# Crypto Markets: Clarity Act, AI Convergence, and Bottoming Signals

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-07-28

## Transcript

You lean in at these moments when the market attention and capital are elsewhere and devote more time and attention to crypto because the thesis has never been stronger, the opportunity has never been better, and your ROI on your own personal education and investment of time and attention in crypto right now is never going to be stronger than this.
What's up, everybody?
It's LG Ducet here.
Welcome to The Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show that always switches hosts at the very top or at the very bottom of the market, and you, the audience, have to figure out which is which.
Today is July 27th, 2021.
It's a busy week in the macro and crypto with the FOMC meeting this week and a new revised and combined text of the Clarity Act coming to the floor maybe soon.
But does a dip in the stock market indicate a bigger issue globally?
And are we yet again seeing signs of a clear bottom in crypto as some protocols finally capitulate?
I'm back to host just this special Monday episode so we can turn the mic back onto your favorite crypto host.
And if you want to see what John has in his portfolio and what our analysts are buying and also what John might have on his watch list when it comes to alts as we bought them.
All of that is in Milk Road Pro.
It's a dollar for a trial for seven days at the link below.
And a reminder that our podcast today is free and it would not be possible without our partners at Securitize, the regulated rails for tokenization.
So keep an eye out later in the show for a message about them.
John, what's up, man?
I feel like I haven't seen you in weeks.
What's going on?
It's been a while since we talked.
When we don't do these Monday episodes together, I feel like we just don't get to catch up enough.
But I'm doing well, man.
It's been a really interesting time in the crypto markets.
I've got to do some really cool podcasts in the last couple of weeks.
And I'm just excited for what the rest of the summer brings.
It feels like I moved away to go to school in a different town.
You know what I mean?
It feels like we had, we're in college for like a year or two together.
And now it's like the college year ended and I'm like, I'm actually, I got to move to like Albuquerque to go to some other random college.
And like, we'll see each other sometimes on weekends, but like, it's not gonna be the same.
Like we were, we were like roommates before, you know, and now, now we're across.
And I went, I went to go do something kind of weird and different in AI, but now, but I always want to come back and hear what's going on with you guys in crypto.
This sounds like the plot of a John Hughes movie, but I sure.
Yeah, that's that's that's that works for me.
Why not?
Did you just did you just tell me that being in crypto is like being in detention?
Because that would be pretty accurate right now.
You know, sometimes it feels that way, but I think we might be getting out of detention soon, which I'm really excited about.
So yeah, this is good things coming.
I want to ask you about that.
But as you know, I've been very focused on AI and I haven't had the chance to really keep up with Clarity Act.
FOMC is also this week, so I do want to talk macro stuff.
So we have a lot to cover on one show.
Like I said in the intro, there's a bigger dip in the market, maybe a bit of a bigger scare.
So maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that.
But I think a good place to kick off, John, is maybe...
you know, what people will probably point to as maybe one of the larger fears that's scaring the market right now, which is the FOMC, right?
Where a lot of people have said, hey, listen, there's no way he's going to raise hike rates.
But maybe that's what the market is afraid of.
But you're the expert.
You tell me what to expect this week.
Yeah, well, I don't think he's going to raise hikes, but he might hike rates.
So yeah, there's a few things going on in the markets right now that are spooking people.
I'll kind of like back up and frame some of this.
But so first of all, with AI, I think that is a big part of the macro landscape right now.
And a lot of people are concerned that the Chinese are going to start manufacturing their own chips.
And so there's a lot of fear in the semiconductor sector right now.
And then there was also this Kimi K.
3.0, I think it was called, that kind of got to near, not at, but near frontier performance with very low cost.
And so that's put like kind of this big question mark generally over a lot of...
future earnings and the valuations for a lot of things in the AI sectors, particularly in the United States and US markets.
I think that these fears are overdone.
But while that digests, I think there's just some uncertainty there.
The other thing is that the war in Iran had kicked off again and conflict had resumed there up until the last couple of days, where now it seems like both sides have seized hostilities and things seem to be normalizing a little bit.
Oil had...
When the ceasefire had gone into effect and it seems like the conflict was over, oil had gone down to around $70.
And now once the conflict kicked up again, it got back up to $100.
And so when the news of this potential ceasefire came back, I think we saw oil come down.
So now we're in a position where we're going into the FOMC meeting on Wednesday.
So on July 29th, this week, a couple of days from now, the Federal Reserve will have their FOMC meeting and we'll get an announcement from the Fed about what their change to the federal funds rate or interest rates are going to be or not be.
When things were looking like clear skies and the conflict was not in full swing again, Polymarket, the predictions on the Fed rate hikes for this Wednesday was around 8%.
