of just time-based capitulation.
I'm starting to see that in our community.
I think you're going to see some people.
and this is kind of why I'm starting to revise my thesis on this a little bit, the insatiable pump in AI is starting to give people FOMO.
So you're seeing people now start to wonder, should I puke my crypto bags and go chase these AI and top blast these stocks over here?
I think there'll be some element of capital that does that because there always is.
But then I also think that you're going to see some of these positive catalysts for Bitcoin also present a potential floor here.
So something you could see is the Clarity Act coming through in the next month.
That could be a very bullish tailwind for Bitcoin and for crypto.
If it doesn't come through, look out below, but we'll see what happens there.
And then the other thing is that for several weeks now, well, for longer than several weeks, but in the recent weeks, there's been a lot of public teasing of some kind of an announcement around a Bitcoin strategic reserve from the US government.
I don't know what that means.
If it's just like, hey, we're going to hold this in our left hand instead of our right hand, like the market shrugs it off.
But if they say something more bullish, like we're accumulating Bitcoin in a budget neutral way or.
We're adding the Bitcoin we seized from XYZ terrorist organization to our balance sheet.
Whatever that announcement is, there does seem to be some kind of forthcoming announcement from the federal government around that.
That could be a catalyst for positive momentum there.
I just think that there's ample reason to think that there could be some tailwinds here.
But there's also some FOMO and some exhaustion and some capitulation happening.
I think we could go down and test 60K.
I'm not saying...
that that's out of the question by any means.
But I think pushing us below 60K and keeping us there for several months seems like a stretch to me.
I just think that seems like a pretty hard floor.
And I don't really see us like we could go sweep it.
We could test it.
We could go through it.
But I think, well, if we do, it'll be quick.
And I think the recovery will be pretty steep because I do think that people recognize now that this is now becoming a value trade as opposed to like a speculation trade.
And so I think that that'll start to be reflected in the market price soon.
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How do you feel about the idea that, you know, and selling your crypto bags to FOMO and to AI at this point, we're not going to, I don't want to debate that, good or bad.
What about people looking at their long-term crypto bags and seeing that those are really underperforming compared to other?
crypto assets and hyper liquid is the obvious one but um even the other stuff and stuff that even you believe in as well things like near uh newer entries like venice zcash like there's there's you know there's this kind of like ring of like five or six assets right now that have seemed that have done like incredibly well in the last two months um and have all these different reasons for them to perform and to continue to move up um and seem to be the only real kind of green shoots we're seeing through the bear market um and even an obvious uh we've talked about it there are many times uh maybe a lesser obvious asset but also kind of obvious to pick on is something like solana right where it's like solana and trench is kind of your number three chain for a long time now really like not discussed at all right not part of this meta narrative and again that's just we're just talking on like crypto twitter and stuff What do you make, John, of this?
I don't know if it's a rotation.
I don't know if people are selling their ETH or Bitcoin bags or Solana bags to get into Hyperliquid.
Maybe there's a lot of fresh capital coming in through the ETFs as well.
But do you see that trend continuing despite what happens to Bitcoin?
Like if we dip below 60K, does Hyperliquid remain at these levels because of everything it's got going on for it?
So I think that there's a lot of ways you could take this question.
I think that...
Number one, this whole privacy narrative has really caught the meta narrative attention in crypto right now.
It's definitely the main character and anything that's around that is where that attention goes.
But I think this is, again, an example of where you want to allocate and what thesis you're trying to bring to your investments in digital assets and which capital you're trying to compete to win.
So if you're trying to go after the hot ball of money, as a general term, whatever's hot this week, whatever the narrative is, whatever people are pump chasing right now.
Yeah, maybe that's Zcash, maybe that's VVV, maybe that's hype.
It's not to say that's all that's there.
It's not to say there's no fundamental value there.
But for example, I went to ConsenSys when Nier announced Nier Intense and I sat down with one of the guys who gave the presentation and talked to him about it for an hour and I made an allocation to Nier.
I don't really talk about this really, but I just grabbed a bag of it and staked it.
and left it alone and like i just you know like whatever eventually people will figure out this is worth something right consensus what year was that i think this was i think it was 2024 maybe 2023 just so people know that wasn't recently no it wasn't recently but like i've i'm not like i'm not like worried about near and like suddenly people have gotten excited about near and it pumped like a lot but um I don't know.
Either way, I'm still bullish on near, right?
