# Crypto Strategy: DeFi, Perps, and Tokenized Equities

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-10-15

## Transcript

I'm very heavily concentrated on Bitcoin and Ethereum.
I have the rest of my portfolio very focused on a lot of what I think are the blue chip or the best DeFi projects and protocols.
Bitcoin is fighting to hold on to $83,000.
It is up over 40% from its lows in July.
Every dip back towards 81K has been bought this month, but this morning's inflation report came in hot and fears of the Fed rate hikes coming back are rising.
Is this the start of a new bull market for crypto?
Is this just another bear market rally?
And what do investors need to know?
Hello and welcome to Milk Road Crypto, the show that still hasn't turned on its fee switch.
I'm your host, John Gillen.
Today is Wednesday, October 14th, and today, for the first time in a long time, we are doing a Milk Road Crypto roll-up.
So I'm joined by two of my Milk Road colleagues, Kyle Reedhead, the head of research and Martin, the lead analyst.
Kyle has gone full DeFi on us.
Martin's indexes are telling a much more cautious story.
So we are going to get into it all today and unpack what everyone's thinking about the crypto markets.
If that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
And as a reminder, our podcast today is free and that would not be possible without our wonderful partners at Nexo, the digital asset platform that lets you trade, earn and borrow all in one place, all in one account.
So stay tuned for more information on them later in the episode.
But for now, welcome back to the Milkord Crypto Rollup.
Martin, Kyle, how are you, gentlemen?
Great.
It's good to be back.
That's a hell of an intro, John.
We don't get those kind of vibes.
Yeah, I jump right into it.
Yeah, I've been doing a lot of these.
I'm getting a little bit more used to it.
Let's kick off with Bitcoin because I really am curious to hear what your guys' thoughts are here.
Like I said, Bitcoin is up 40% from its lows in July.
It's, I think, still just a little bit under 83K, around 82, actually, at the time of recording.
What's your outlook here?
Martin, I'd love to start with you on this question.
What are your thoughts on Bitcoin?
Are we starting a new bull market?
What are your updated thoughts here?
83k and I think most of us in Milk Road we said that like beating 82k 83k is kind of key level for Bitcoin and now we are kind of testing it back from from the upside and I think unfortunately the macro is not like in the setup that we wanted to have so I was about to say that yes crypto is again in the bull market but you know if the the macro is is gonna be a headwind then i don't see like bitcoin doing new all-time highs anytime soon unless like the whole situation with you know rates and yields and oil will calm down and like then i think we are gonna see the next bull market so right now at this very point i think we are gonna probably range around 80.
85k for some time and then depends on how all the new data will come in uh we will move from there kyle what about you last time we spoke you were calling for bitcoin to bart back to like 65k i think um what are your thoughts now i was hoping for it to bart uh i do think we're gonna um i had said it needed to go above the 82k which it did uh now as as martin said we're kind of testing it right now um i think there's a chance we go lower my kind of number that i had milk road pro was if it hits 74k i think you want to be buying a ton of it right now so we'll see if it if it gets there but i do think overall we're in a bull market so dips are for buying at this point will it range for a bit could it chop for a bit it could i still think a lot of people are offside and just not in Bitcoin or in crypto at the moment.
I think it's starting to get a narrative.
The macro is shaky in terms of the price of oil, maybe inflation a little bit, but I don't think it's that bad.
I'm not as concerned as Martin is.
And so I think we will be much higher from here by the end of the year.
I think that Bitcoin is ranging and, you know, until it breaks out of the range one way or the other, I expect it to kind of continue to do that.
I think 81K has been defended twice by the bulls.
It seems like the bears might test it again.
I'm kind of expecting us to go test like 78K and like.
kind of like, you know, hit some of these like supports below us.
There's a lot of them.
But until the bears like pushes back below 75, five and like break out of this range that Bitcoin has been trading in, I'm kind of expecting us to just continue to chop and range, but eventually move higher because I think that this price action isn't really tied so much to macro.
It's more like Bitcoin.
reverting to the mean and like starting to have its own fundamentals and its own bull market starting it's like you know fundamental to crypto as opposed to like related to external factors or beta to liquidity or something so um yeah as long as we're in the range it looks bullish to me i heard you and um was it caleb maybe i forget we're talking about this reverting back to the mean where do you think is the mean Like, what's the number there where you're like, okay, that's the fair value.
And then now it's like, okay, I need a catalyst to go above it or catalyst the other way to go below.
What is that number?