Once things kicked off again and started, the hostility started, oil spiked in price, those prediction markets, it rose up to about 30%, 35%.
So it's not quite a coin toss.
I think the market is still leaning towards the Federal Reserve not raising interest rates.
However, there is a non-zero chance of that happening.
So I think that there's just a lot of uncertainty from these things.
There's uncertainty in the semiconductor sector, uncertainty in the AI trade.
And this week, there's uncertainty about the Fed's decision.
Kevin Warsh has been very clear about wanting to give less guidance to the markets and allow the markets to sort of tell him where interest rates are.
monetary policy should be, where interest rates should be.
And so there hasn't been any kind of communication out of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors about this since July, I think 18th was the last time there's kind of like any sort of noises made about this.
So it's been a long time since the market has had any guidance on expectations here.
That's one of the reasons for so much uncertainty.
Another thing to add into this whole thing is that later this week, I think it's Coinbase, Meta, Amazon, Apple.
And I believe Microsoft are also reporting earnings.
So there's just a lot of information that the market is waiting on and uncertainty that has come from all these things.
And so we've seen some volatility.
As it relates to crypto.
Ethereum and Bitcoin and the rest of the digital asset marketplace have generally done relatively well this week.
And so it's been nice to see some relative strength and stability in those markets while all this is going on.
And to me, it's just another indicator that there is still some strength in crypto, that the bottom is forming and getting stronger and hardening.
And I don't know if we'll see lower lows or not, but it's nice to see us kind of holding our ground in the midst of all this uncertainty.
Hi, everyone.
This is John.
Listen, our Milk Road Pro analysts nailed this AI bull market.
They had dozens of calls pay off in a big way for our community.
If you want to see how our entire team of analysts are positioning for the crypto bull market that's going to come after this bear market finally ends, you can join us now at Milk Road Pro.
It's just a dollar.
Link is in the description.
You'll get access to all of our analysts' trades, their watch lists, and see how they're navigating this in their portfolios and get access to ask us questions in Discord anytime, day or night.
It's just a dollar.
Link's in the description.
Milk Road Pro.
Join now.
I'll see you there.
John, one of the prevailing narratives we've seen, again, you know, I was trying to bring the more, you know, populist narrative take and see if there's any truth to it.
But even weeks ago, I saw, you know, seeing the most obvious narrative that's like, listen, every year and especially midterm years, July gets hot.
And then August and September, there's a cooling.
And then Q4 goes absolutely berserk.
I feel like you do not subscribe to these very populist, like just.
you know, kind of fake chart kind of things.
But is that, is that, is that kind of feel like what's happening here is that we had, we had a good start to the summer.
But now there's going to be some kind of natural cooling as per everything that you're kind of mentioning, a lot of different reasons for that to happen.
And maybe, and maybe some missed earnings.
Cause even last week, like you said, we already, we already saw some earnings come in.
And even for something like Tesla on our end, on our analyst side, we had mixed reactions to Tesla.
Like three of our guys each had a bearish.
neutral and bullish take on what was in Tesla's earnings.
So I feel like this week that, you know, and that represents how the market's reacting too.
And then you still have a lot of big earnings coming this week that will further affect that clear uncertainty.
So I think that the thing I'm watching more is less the seasonality and the cyclical patterns of the markets here and more some of these fundamentals.
Because I think, you know, if you look at Bitcoin's chart for the last week or two weeks, it's more or less been pretty much flat.
Like it went down to 62, 63, went up to 65, 66.
But it's still kind of more or less like in this range.
I think at the time of recording, it's between 64, 65, somewhere in that ballpark.
And so it's kind of turned into a stable going here at around 64K.
That's not good or bad, but it is looking for clear signal from the market which way to go.
And I think that what you're describing makes sense.
I think there is definitely time this summer for a low volume period to come where we see a drop in price or some sell pressure.
There is still a lot of resistance over our heads that we might go up and bounce our heads off of and go lower off of that.
So I don't by any means think that we're in the clear, but I do think that we are in a situation where the market, particularly the crypto and Bitcoin markets, are looking for some sort of clear catalyst or signal for a justification for a move in one way or the other.
To me, the thing I'm most watching right now is not the seasonality, the cycles, but the Clarity Act because Cynthia Loomis from Wyoming just released.
this updated language, which is a revised and combined version of the clarity act that the Senate has been debating.
There are plans.
I don't know if this will happen, but there are plans to bring it to the floor of the Senate for a vote that could happen as soon as this week, not likely this week, but it could happen as soon as this week.
And so we'll kind of see how that goes.
I think that's going to be what gives Bitcoin its signal here.
It's not so much whether or not it's the window of strength.
In July for the midterm year seasonal patterns from Bitcoin, it's more so I think going to be driven by some of these fundamentals and speculation about them.