Like I'm not because of the fundamental value of what they're building, what they're offering the market, not because Arthur Hayes decided as part of some Holy Trinity cabal trade this week.
By the way, actually, there was an interesting thing.
We should do a podcast on this.
Arthur Hayes bet Kyle Salmani $100,000 to charity of his choice if he could pick a digital asset that was going to outperform hype this year.
And Kyle picked soul.
Kyle Simani's got to make up his mind what he's doing, man.
The guy's got to figure out if he likes crypto or not.
But that's the idea, right?
Do you think that hype is going to continue to outperform here?
Or do you think Solana, which is extremely oversold and beat down, is going to have a recovery at some point?
And that's kind of the idea here.
So I think that that's something that every investor has to figure out for themselves.
What do you want to do with your capital?
Which thesis are you trying to bring here?
What capital are you trying to chase?
And what's your time horizon?
Is it the rest of 2026?
Is it the rest of this month?
Is it 10 years?
And I think for myself, I have a much longer view of the value proposition of digital assets.
So I'm more comfortable staying allocated to things like Bitcoin and Ethereum, even through this window of weakness.
And we've been talking about this, but I recently exited some of my altcoin positions because I think that there's going to be headwinds for Bitcoin.
When you're seeing that, I think you want to be a little bit more liquid and a little bit more hesitant to start DCing alts at the moment.
But I do think that this is a really great opportunity coming once we see this window of weakness on Bitcoin play out here on a lot of altcoin projects.
Now, for me personally, when I say I exited my altcoins, that doesn't include Ethereum.
I haven't sold any Bitcoin or Ethereum.
I'm not planning to.
I don't think there's a scenario where I would consider that.
But that's because I have a different thesis on those than some of the rest of this asset class.
And yeah, so anyway, there's a lot of ways to look at this and everybody has to figure out how they want to navigate this for themselves, what their thesis is, what their time horizon is and how they want to get allocated there.
But I think that.
Kyle is one example of somebody who sees the value on hype, knows that it's going to be a long lasting investment and knows that it's going to be a really powerful player in these markets for a long time and is bullish on hyper liquid and the hype token, but also is saying like, yeah, I think Solana is really strong too.
And I think that it's oversold right now.
And I think that's an opportunity that I'm interested in.
We'll see how that plays out.
But I think that there's a, there's a FOMO bias here that happens where fundamentals and value kind of get overlooked and overshadowed by the, the.
the thing that's getting all the attention at the moment.
And that's, you know, it happens in all markets.
Of course.
Yeah, naturally.
And while we're talking, John, I just want to say that Bitcoin has gone up almost a thousand dollars since we started speed.
Since I said we're dying at the start of the episode, it's been 30 minutes.
We're back up above 7,100, man.
Let's go.
You know, if I told you that five years ago, you'd be ecstatic.
So not all things are terrible.
Well, this is my point.
I think we will see some strong support here at 70k.
I don't know how strong it'll be.
I don't know if we'll collapse eventually or if we'll come up.
This is something to watch, but the market's going to have to digest what they think Bitcoin is worth at the moment.
It also feels like the last...
The last two weeks have been almost like kind of cyclical, where on the like the Sunday, Monday, we seem to have these legs down and then kind of like and this has this is the most arbitrary way to look at things.
Just so people know, my analysis is very arbitrary.
This is how I do things.
But you had the start of the week.
Oh, we're dumping what's going on.
And then through the week, you kind of hold in that range.
And then again, on the weekend, sometime at the end of the weekend, you have another major dump and then hold through the range.
So maybe that'll happen for the third week in a row.
So maybe we will resist here and reverse.
That would be really lovely.
It would be lovely.
to reverse here, John.
And a good time to buy it, kind of like what you're saying.
I do want to bring attention to something that I threw up in the Milk Road Pro Discord this weekend, mainly to give myself a little pat on the back because I did say that Hyperliquid would go to $70 this year in the...
2026 milk road predictions uh which was predictions from all our analysts and actually we should do this we should do this for the second half of the year on ai because i want to know what melvin and vincent uh and kyle think i'm on i want them to give us end of year ai predictions so maybe i'll get them to do it there but john these are your predictions that you made uh on january 1st or sometime late december which was one bitcoin new all-time high You've still got seven months for that.
So that could still happen.
U.S.
federal government starts a formal Bitcoin strategic reserve, which is funny.
We're literally just talking about that today.