I'd have to look, but we're basically looking at the 50-week moving average, which is basically one year of trailing price history, you know, the average.
And that's kind of where we've been fighting around, right?
The bulls and bears.
So we're at it now.
Basically, we're around it.
And I think the key level I've been watching is 83K because that's the high from May.
And so if we can get over that and hold that, then it seems like a higher high is being confirmed.
But we keep, there's like, I think four times now we've crossed over it and dropped under it and then gone back over it.
So the market is really making up its mind here and taking its time about doing it.
I mean, the good thing about the chop is like, if you look at the RSI, we were, we were pretty overbought, which I mean, Bitcoin can do that for a long time, but we got there real fast after the move that we had in, in, in August.
And so now we're kind of chopping up at, you know, in the, in the lower eighties, but our size coming down.
Right.
And so if we can continue to do that, that's a great thing.
And I think that's what allows it to have legs for, for the next kind of like move higher.
So I actually don't mind a little chop here after such a big move.
Yeah, me too.
I'm kind of of the mind that if we did get a dip to like 78k, then the RSI would go oversold.
And that would be like a screaming buy signal actually.
So yeah.
What about the rest of the market?
And like ETF flows are still sideways.
So nothing's going on there.
Sailor is not like really buying in heavily.
So like, I think we need like more market participants start to bid again.
before Bitcoin really takes off.
Do you think sales are about to start buying in size?
Or like, why has he not really leaned into it yet?
Good question.
I don't know.
So, okay.
So I actually think we have crossed the threshold on this.
I think that strategy has accumulated Bitcoin three times, I think in September and October in total.
They're not buying a ton, obviously, but they are now buying again.
STRC, which is their...
Their preferred product is now, I think, like $0.10 off of par.
So once that gets to $100, once that gets over $100, he can start issuing that and just smash buying Bitcoin.
Then I would say the other thing is that Strive, they have their… They have another preferred product.
I think it's Stava, Strava, whatever it is.
But they have a preferred product and they are issuing that to buy Bitcoin as well.
I think they've bought somewhere around like 3,000 Bitcoin in the last couple of weeks or something like that.
So the treasury companies that have survived the bear market are, I think, now back into accumulation mode just barely, but they are starting to do that.
So if that continues, then I think we could see that flywheel start to kick in and really get some...
price appreciation from that.
Yeah.
Here's the, for those that are on YouTube, we'll get some charts up here, but here's the stretch chart, which is made an incredible recovery.
That was wild.
It got down to like 70 bucks for a while there.
But yeah, almost back up at a hundred.
We'll see if it actually gets to a hundred and stays there.
Then they can start to clip it and, and use that to buy Bitcoin once again, like they were doing back earlier this year, but we'll see if it happens.
Hey, what do you guys think about Tom Lee talking about how, you know, they're close to 5%.
buying ETH.
And once they get to 5%, which was their goal, he said, they're just going to stop buying ETH.
What do you guys think about that in terms of demand for ETH?
Because he's been easily the biggest buyer of ETH for the last year and a half.
What do you think that means for ETH?
And then what do you think it means for Bitmine?
This pullback on Bitcoin is scaring a lot of people, and I am not one of them.
So if you want to see what I'm not selling and why, what's on my watch list, and when I'm going to be deploying more capital into these markets, you can join Milk Row Pro today.
It's just a dollar.
The link is in the description.
I answer questions day and night in Discord.
I'll see you there.
I think it's a crisis, and we should all freak out.
I mean, I'm kind of shoulder shruggy about it.
Like, yes, he's been buying ETH for a long time, but he's also been pacing himself, so he hasn't really been moving the markets radically one way or the other, I think.
from a sentiment thing maybe it you know makes some people a little bit nervous but um i don't know i just think that ethereum is a great asset a lot of people are going to continue to accumulate it and i think bitmine is going to you know continue to use its capital to um improve the ethereum ecosystem strengthen the fundamentals of eth and you know now use that capital uh to support their stock as well in different ways and through different investments or buybacks or whatever they're going to do.
But I'm not really concerned about it.
It's all just kind of following the plan and the playbook he's been running.
Do you think that he ends up buying assets that exist on top of Ethereum now?
Let's say they got an Aave or Sky or Uniswap or whatever.
He starts buying kind of DeFi and the applications that live there.
Or what do you think he does with his capital moving forward?
Because I mean, he's going to generate a ton of ETH because it's most of its state, right?
I'm sure he's going to deploy it inside of DeFi, which is amazing for the ecosystem.
But I assume he's going to continue to invest.