So the market right now is still kind of leaning a little bit bearish on the Clarity Act passing.
It could happen.
It's just like the path is very narrow to get there.
And so if it does pass, I think that is going to be something that is a very strong bullish catalyst for Bitcoin for the rest of the digital asset market.
And so that's something I'm watching closely.
I think if it doesn't pass, Bitcoin will probably see some softness on that.
But I don't think it's going to be like this catastrophic collapse because like, you know, it's been two years.
We haven't gotten it.
I don't see any reason why Bitcoin should like radically react to that one way or the other.
So we'll kind of see how it goes.
But I think that's what I'm watching here for Signal on what happens next.
But I agree with you that there is still some time for some continued weakness in crypto and in other markets in the summer period before what a lot of people are expecting is going to be a bullish Q4.
But we'll see when we get there.
We've sung that song before and it hasn't worked out.
Listen, if you sing it every year, eventually you'll be right.
Maybe.
I don't know.
Well, that's what people do.
It's happened before, so it's going to happen every time, you know?
But John, what happened to, I feel like when I was doing the crypto show, I heard from you and from our friends at Bitwise and other people that's like, listen, if this doesn't get done before, because it had passed through some vote, I think in early May or something like that.
It had some kind of, it had gone to the next step.
Maybe you can remind us what that was.
But I'd heard that it's like, if this doesn't get done before like the summer recess, it's done because.
Come fall, it's all midterms.
There's no time to talk about clarity acts.
But you're telling me that may not be the story, the case anymore.
I think that it's like people have been saying that the window gets less realistic.
And yeah, I think that the realistic timeline was to pass this when they originally were talking about it in spring, in early summer, and they're kept being new.
objections, new forms of hostility, new kinds of problems.
Jamie Dimon kept moving what he was upset with.
Same thing with Elizabeth Warren.
She keeps either making up new concerns or changing her old concerns or just like, you know, continuing to move the goalposts on what they would need to get to a yes.
A big thing is they just don't want to get to a yes.
I think on this, I think a lot of the Democrats, they're going to need seven votes.
in the Senate from Democrats to pass this.
And I don't think they're going to be able to get them.
Or if they are able to get them, they're going to have to give up so much and so many kinds of concessions that they don't want to take the deal.
And so, yeah, like if we don't get it by August, then you're correct.
We will see the Senate go into a recess.
We'll see everybody leave Washington, stop lawmaking, go to campaign.
And then nothing is really going to happen until November.
And then.
You know, in a midterm election, usually the incumbent party loses seats.
And so if the Democrats pick up seats in the Senate or in the House of Representatives, then the path to getting the bill passed gets even more unlikely.
And then we either get no bill or have to wait until 2030 to potentially get a bill.
So it just this is kind of like the actual bitter end of this, like, OK, maybe, OK, maybe thing that we've been doing for two years with this bill.
And that's some of the reasoning on that.
But yeah, like.
The thing that happened in May – well, anyway, the House of Representatives has passed versions of this several times.
The Senate has voted in committee on several versions of this several times too, and it keeps going back to the drawing board.
The big sticking point right now, as I understand it, has been around the ethics requirements and the ethics rules on this.
Trump has given some concessions to say that it's like 600 pages of ethics provisions.
But basically he's saying that neither – nobody in – in the administration or their spouse will do anything in crypto.
However, Democrats like, well, that leaves out your sons and we want your sons out of crypto too.
And then it also is like, I think in the, the, the provisions that Trump, the white house agreed to, it says that it will be enforced by the attorney general.
Well, the attorney general is Todd Blanche, who's Trump's former personal lawyer.
And.
It doesn't seem likely that he's going to go after Trump on these things.
And so the Democrats are like, OK, well, we want to change that to be enforceable by the state attorney generals so that we can harass you with lawsuits, all these things.
So, yeah, I don't know where this ends, but there's there's like there's it's clear that both sides are making genuine efforts, I think.
But it also seems like the path is getting really, really narrow here.
Do you want it to go through?
I think so.
There are a lot of things in it that I would like to have.
I would love to have a formal token taxonomy.
I would love to have definitions on what all these assets are, how they're governed, which regulatory agency has oversight, developer protections.
There are a lot of things in it that would be really good for the industry.
And I think not having it is really damaging to the United States overall because it creates regulatory arbitrage because Japan, Europe...
even Russia, all of these different countries have passed their own versions of legislation around digital assets and how to do business in crypto in their jurisdictions.
If the United States does not have that, we're at just like a structural disadvantage in the marketplace.
So that's, I do want the bill to pass.
However, I think that there are some valid concerns and like to summarize them, it's this bill started out as a bill to help and promote the digital asset industry in the United States.