Privacy and identity solutions will be the biggest meta narrative, John.
Wow, that seems like you pretty much nailed that as that has been, at least in crypto, kind of like the main thing outside of hyperliquid that has pumped the only green shoots.
ETH breaks 5K, also possible.
You put a broken heart and a crying emoji there.
And Jerome Powell does not step down when his term as chair ends in May, but chooses to remain on the Fed's board of governors under the new chairman.
Also very interesting.
Mr.
Macro knows his shit, man.
That's you.
You're Mr.
Macro.
You're the Mr.
Macro.
Oh, wait, wait.
Let's look at mine.
Let's look at mine.
Let's look at mine.
Hold on.
At one point this year, Hyperliquid and Zcash will have the exact same unit value.
$70.
Only half of that is right.
Zcash is like $500.
But, but, hold on, Hyperliquid did hit $70.
Okay?
Just telling you.
Go on, John.
So that counts.
That counts.
I got half a point out of five.
That's hilarious.
Actually, I think they'll have the same price at the same time.
They've been so funny.
I'm hearing some people say that Ethereum and Hyperliquid are both going to be triple digits at the same time.
And so we'll see that.
I've seen that.
Yeah.
I don't think that's going to be the case, but I'm hoping Hyperliquid gets to triple digits, but I don't think Ethereum is going to.
So my predictions for this year.
Yeah.
Most of them have played out.
I think that the Bitcoin and Ethereum new all-time highs, those ones are the ones that are still yet to be seen.
I think there's still a chance that that happens.
A lot of what was driving that thesis for me was that the four-year cycle, the calendar, is not what's driving the valuations of Bitcoin or digital assets or of Ethereum.
It's a lot of macro factors that are at play.
And I think that we're seeing this, you know, what we've been calling for all year on Milkard Macro, which is this sort of like economic reacceleration.
We've got the ISM.
manufacturing BMI surveys today, they were hotter than expected.
So what that means is that the economy is reaccelerating, right?
And you're seeing this in a lot of different economic indicators.
The Korean economy is spiking, the ISM is spiking, inflation is picking up.
There's all these kinds of indications that the real economy is getting stronger.
In that environment, historically, we've usually seen the business cycle accelerate.
um risk assets do well we've seen all seasons in that environment and rate cuts from the fed the fed is not going to be able to cut rates under these exact circumstances but they they were but in any event that that's kind of the thesis that we had there right and that was the outlook at the beginning of the year and that that has played out in some ways it hasn't in others bitcoin and crypto digital assets is like the only risk asset that really hasn't rejoined this kind of like broader um rally it still may there's still time before the end of the year for this to turn around i don't think that we've seen collapse yet by any means um but i do think we are getting close to some really serious bottoms on bitcoin on ethereum so i'm not selling them i'm looking for opportunities to accumulate them and i think that this is to me where investors should be looking right like you don't want to be trying to call the top on the most overbought consensus trade in the market you want to be looking for things that you see a long-term um fundamental strength to that the market is just undervaluing because of sentiment because of attention and then because of irrational factors and then allocate and capitalize on that that takes a little bit of patience it takes a little bit of guts and it takes being very educated about what you're doing and having a thesis on it you can't just rent conviction from other people you have to understand what you hold and why and uh and what your time horizon is for those investments so I'm viewing this as a great opportunity because I do still think that there is a non-trivial chance that we do see this continuation of the upside for Bitcoin and Ethereum here.
Maybe not in the next 24 hours, but I think before the end of the year, there's still a non-zero chance we could be at all-time highs.
That would be huge.
And it would really surprise a lot of investors because everyone right now, the consensus in all of the crypto native land is that October will be the bottom and I will buy the bottom in October and I will be the best investor in history.
and then I'll capitalize on all the upside and I'll miss all the downside.
That's not going to be what happens.
This is going to behave differently than people expect because the markets overall are behaving a lot differently than most people expected right now.
So we'll see how this ends up going.
But yeah, I'm still hoping that those two predictions play out, even though right now we are still in the bear market doldrums.
John, last question for you, and I want to wrap up pretty quick here.
One thing that you said right at the start of your statement there is that you, hope hyperliquid goes to triple digits are you cheering for hyperliquid yeah i think so this is another thing i think people get wrong about this my my on the screen here we've got wartime ethereum.eth i'm very much that's not you're saying that like it's some other user that's you that's you yeah that's me that's me but see and i think this is a mistake that a lot of people make this this tribalism this like zero-sum game you know solana can't win unless ethereum loses type of mindset i think that there are a lot of different projects that are building really valuable things in this space and the assets are all very distinctive from one another and they're not really in competition with one another.