Like he already owns, who did he invest in?
Was it WorldCoin?
Well, MrBeast as well, but like a WorldCoin dat, or maybe it was WorldCoin, I can't remember.
So he is making like, or has made other investments.
I wonder if he just like kind of moves off of ETH and starts to buy other things within the ecosystem.
That's completely possible.
I don't think it's a good idea.
Don't think it's a good idea?
Why not?
I don't think so.
I think he is trying to sell Bitmine as a company that is backing ETH.
And like, if you are starting to do some...
other ventures or you know invest in like early startups like yes you might be able to sell me uh the ethereum idea and and the thesis but like now you are investing in some other stuff like and i don't know it feels like it's a different different investment look at nvidia right so nvidia sells gpus right but then what does it do it goes and buys a bunch of companies within the ecosystem that is buying those gpus and creating products with them Right.
So it's hard to investing in the ecosystem of NVIDIA.
That would be similar to what Bitmine could do with Ethereum.
Because the value of Ethereum, of ETH, goes up the more users we have, the more applications that are generating revenue on Ethereum.
And so if he can go and find a way to help accelerate that growth among those applications, it would be a bullish thing for ETH in the Ethereum ecosystem overall.
Obviously riskier.
Like different stage, like if you are Nvidia, you are the biggest company in the world and like, you know, you have so much money, you don't know what to do with it.
So I think it's okay to kind of support the whole ecosystem.
But Ethereum is not at that stage.
Like those are like, most of these projects are still startups.
Like they're great, good products, but we still need to kind of move the needle and get the masses, which is not happening.
I think the partnership with the guy, what's his name?
Mr.
Beast.
Mr.
Beast.
That's like, if they are going to build something out of it, that's huge because that guy has a huge audience and if they can build some products on top of Ethereum, this can be the next big catalyst for Ethereum because they would be able to bring millions of people into Ethereum.
So maybe not necessarily investing in products that are already on chain and already crypto native, but instead products or people or entrepreneurs that are outside of crypto that might be able to bring a large audience and a large user base into crypto.
Right.
Which is what the Mr.
B strategy would be.
That'd be interesting.
I think that's what really crypto needs to do.
Like, it's not about like, we have a lot of great products.
We just need to, you know, find people who use them.
So what's interesting, I know we want to talk about perps.
There were some questions, I think, in our Discord on Lighter.
I was talking to, I don't want to say the name, but let's call it a crypto exchange.
And what was interesting is he was telling me, he's like, perps have been a really successful onboarding tool into crypto for non-crypto people.
He's like, right now, if we try to market perps to crypto people, he's like, we've had perps in crypto for like five years.
I can't get someone to leave Binance and come to my app that I have, my on-chain perps thing, because they've been using it in Binance for years.
So it's nothing new to them.
He's like, but it's interesting.
If I go to someone who invests in stocks, who doesn't really know of perps, they've used options maybe, but options are kind of complicated.
It has expiries.
It has all these different details to it.
He's like, I show them, hey, you can just go long on NVIDIA or on whatever stock.
And it just works.
They're like, holy shit.
And all of a sudden he can get them to easily move from their Fidelity account or their, you know, whatever account that they're using to do options today.
And he's like, so their strategy in the last few months have been, hey, let's go after stock traders and bring them into perps and introduce them to perps.
And he said it's been a huge flywheel for them, for their business.
So I think.
It's kind of that strategy is let's find the people that are investing elsewhere and bring them into some of the new primitives that we've created over here on chain.
And even if we can apply them to the assets that they already like, like an NVIDIA or he said the biggest traders are Micron and SK Hynix, but just adding perps to them, he's like, that's kind of the way that we're getting them on chain.
And it's working extremely well over the last few months.
So it was kind of interesting to see that playing out.
Like a lot of people are...
A lot of people are asking like how they can get exposure to Korean stocks because you know not all brokers provided access.
So like I always send them like hey if you're familiar with crypto you can go to hyperliquid or lighter and you can get exposure to pretty much everything really.
So even gold or silver you know Korean stocks like whatever.
So yeah I think that's that's actually pretty pretty kind of compelling value proposition from Perps for sure because not everyone has access to everything but now.
you do have access i think that perps are going to be an extremely popular product and i think what people in discord are asking really is like why am i bullish on lighter and not hyper liquid and i don't think that's the case i'm bullish on both of them um they both have different risks and concerns and uh there's i think but i think both of them are going to grow a lot and i think that's the thing to like to kyle's point right like this is a really um broadly applicable and in demand financial product and primitive.