And it is not, completely turned into something else, but it has kind of over time through debate moved more in the direction of a bill to protect incumbents and legacy systems and the banking infrastructure of the country.
And I don't think that's really what I would hope for from this bill.
So yeah, I don't know.
There's some pros and cons, but on balance, I do want the bill to pass because I think there's a lot of important reasons why we need it.
Got it.
Okay.
Okay.
So you do want it, but with some things that you kind of see as vital.
in there yeah yeah we gotta we gotta have it you gotta anything in washington you if you get a bill passed in washington you have to compromise and a compromise leaves both sides feeling unhappy and like so that's kind of how i feel about it do you feel like there's an urgency for it to resolve because also that's another insight i had uh clearly and i think again this is from matt hogan um last time i did a show with them that's like listen this just we would just prefer at this point for it to just get figured out more so than for it to hang.
And even you were alluding earlier that it's like, well, one way or another, it might not even have an impact on the market.
But I personally, I don't think that's true.
I think if you want to, if you want to see a true bottoming, like if we are going to have an obvious bottoming signal, it could come on the day where the Clarity Act gets shut down for good.
You know what I mean?
That it's, and even if it might just be a blip down to 52K and then it's back.
But I feel like, I feel like that's the main thing that.
some people in the market are just waiting for as the only obvious catalyst right now for crypto.
Yeah, I agree with that.
And I think that is something that could happen.
This is one of the big reasons why I've been so conservative about deploying cash.
Like I've been extremely bullish on crypto on digital assets throughout this entire summer and longer, but I've been in cash for a long time, not completely in cash, but I've had one of the largest cash positions I've had to this like last several years because.
We haven't found the firm bottom and we haven't seen like a clear turning of the corner.
I did a lot of interviews last week with a lot of analysts from CryptoQuant, from Bitcoin Pro Magazine, Matt Crosby.
And then I also talked to Jamie Coutts from Real Vision about this.
And they're all saying the same thing.
We are seeing signs of a countertrend rally, but we haven't seen signs that we've totally broken out of this bear trend and gone back into the bull market until we see either way, right?
Like you said, like a wick down into the 50s that makes me feel like, okay, that's it.
That's the bottom.
or until we see like a breakout, you know, into the high 70s again, to me, it makes sense to just do what the market's doing, which is watch, wait, and look for those clear catalysts to come.
So that's what I'm doing.
That's why I'm so much in cash.
But I do think that the opportunity here is really...
excellence, like there's a fat pitch coming in crypto that you're not going to have such a clear thesis on in other parts of the market.
So I'm really excited for what that looks like and for the price action that follows it.
But for the moment, I do think it makes sense to just watch because the window for them to figure this out, yes or no, one way or the other is getting really small, like a matter of weeks here.
And so I think, and you know, with the FOMC coming, like it's just a good time to be in cash and pay close attention because yeah, you don't want to like force a trade and then get caught on the wrong side.
Real-world assets like funds, treasuries, and private credit are still running on rails built decades ago.
Gated, paperwork-heavy, slow to settle.
Everyone's talking about tokenizing them, but far fewer can actually do it, and do it without cutting regulatory corners.
Securitize can.
It's the SEC-regulated infrastructure bringing real-world assets on-chain.
Nine years in, native tokenization, not wrapped, backed by BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and Cathie Woods Ark Invest, and chosen by the New York Stock Exchange, VanEck, BNY, and Apollo to do it at scale.
It's the regulated bridge between traditional finance and crypto.
Tokenize the world at milkroad.com forward slash securitize.
And John, it's lining up perfectly with a four-year cycle bottom.
That's all I'm saying, man, is that it's like, you know, I've always found, and again, I'm not an analyst.
I'm not, I don't have the knowledge that you guys have or the expertise, but to me, I've always found that I'm like, somehow, somehow the technicals on the chart somehow magically line up with the thing, with the big news events.
Magically, it just works that way.
And that's, and that's even what you're saying now.
And if you go through my imaginary scenario, that's like, boom.
uh you know clarity act gets struck down it's all crypto's dead forever and it's magically just that one day in september that's that's that exact four-year cycle one year bottom after the top or whatever and boom there you go everything's confirmed and we're off to the races after that it'd be magical for it to be that way i don't think it's going to happen but i'm just saying it's just funny funny to me how these things always seem to to line up so perfectly You sound like my favorite analyst, Ben Cowan, because he always says this, that the narrative follows the price and that the cycle and the price tell you everything.
And the narrative has always come in to justify that.
You know, we could talk about that for an hour and a half, but I do agree that.
It does seem to be shaping up that way, although I still maintain that I think we're more likely to bottom before the expected bottom in October, precisely because so many people have that same mindset and are expecting that bottom in October.