They are trying to find different kinds of product market fit.
There are different kinds of value created by the different projects, by the different ecosystems and by the assets themselves.
I think that's as it should be.
That's what makes a market.
Right.
And they don't want to all just be copies of Bitcoin.
Right.
Like we want to have different assets that are doing different things, delivering different kinds of value and services and products to.
different parts of the market.
And I think that that's a great example of this, this hyper liquid versus Ethereum thing.
I'm not rooting for Solana to lose.
I'm not rooting for hyper liquid to lose.
I want to see the innovation.
I think hyper liquid to me is a great poster child for why the digital asset industry is so important, because that is an example of something that came out of the digital asset space that would not.
It's an innovation, a new financial primitive that, you know.
perpetual futures contracts have existed for a long time until the digital asset space came along.
They were never really able to find product market fit.
They were never able to scale.
They were never able to have the security and liquidity needed to support them.
The digital asset space brought that around.
And now Hyperliquid is competing with NASDAQ for volume.
I think they might have surpassed it recently for certain things that they're trading on Hyperliquid.
So we're seeing price discovery on Hyperliquid for a lot of major assets.
It's a really great poster child for the innovation and the benefit that the overall global financial market can get from accommodating the digital asset industry as we continue to be the place where innovation and financial markets happens.
So I don't think that there's anything wrong with rooting for Hyperliquid and Ethereum at the same time because Ethereum is trying to offer a completely different kind of value to the market, right?
Like Ethereum, the L1, the programmable money idea that Ethereum came out with.
That was proven by the market too, and it was proven because of all the different imitators that came out to compete with Ethereum.
But Ethereum is not trying to be the fastest, most centralized.
Like I said in the tweet this weekend, Ethereum loses its value if it tries to compete with Hyperliquid or SWE and just become another, not to be derogatory, but a high throughput centralized casino.
Ethereum is trying to be global, censorship resistant, decentralized, secure, permissionless, private, open.
global economic financial and governmental infrastructure um that's credibly neutral that's a very unique and very very powerful multi-hundred trillion dollar um value proposition and that's what ethereum as a network is going for and that's what eth as an asset is giving you exposure to it's very distinctive from hyperliquid there's no reason to have this tribalistic you know, zero sum game mentality, you can root for hype and ETH and Cardano and Algorand and, you know, on and on and still say like, you know, I think there's things about this ecosystem or this asset that are more attractive to me for these reasons.
And this is why I prefer this or that, but I don't think that there's any value in, you know, attacking one another or, or, you know, getting, uh, a lot of ad hominem nonsense about all this stuff.
We want the digital asset space overall to do well, and it's not a zero-sum game.
So I'm not in any way rooting against Hyperliquid.
And I think that the value it's delivering has been really, really transformative for the markets and good for digital assets overall because it validates the innovation that we're doing in this industry.
Why don't you own any?
Well, I missed- We can save that for next week too, John, because I know you got to run.
So we can save that for next week.
Well, no, I can say something about this.
I was looking, to be honest with you, for some weakness in this, and it just kept going.
higher and higher and higher and it never really pulled back um and and now i kind of feel like it's one of those things this is how i felt about solana in the last cycle too and i'm not saying this is going to play out exactly the same way but i kept looking for an interesting an entry on solana in the 2021 bull run and it never really came and i kid i was like it's it's hundreds of dollars now and now it's 200 now it was really painful but then the ftx thing happened and i got a bag of solana at 10 bucks and so um you know i i think We'll see what happens with these things.
John, excellent thoughts as usual.
Let's hope for a, if there is a deeper bottom.
Let's hope it's quick and it's soon and that we are brave and bold enough to absolutely blast the hell out of it.
So thank you, John, for another great episode.
A lot of great content coming out or a lot of great episodes coming out this week on Milk Road and on Milk Road Macro and AI.
So keep an eye out for that.
And of course, if you want to see what John does have in his Milk Road Pro portfolio, it's only a dollar to try it out for a couple of days.
So make sure you get in there.
You can even chat with him in the Discord and ask him questions yourself.
So make sure you get in there.
The link is below.
Otherwise, John.
Have a great week and I'll see you again soon.
Thanks, LG.
This is great.
Talk soon.
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