And a lot of people are going to be successful with this.
A lot of projects, a lot of different businesses are going to start offering them, but it's all kind of dependent on the CFTC opening the regulatory floodgates and like really bringing some of these platforms and products into the U S markets and in a bigger way they're starting to, but like, there's a lot of room to grow there.
So I'm just kind of like bullish on perps and per products and projects in general.
Why is, why is lighter getting crushed?
The last few days, what happened?
Yeah.
Yeah, so I think part of it was Robinhood saying that they're going to use Bitstamp for their in-app or their main perps partner for their platform.
And Leiter still has the Robinhood wallet, but it's more like a side product, I guess, or whatever you want to say there.
And then I think that they're just seeing a dip in revenues and volumes right now.
and some waning attention, reverting to the mean.
But I think the long term thesis is still really strong.
The uptrend is still there.
So yeah, I don't know.
It's just normal bull market things, I think.
I think for me, I was actually checking LiR today because I really want to get exposure to it, to it perhaps again.
But LiR is going to have a huge unlock starting January.
So right now they are making, I think the monthly buybacks are about like 3 million or something like that.
And there's going to be tokens unlocks starting January next year worth about 50 million per month.
So I'm just worried that the supply overhang is going to be way too big.
So market is not able to absorb that.
And like most of these investors in the previous rounds are up like from 2x to 9x.
So they have, you know, incentives to sell.
I'm not saying that everyone is going to sell, but...
you know i'm just worried that we have seen this story before so many times and don't get me wrong i think the lighter team is one of the best teams in in in the space like i i got interested in lighter when i heard first podcast with the blood with a founder and co and i was i was really kind of uh interested right away because that guy is is a huge, huge guy, huge brain.
And I wanted to back that guy.
But now, like I sold way too early.
And now I'm not sure that there is still a time horizon for for this trade to play out because even right now we are at $3.5 or something around that level.
And again, in like two months, there's going to be a lot of new supply coming to the market.
And so who are the unlocks to?
Is it?
It's team.
Okay.
i agree i agree that's a major concern but that doesn't start until january so in the meantime you got time before then uh hyperliquid is um Is there, John, I don't think you own Hyperliquid in your port.
Is this something you're looking at?
The nice thing is RSI is starting to get a lot lower, even though it's still around 80 bucks.
So it's kind of chilled out for the last little bit, similar to what we were just saying with Bitcoin.
But it feels like maybe at some point Hyperliquid's going to be another good buy.
What do you guys think?
Hyperliquid's a great product.
They've got great tokenomics, great token alignment.
Great revenue, great distribution.
Great.
Yeah, this is like a really great project.
I don't hold any of it right now because it feels like it can go higher, but it's a pretty consensus move among crypto right now.
And yeah, I don't know.
I just I feel like it's because of how big its market cap has gotten relative to a product like Leiter, I'm kind of more interested in deploying capital into something that hasn't already gotten to it.
$25 billion market cap yet.
But I just, I'm not fudding.
I think it's going to be, it's going to continue to do well.
It's done amazing.
And I think it's going to be up only.
And they're much different than Leiter.
You know, they've got the hyperliquid virtual machine.
They're building different kinds of products and just perps and stuff.
They're expanding into a lot of different things.
So yeah, I'm very bullish on hype and hyperliquid overall.
I'm just kind of like, all right, this is a little bit rich on the valuation right now.
I think I sold my hype at like I was selling in trenches.
I think the last one was about 72, 74 bucks or something like that.
So we are getting close to that price again.
But I think I'm not gonna buy because I simply think that LIDR is a better product.
And I think if perps are about to win, I think LIDR is in better position, even though the token might not be, you know, as interesting as hype.
uh more bullish on lighter product wise interesting i agree with that too there there are some differentiators about like lighter is lower fees they've got the zk technology they've got they're Ethereum aligned and Ethereum based.
There's some things about the product that I think are attractive.
The other thing too is to me, perps just comes down to a distribution war.
How many people can you get your product in front of?
And Leiter has a differentiated strategy for that that I think is going to advantage them in certain ways.
Like Robinhood is just one example of that.
But once they get the CFTC approval and clarity that they need, which they're actively working on, they're spending a lot of time in Washington.
Once they get that, I think that they're going to see a lot more people.
I interviewed Trevor King on the show and he said they're going to have a lot more dance partners.
So I think that that's a really strong thesis on Leiter, just getting integrations with a lot of different partners and getting a huge amount of distribution.
And that is kind of the contest to win on Perfs, I think.