So whatever happens with all the short term narrative stuff, I do think that we're going to see people capital formation coming back into Bitcoin, into crypto, into overall digital assets sooner than people are expecting, precisely because everyone thinks they have until October or Q4 to start building.
And so I think that the front running is going to start to happen again, too.
You have to pick a day on the calendar that you think is going to be the actual bottom and schedule him to come back on the show for that exact day.
You got it.
You got to preemptively call the bottom by booking the bottom guy, you know, the four year cycle guy.
That's that's what you got to do.
That's what I want.
That's what I want to hear.
And you'll you'll you'll have front run everybody else because that's the day everybody else is going to want him on.
But you will have had him on the show just in time.
And I'm.
I would always love to talk to Ben.
He's great.
He can talk for hours about anything.
And one of my favorite parts of this bear market was watching him make two-hour videos about Bitcoin dominance.
So, yeah, it's always a good time to talk to Ben, whatever is going on in the market.
Get them back out here.
Another thing that you shared with me earlier, John, and we've kind of seen this tweet circulate a little bit, is from Frank Chaparro at GSR.
And basically, he's painting a picture of the state of the crypto bear market and basically showing capitulation not on the price side, but on the protocol side.
Right.
And you've got I'll just read it out for the people listening on audio that it's state of the crypto bear market.
And he lists companies that are winding down, which I think this is Story Labs, not Storage Labs.
Maybe it's Storage Labs.
I think it's Storage.
It is Storage, not Story.
I thought there's a Story token.
OK, so it's Storage Labs.
I don't even know what that is.
BitMEX.
Arthur Hayes' old company or current company, we don't know.
Movement Labs, Pulin, BitMart, Ascend X, all companies maybe you don't know.
And then also he lists all the layoffs that the major, the super apps and the central exchanges and a few other.
players have done, including Coinbase, which reduced 14%, Robinhood, 10%, workforce reduction, and so on for even the ETH Foundation, pointing that out too.
And we've covered that extensively on the show, the rotation that happened a couple months ago and that bottoming on ETH.
But you see this as a positive sign, I think.
I wouldn't say so much a positive sign, but I do think I see it as a...
a bear market bottom indicator because we see this a lot in bear markets.
So just to go back to your first point here, storage is a decentralized data and memory storage solution.
It was like a competitor to a file coin and different ones like that.
They were US-based, I believe, and had been in operation for many years.
So I was a little surprised to see that.
I haven't looked into why they shut down, but...
I know the project.
I know the team.
And so I yeah, but this is just an indicator of kind of where we are in the bear market.
Right.
Every time we go through a bear market in crypto, there's always a kind of a situation where a lot of the capital goes out.
The demand goes out and projects, protocols that are seeing basically no action, no movement.
They have a choice between trying to like.
you know, allocate more capital after that and try to build through it or to shut down operations.
And, you know, certain people at different times, the market will make different choices.
And this is just a sign, I think, that we're seeing the market contract and the shrinking relative to the demand to meet that because like the market can support a lot more of these projects and protocols during a bull run.
But during a bear market, you see a lot of this like shedding of excess projects and shutting down of things.
I think one of those ones, I think it was Movement Labs or something like that, had only generated like a couple hundred dollars of fees in the last several months.
And like, yeah, they basically just, you know, so they decided to just call it.
And so it doesn't mean that the products were bad or the teams were bad.
It doesn't mean that they're corrupt.
It doesn't mean that we're an industry of, you know, degenerates and criminals.
It just means that, hey, if, you know, if there's...
a drop in user demand, a drop in business, sometimes businesses shut down.
So that's what I think we're kind of seeing there.
So I don't think it's necessarily a good thing, but I think it's another indicator that we're bottoming.
It's another sign that the bear market has kind of like purged a lot of things that there's a lot of.
like a lot of signs that we've reached the bottom as bad as the pain is going to get and that we should be looking ahead to better days, more bullish action and more new projects coming in that are getting demand that are launching into stable businesses.
So yeah, I don't know.
It's just one of the things you always see in a bear market.
And it was an indicator that a lot of people have been talking about that I think that there's truth to it because it does happen in bear markets and it's happening now.
And we're also seeing, I feel, John, we're also seeing the opposite as well.
Right.
Where a lot of the VCs who stuck around in crypto are saying, like, listen, like we are we are I think it was even a dragonfly recently announced like their biggest fund ever.
Right.
And I don't know what it was, but it was something where it's like they it was an obscene number, like a billion dollars or 600 million that they've collected to invest in crypto companies and that you're seeing a lot of investment in kind of like.
the next round of companies that are coming into the space, right?
So it's like you have a clear rotation from like, okay, old protocols, relatively new ones from the last cycle.
It's not working out.
They're capitulating, but simultaneously you're seeing, you know, new energy coming into the space and it's happening on the private side right now.
So you don't really know what those deals look like or a little harder to see what those companies are, but there are companies that are getting funded that are preparing to deploy products probably when things look a little greener too.
Yes.
And I think the Robinhood chain launching.
is another indicator of this bottoming process too, right?
Like they launched in a bear market and they've seen an enormous amount of capital, user adoption, volume.
They've got everything from real world assets trading volume to meme coins.
So they're really launching a lucrative, productive, and like in demand digital asset based and focused business.
And so that to me is another sign of a green shoot, so to speak, of crypto spring coming and of the digital asset marketplace and the industry overall still having strong.
life and just, you know, continuing to iterate, define product market fit and where capital and users are and what they are demanding from digital assets.
So I think, yeah, there's a lot of things to be bullish on here.
And it's just a rotation from, you know, this is what you said, shedding some of the old projects that, you know, maybe had a good idea, but didn't find market adoption and product market fit and a migration towards things that are getting adoption and finding demand and all that's bullish, I think.
Is this, I actually, I wanted to ask you about Robinhood chain.
And obviously it's been a darling in the DGN world for the last couple of weeks is it's brought a lot of good energy.
It has a, a lot of money is migrating there.
It had a meme coin that ran to, I think a cash cat ran to like 200 million or something like that in a matter of a couple of days.
It has a, it has a pump fund.
style meme launchpad that people can use.
And then it has a few other applications.
Virtuals, which was like an AI thing on base, has migrated there.
People are launching projects there.
And outside of that, like you said, it's a home for RWAs.
But it is an L2, John.
And this kind of brings back into the question.
of whether that is still something that makes sense to do in this modern age right you not only have not only have they launched their l2 but also tether has launched their l2 in the recent weeks right stable launched had a bit i always talk about a few meme coins i don't even know why they launched it so maybe you can tell me more and now we're getting a little further down the grapevine in terms of talking about you know primarily like the crypto majors but it does i think what you're saying is true that you do you have some pretty big companies seeing now as the time to launch their chains at least.
And I'm assuming that's in hopes to attract a lot of the new projects that are coming the next cycle, like come build here, right?
Yeah, I think there's a lot at play in what you just said.
I think, so first of all, last week I did one of my favorite podcasts I've ever done, to be honest with you.
I got three of the five co-founders of Ethlabs, which is a new research and development nonprofit in the Ethereum ecosystem.
I got them on the podcast, talked to them for an hour.
I asked them directly about this, about how does Robinhood as an L2 It's based on Arbitrum, but that's in the Ethereum ecosystem.
How does that factor into the vision?
Because Vitalik said that the old roadmap for L2 is no longer made sense.
But I asked him, what is the new vision?
What does that look like?
What does success mean here?
How much value in terms of fee extraction should Ethereum be doing for the service and the value that they're offering to Robinhood and to the Robinhood chain?
And so we talked about that extensively.
I would strongly recommend people go listen to that conversation because it's full of alpha.
And frankly, LG, like...
We spend so much time talking about digital assets, but it's really rare to get an opportunity to sit down for an hour with some of the people who are actually designing and building the actual protocols that underlie all these things.
So it was really enlightening for me to get the updated outlook from them on what they think a strong Ethereum L1, L2 relationship and ecosystem looks like and their thoughts specifically on Robinhood and Robinhood Chain.
But I think overall, I think it's a very bullish thing for Ethereum, for digital assets.
And I think Ansgar Dietrichs, who's the executive director, said, I don't know how you could look at what's going on there and say that it's bearish.
So it's all very positive.
I forget the rest of your question, but I think that the main thing I would say on this is that it's just a sign that the market is still iterating, still improving.
There's still a lot to be pioneered with digital assets.
This is one of the reasons why.
clarity is so important is that not only are, you know, let's say crypto native or trading native companies like Coinbase and Robinhood going to be able to bring these products to market, but you're going to see companies like, you know, Google, Meta.
other people like Microsoft, the JP Morgans of the world, the Black Rocks of the world, there are all kinds of different kinds of legacy businesses and incumbents who would want to try and find ways to launch new products and services in the digital asset space if they have the regulatory clarity to do so.
So I think Robinhood and Robinhood Chain kind of validates that thesis that there is a huge untapped market, unaddressed market in the United States for these things that would get unlocked and promote a huge amount of economic activity, innovation, and...
better outcomes for users if we get this clarity and are allowed to do business in the United States.
So yeah, overall though, I think it's, it's, it's bullish no matter how you look at it.
And I'm really excited to see where all this goes because now that Robinhood has done it, it kind of throws down the gauntlet for base and Coinbase to respond in a different way.
And they've already talked about how they're going to change their strategy.
And it just kind of keeps going from there.