Can you do a ton of different stocks on Leiter yet?
Or what sort of assets do they have?
It depends on what jurisdiction you're in.
Oh, yes.
join us in new york so you might not have access to i can't do anything yeah the people's republic of new york doesn't allow me to participate in most of these things but yeah that sucks man uh well i think they have like maybe let's say 50 stocks so you know the most popular ones uh but for example the korean ones so you can buy uh sky hunnings or samsung as well but who's tokenized it was it was it lighter itself or do they use like securitize or something like it's perps So it's not like tokenized.
There's no spot.
Gotcha.
Do you want to talk about tokenized products?
Yeah, we can absolutely talk about tokenized.
Because the reason I was asking is, obviously we had the innovation exemption from the SEC.
And so there's like a certain rules or instructions that you can, if you tokenize a certain way, then you can do it in the US.
I don't know about in the Republic of New York, but maybe you can do it there too.
But I think this is still the next big, like kind of catalyst for DeFi.
I think if I'm looking at where to invest in crypto, if it's a digital asset, like outside of the equities, I'm looking more at DeFi than I am looking at like an Ether or Sol.
Because I just think that there's so much room to grow from the DeFi side of things.
I mean, they got...
pretty crushed in the bear market.
And they haven't really been able to get back to their highs of the 2021 days during the last bull market we had.
I think the thing that will do it is the onboarding of more stocks and tokenized stocks.
Because I think like Aave just released, they're allowing you to take out loans against your stocks, which is pretty cool against Coinbase stocks.
But I think today or maybe it's yesterday, they announced they're now doing incentives for that.
So if you lend out and borrow against your stocks, then you can earn extra APY, which is pretty cool.
And so I just think, you know, Uniswap, I think the next big kind of leg up for Uniswap, Aerodrome, other DEXs is the ability to trade stocks as we get more and more of these.
The problem is, is like, you know, Coinbase has seen a ton of growth.
I think they've gotten to like 2 billion or 3 billion now in tokenized stock volume, but it's on like...
I don't know, they have like seven or nine stocks.
That's it, right?
So once they get to hundreds of stocks and you can get anything from there, I think that's when we're going to see some serious volume increase across a lot of DeFi.
Probably starting with Coinbase and Robinhood, but I think it's going to continue.
I mean, Securitize has gone crazy.
I don't know if you guys have watched that stock.
It is so volatile.
It's wild.
But I think you can see that.
you know wherever tokenized stocks going whoever's integrating them and using them within defi i think that's going to be the next big trade for for crypto outside of pervs i actually agree with this take and i think the coinbase the way that they've gone about tokenizing these assets is a big differentiator product wise because um robin hood is giving you like you know a a what is it like an obligation ownership obligation whatever it is but they're the products are technically offshore and they're just like selling you like a derivative like a placeholder version of it.
Coinbase has got basically everything on chain.
Like you get the, you're the beneficial owner, you're the, you get the voting rights, you get, you get like equal equity rights you would get if you bought the stock in, you know, a traditional TradFi venue.
And so that's like a big differentiator on the product.
And then I think Aerodrome is going to be expanding and they're going to be integrating Velodrome and Aerodrome to make Aero and bringing a lot of these tokenized products to market.
And there's going to be, I think it just like an, enormous amount of demand for these things and a differentiator from again, just a higher quality product or a different version of a product that I think will have product market fit, get a lot of attention and adoption.
And I think the thing that's interesting about this is that when you tokenize these equities, you unlock so many different use cases for DeFi for people who want to hold these assets.
also want to do other things with them and get more benefit and value from them there's just like a whole lot of things that are unlocked and created um and i'm i'm bullish on what this means for the l1s but i do agree with you like the apps that are supporting this like uniswap like airdrome they're going to benefit a lot and i'm you know personally very bullish on both of these so um yeah it's like a really great setup and it's starting to really like um it really take off in a big way even with just a handful like like nine stocks or whatever they have seven stocks even with just that it started to take off in a big way so i'm really bullish on the the continued growth there um martin what are you seeing on that yeah i agree i think if you look at banks and how they make money it's mostly that people just have some money there and like the banks are using your money and borrowing it to institutions or other people and the spread that's how they make money right If you look at brokers today, you own some stocks and they are lending your stocks on your behalf, but they are kind of keeping the spread as well again.
So I think what Coinbase can really offer is, hey, you can, you know, hold stable coins with us and we are going to give you like very good returns.
Like, let's say something close to Fed fund rates or something around 4%, which is awesome.