But yeah, overall, it's just really bullish and I'm excited to see where all this goes.
That's what I was going to say, man, is that Robinhood knows there's going to be a big crypto cycle coming and they're putting, you know, they're laying it down ahead of time.
And to me, like that whole chain coming out is like, this is a sign that there's there's blood in the water for Coinbase.
They're coming for those users that Coinbase launched.
Base launched in July 2023, man.
Like it's been around for three years.
It has it had its up and downs kind of lost its way at the end of the bear, the bull market last time.
A lot of kind of confusing creator coins or all that kind of crap.
Brian Armstrong putting his foot in his mouth or at least having a public kind of mess up recently with changing his profile pic to a meme coin and then saying like, well, I just do it for the culture.
I don't care about the meme coins like such an unforced error.
And again, this is looking for the trenches side, but still not a good look for him to kind of mess around with that at a time where a competitor.
is coming aggressively with their plans for the future, right?
So, but inevitably, John, I think it's a benefit to the consumer as these assets get more, you know, accessible and more people want to buy them.
It's better to have multiple, you know, all these super apps vying for that product and for that retail attention because it'll just drive a better product in the end, right?
And force them to really compete.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's one of the things I think is so important about this is that unlocking that competition does drive lower fees, better products, better services, and just better outcomes for everybody.
And I'm excited about that because I think that's good.
That's healthy.
You don't want a bunch of legacy incumbents squatting on a system that is allowing them to exploit their users and use their...
customers' capital to enrich themselves and not share any of that revenue and that economic activity and the benefits of it with the people whose capital they're actually using to do it.
So anyway, there's just a lot to this.
But yeah, I agree.
Robinhood sees the future.
They see that there is another bull run coming for digital assets.
They know that this is going to be one of the strongest ones in the history of digital assets.
And they also understand, I think, importantly, how much AI is going to strengthen the investment thesis and the fundamental values of digital assets overall.
Brian Armstrong, you mentioned Coinbase.
He posted about that just this morning, about how AI and crypto together are going to become one of the strongest economic drivers in the next cycle and in just the economy overall.
And so it's interesting to see how these people, these major players are fighting over this market share.
But you're right.
The outcome is better products and service, better experiences for users.
And all that's a win for crypto.
And yeah, I'm here for it.
If you guys want to listen to a good episode about Robinhood, actually, I did one with Vincent on the AI side about two weeks ago, not last Friday.
So Friday, July 17th.
So you can scroll through that channel.
And the thumbnail, if you're looking on YouTube, is just like an evil looking photo of Vlad Tenev, who's the founder CEO of Robinhood.
I really liked that episode, by the way.
I meant to tell you this.
I really enjoyed that episode.
It's really good.
Thank you.
Yeah, I love the episodes of Vincent and all the AI guys, but he has a good deep dive.
But it was mainly about agentic trading and basically Robinhood facilitating AI to trade for you.
right and their plans for that and how they have like they have their credit cards in order and everything so it's it really paints a good picture of how far ahead robin hood is looking which is kind of what you're alluding to right that it's like they are they are playing way way way ahead of where we are right now so again bringing it back to crypto that even the chain even it's only a month old and there's meme coins and whatever it's like that is not they didn't just launch this to collect a couple hundred thousand dollars from meme coin fees, you know, or from Uniswap fees, people trading ETH for meme coins.
Like there's a much bigger plan here.
And I feel like.
We won't see what that is, John, for a couple years as crypto kind of comes back, right?
So I don't think that they're just going to launch a chain and say, hey, random projects on the internet, come build here, anonymous people, kind of like Base did.
Or Base had some big plans when they launched, but it never really came to fruition.
Or is Robinhood going to learn from that and I think deliver something really cool or at least hopefully somewhat innovative?
John?
Great episode, man.
I always love talking to you.
I always end up talking too much and I feel like people want to hear from you.
So what can you leave us with this week?
Maybe tell us about what's coming up on the show this week or even kind of what you're watching besides the FOMC.
Well, I'll just start by saying I don't think it's going to take a couple of years for this stuff to play out.
The speed and the speed of capital formation that we are now seeing in these markets is larger than ever before.
The number of self-directed.
we call them retail, I think self-directed is a better way to say it because it gets more to the point.
The number of self-directed investors and the amount of capital that they are managing themselves has never been higher as a percentage and as a dollar figure nominal terms.
So what you're seeing is there's a knife fight over market share at a time when more capital and more users than ever before have been participating in these markets, not just in the US, but globally.
And so...
Winners and losers can happen very quickly.
Market share can be won and lost very quickly.
There's 70 million Ethereum we've bridged onto Robinhood and taking the first like… week or something like that that was launched.
Incredible amounts of volume.
And that can go other places too.
It's mercenary capital.
It moves quickly.
I do not think that it's going to take a matter of years to get to a place where we're seeing large numbers of agents trading large amounts of digital assets for huge amounts of users.
And so I just think that this is a radically underappreciated part of the market right now.
And I think, you know, Jordy Visser, I've said this before on the channel, but Jordy Visser keeps pounding the table on this.
He's launching his own research channel just to focus on this thesis on crypto and digital assets because it is so important and is such a big driver of the next phase of the economy and just the next market cycle in general.
So that's something I think I would say there.
This week, we've got a lot of great episodes.
I've got Bitwise's head of on-chain analytics and research.
to talk about a report he's done on staking because there's a lot of changes that have come to staking.
Institutions are driving more staking demand than retail ever did.
And so I'm going to get some alpha from him on that.
I've got the head of marketing and strategy, I believe, from Algorand this week because I want to talk about that project and how they're dealing with quantum resistance because Google specifically named them as a project that's leading the way on this.
I believe Google did.
There's some of those details on that I've got to brush up on.
And then I've got the head of strategy and legal for GSR, which is a trillion dollar crypto.
liquidity provider and market maker.
I've got him on the podcast to talk about the Clarity Act, what that actually means.
And to like, you know, get under the fingernails of this because everyone's talked about stable coin yield, but like, hey, what does this actually do?
What does this token taxonomy mean?
How does this benefit the market?
So there's just a lot of great stuff we're doing.
And I've got a lot of great podcasts lined up after that too.
So there's just, there's a lot going on.
There's a lot of things to be had, to be understood right now.
A lot of things moving in the markets.
I just get, you can tell, I get really excited about this because This is the best opportunity to, like I always say, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish.
You lean in at these moments when the market attention and capital are elsewhere and devote more time and attention to crypto because the thesis has never been stronger.
The opportunity has never been better.
And your ROI on your own personal education and investment of time and attention in crypto right now is never going to be stronger than this.
So I'm really excited.
There's a lot going on.
And yeah, I'm just I'm really looking forward to the week ahead.
It's going to be a good one.
Beauty, man.
You're doing a great job on the show, man.
I think people are really enjoying it.
People love listening to it.
I think our audience is up, man.
Like our download numbers are up.
And ever since you took over and ever since I left right at the Pico bottom.
of the market right at that.
It was literally the day, the last episode I recorded was at the 57K day where we touched that.
So, you know, congrats to you guys on the show.
No, but in all seriousness, it's a great show.
We don't, we won't be doing another episode together for, I think, two weeks.
So I'll be back in two weeks.
But if you guys want to check out the AI show.
and whatever's going to happen there.
That runs five days a week now as well.
Today's actually a very different episode, John, if you'll listen to it, it's with this guy, Liran Shapira, who runs a podcast called Doom Debates that has like 200,000 subs on YouTube.
But this might be your style where he just brings on experts that think AI is going to kill us.
And he rates their level of how realistic those things are.
But he uses a lot of like, you know, scientific paradoxes and a lot of philosophy and a lot of like, you know, it's the total dark side of the AI trade.
That's just like, listen, what kind of beast are we actually making here?
You know, what's actually interesting, just to give a preview again about him is I was like, this guy's going to come on and be like, listen, you guys, you finance people like.
You suck.
Like you're pumping this stuff.
Just get rich.
And he said, he's like, no, no.
He's like, I want to get rich right before we die.
Like, that's basically what he says that he's like, listen, the market, it will do what everyone thinks it's going to do.
It's going to go like on this insane curve up as it's been going.
And we are going to build, you know, these companies will be worth a hundred trillion dollars and all that.
And then one day there's just going to be a switch flipped.
That is like AI now takes over.
crushes us all and we die.
I don't think it's going to happen exactly that way, but it's funny to hear his view where this guy spends all his time saying like, listen, AI will be detrimental to humanity long term, but in the short term, we will build all this stuff and the economy will boom as a result.
So it's a funny kind of two-pronged approach to the AI build out.
And obviously, you know, crypto is kind of a part of that, right?
Like it's, you know, like you're saying that crypto and AI agents go together.
So, you know, lots of fun right up until the end.
I don't know why you're describing this as funny, but it sounds hilarious.
I said fun.
I said fun.
I didn't say it was funny.
You said funny several times.
Anyway, I'll check out the episode.
It sounds interesting.
Thanks, John.
All right.
Thank you, sir.
And have yourself a great week, guys.
Thanks, LG.
I'll see you next time.
Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event?
Subscribe to our channel.
join the Milk Road daily and pro newsletters and start investing like the top 1%.
This show is for educational purposes only.
Nothing we say is financial advice.
Investing is risky.
Never invest more than you can afford to lose.