I guess there's not many US banks that offer you 4% right now.
Then imagine that you can own Tesla and how much is your broker paying you right now for lending Tesla to some short people who are shorting Tesla?
None.
So like, you know, you can all of a sudden you can get like pretty much all of your assets or of your kind of wealth in some form yielding you something because it's doing the job.
I think that's going to be the next big unlock.
And I think right now Coinbase still struggle to kind of put everything together in a very, you know, appealing way and easy for users to experience all that.
But once they figure this out, it's going to be awesome product, awesome product.
And I think I agree that it's going to be the next big thing.
Here's a question for you guys that I simply cannot wrap my head around.
Why have stable coins not grown in the last year.
Literally, they have not moved in an entire year.
And I just cannot wrap my head around why.
Do you guys have any explanation of this?
I'll just show the chart for those that are listening, or sorry, for those that are watching.
We hit $303 billion back in October 20.
And today we sit at $303 billion, October 14, 2026.
So a year later.
Why has that not moved?
Obviously, I know we were in a bear market.
Okay, sure.
But it doesn't really make sense to me with everything going on.
What are the incentives for people to move onto blockchains?
One, it's yield, but right now you can get, you know, 5% on US treasuries or 10 years won, so people are using that.
Or second, you just need to move money more freely, more like faster and cheaply.
But that's probably like, I am just using some providers today and I'm not really like...
you know, thinking about should I switch and do not use Weiss or, you know, whatever people use today.
Yes, it's expensive, but it's not kind of making incentives big enough for me to like go and explore blockchains.
So I think like Stripe and like all these guys who own the payments today, they will eventually make the move and like they will bring all like hundreds of billions of stablecoins on chain, but it's not happening yet.
And so like, that's probably the question, what is going to be the next kind of catalyst for next 100 billion of dollars stablecoins moving on chain?
Either there's needs to be some higher yields.
And yes, you can find some higher yields today, but those are very risky and like, you know, probably not gonna do it.
And second, like we really need like these existing apps with users that are gonna just use blockchains on the back end so people don't even know that they are using blockchains while they will compete with other alternatives, how to move money across the boards or just how to use payments for merchants.
I just thought from an enterprise standpoint.
they would have picked it up and used it by now because the amount of money you save using stable coins versus like sending wires is unbelievable we've been using stable coins to pay our employees for years and like i could not imagine going back like when i have to send a wire i actually have to go like i had to send a wire the other day uh because sometimes we get paid too much in dollars that i'm like oh i gotta send it to our exchange to get it into stables and i had to go into the bank to send a bunch of money and like what a disaster i had to go in there and wait for like 40 minutes while they like We're talking to whoever the lady is actually twice now.
I've had the same lady and she's like all confused about to send this wire to wise.
It was actually had to send it to wise because you didn't know what wise was like.
It's a disaster.
And like the fees, the speed, like it takes so long.
And I'm just like, how are enterprises not doing this already?
Like it's such a way better way to move money.
And I know there are companies that literally move millions, billions of dollars every single month.
And they're paying so much of fees and they still.
don't move over and i don't get it like does circle need to do a better job at finding clients or is it coinbase i i don't understand it um this is the the most mind-boggling thing because i thought stable coins would be way way way higher right now You know, one of the weird things about crypto is that the longer you're in it, the more accounts you seem to end up with.
You buy in one place, trade somewhere else, earn yield somewhere else.
And if you actually need capital, you end up having to sell something that you probably wanted to keep.
That's why we at Milk Road are partnering with Nexo.
These guys keep the whole thing under one account.
You can buy, trade crypto, earn interest on what you already hold, and even borrow against your capital without having to sell it.
All in one spot, all in one account, all on Nexo.
So if you need liquidity, but you don't want to give up your position, or you're already holding crypto and you want to be able to...
more with it i think nexo is worth your time we love working with them i think you will too tell them milk road sent you i think that the last year you said we've kind of gone sideways the last whole year has been a bear market so that that's got to be part of it and i understand your point which is that people who are not crypto native or not using them to trade should be adopting stable coins but i think that's probably why we've gone sideways and not gone down a whole bunch um but i think that you're going to start seeing that happen more and more um as ai agents start to come online because human beings are going to kind of like leverage the products that they're used to whether or not they're better they're going to kind of like stick a lot with what they're used to but i do think ai agents as they come online are going to start being huge adopters of stable coins and that's where i think you're going to start see that transition happen once people start it letting their agents handle things for them.
Agents are going to start realizing, hey, this would be better if we did this, let's switch over to these systems.
And like, I think that's going to be a big catalyst for additional adoption of stable coins.
And I think that is coming.
That's starting to happen in a big way soon.
Have you guys already led your agents to like, you know, pay for something or like manage your money somehow?
I have, but I just took a picture of my credit card and gave it to my grok bot and buying a bunch of things for me and it's super smooth and it's easy.
And and so I don't know that that works.
That works great for me.
So but I mean, I do agree at some point agents are going to use stable coins instead.
But I don't know, the credit card thing works completely fine for now.
I think the pressure needs to come from merchants because those are the ones that are paying those huge fees.
Right.
So if you pay a hundred bucks, the merchant only gets in certain.
portion of those money so like the visa or mastercard they take a cut and like so there needs to be more pressure from merchants to kind of move to these better alternatives yeah i don't think it'll be the consumers necessarily yeah what are you guys what are you guys most bullish on what are you what are you what are you bullish on stable coins or stable coins but what we're going into a bull market here what do you think is going to perform well what do you think like are you more interested in coinbase and robinhood are you more interested in the the daps like uniswap aerodrome are you like getting interested in layer ones again like what are you bullish on for the rest of the year Yeah, for me, there's kind of two categories.
It's the crypto equities.
So I think Coinbase and Robinhood will continue to do well as they continue to integrate into the on-chain world and onboard users and sort of integrate and connect the TradFi world and the crypto world or the on-chain world.
So I think those two are a good bet there.
Galaxy could be the other one, though it's getting absolutely beat right now.
crashed right now because of the CoreWeave situation, which is its main tenant.
So it's Galaxy's, obviously, both AI and crypto.
So those are our three assets that I continue to watch on the equity side.
And then on the on-chain side, I think it's mainly DeFi for me.
Uniswap has had a really good run.
So I'm really hoping that if we get that pullback in Bitcoin down to 74, 78K that we were talking about earlier in the show.
I think we'll see a little puke in alts.
And at that point, I plan to deploy.
Uniswap will be one of them.
I'm hoping it comes down further.
I don't know if it'll get any lower than kind of the $7 that it just pulled back to.
But if it does get to like six bucks or lower, then I'm going to buy a bunch of it.
Airdrome is the other one that I was wanting to buy, but it literally didn't have any pullback.
It was just not affected at all by crypto.
Uniswap is down 35%.
Airdrome is hitting local highs.
So I don't really understand that.
But I just want to get a basket of DEXs because I really think that stocks is going...
to drive the volumes a lot higher.
And so you can buy exchanges on the equity side or you can buy DEXs on the on-chain side.
And I think both will be really good long-term holds.
I'm interested in AVA because I think AVA is just a backbone of the whole DeFi.
So if anyone wants to build DeFi and you want to build lending borrowing markets, which is, again, pretty much kind of the foundation for everything else.
you're probably going to use AVA.
So I am really interested in AVA.
I'm also checking Sky, but my issue is that there is no growth really over the last couple months.
It's just going sideways.
And Kyle's favorite one, which is ChipAI, which brings the credit from GPUs, backed by GPUs into the markets, which is...
actually pretty interesting because you know how you can get exposure to this kind of booming market and so this this is the way so yeah I'm I'm looking at like let's say OGs of DeFi so Sky, Aave, also Athena and then looking into something that is bringing something new something innovative something that's not available anywhere right now and that the example of chip yeah i actually forgot to to mention ship i actually think you know we should probably do a whole episode on this one time uh maybe we'll we'll dive deeper into it in next week's roll up um but there's a new financial asset in the world now with gpus uh and compute and there's the market is trying to figure out how to price this stuff right because it's it's very um well it can be volatile but there's also many different versions of it of compute you know there's different versions of gpus and so we're trying to figure out how to price it and create a market around it and so the tradfire world is trying to do that but we know the tradfire world kind of sucks at this stuff whereas the on-chain world is actually really good at this stuff and so i think there's a really really big opportunity for crypto or DeFi to kind of front run what the TradFi world is trying to do on GPUs is kind of what Chip is doing.
It's a little different.
They're more on the funding side.
But I think if we can start to create markets for GPUs and build sort of services around that asset class, that could be a really...
like good opportunity for like people to kind of leapfrog and jump past TradFi and go straight on chain and start to use on chain primitives for the GPU market, whether it's perps or it's spot or it's, you know, it's some sort of pricing markets or it's funding.
Like there's so much financing going on right now in the AI build out.
And I think crypto needs to be a big part of that.
Chip is doing that, which I'd love.
I think they're really cool, interesting.
protocol but there's a bunch that are coming up that are doing this and i think there's there's a lot of opportunity there as well john what about you i think i echo a lot of this i'm very heavily concentrated on bitcoin and ethereum i have the rest of my portfolio very focused on a lot of what i think are the blue chip or the best d5 projects and protocols um i have a longer list outside of uniswap and just aerodrome but i don't want to give every name away but i am really interested also in privacy I think that's becoming a really important narrative.
And it's not just for cypherpunks or like crypto native people, but institutions want a way to be able to interact on chain, get access to the deep liquidity and public blockchain ecosystems and the technologies and DEXs that are being built and that are growing.
But they want to be able to do it in a way that maintains a degree of like privacy and confidentiality and like not having every position they have available publicly to be hunted by their competitors.
So I'm interested in projects that are.
trying to offer a solution for that.
So I've been paying attention to what they're building at the midnight side chain.
And I think Near offers confidentiality.
And so that's been a big angle for value driver for them.
So that's just like a big trend in digital assets that...
you know, is starting to get attention.
A lot of different projects and blockchains are trying to come to market with solutions for that.
Ethereum is trying to build that directly into their L1.
So it's like everybody is trying to come up with a solution for this because it's something that's needed, like rational privacy.
And so that's something I'm watching too and trying to build into my portfolio, like an articulation of a thesis on that.
But yeah, like I agree.
I'm heavily concentrated on the majors in DeFi and there's just like, there's a lot that's happening.
Perps, I've had.
got some exposure to as well.
But I'm wildly bullish on the whole space and it's kind of difficult because I don't want to have 60 different things in my bags, but I'm also trying to make sure I'm expressing a thesis on a lot of things right now.
But yeah, I'm really bullish across the board on crypto.
There's another circle actually looks a little juicy right now.
uh for for two reasons one i mean we just talked about stable coins and why we think it's going to grow from agentic use uh and just in general it's it's obviously a better product so i think enterprises will eventually adopt it at some point i can't be the only one doing with my business like someone else has to do it too like it's definitely going to come because it's a way better product uh so like i just think in in terms of usdc I think that is going to happen.
But then also we're kind of in a, you know, we're increasing rates right now.
So this is better for the bottom line of Circle.
And so if we can have a world where both, you know, stablecoin use grows because of agents and because I think the macro world we're going into is higher growth.
So GDP higher and thus higher rates.
So I think we can actually sustain higher rates.
Not necessarily like crazy higher.
I don't think we're going to like raise rates like we did back in 2022.
But I think we can sustain higher.
rates.
We don't need to go down to like zero or one or two or anything like that.
And so I think this is actually a good sign for Circle's bottom line.
Also why I continue to buy Coinbase because Coinbase basically takes like 50% of all Circle's revenues.
But I think there's a bull case setting up for Circle and it's been pretty beaten down over the last while.
So I think there's a good opportunity on Circle as well.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of crypto equities that'll do well.
We haven't even covered like security ties and like, you know, all these kind of players that are invisible today mostly, but they're doing a lot of stuff on the back end.
And like, for example, I also own Figure, which is probably one of the biggest players who brought the most real world assets on chain today.
And yet nobody's talking about it.
Now the CEO and founder of Figure, he also launched a new product, which is called Nastra or Hastra, whatever it's called.
But it's just about kind of creating a new fintech that is going to bring all the on-chain kind of benefits to the everyday user.
So it's pretty easy.
You will just experience, you know, the interface that you're used to when you are using, let's say, Robinhood or Coinbase.
So very kind of primitive and easy to use, but you will be using on-chain.
You just don't know about that.
and you will benefit all the upside of that.
So those are kind of things that nobody's talking about, but it's happening.
Like, figure is growing like crazy quarter over quarter.
And so like, there are still players that are still kind of hidden gems, in my opinion, that nobody's still talking about.
I definitely agree with that.
I think that there's a lot of value across the space, tokens and equities and digital assets and figures.
A great example of that.
Yeah, I'm trying to get Mike Cagney on the show to interview him about this actually because you're right, it's not getting enough attention and it's amazing.
So to be continued.
All right, guys.
Well, I think we're going to end it there.
Thanks for hopping on and doing this.
Guys, for our audience watching, this is the crypto roll-up.
We're trying to do like a weekly conversation or bi-weekly conversation to check in, catch up with each other and just share our thoughts on the market, what's happening here.
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Kyle, Martin, thank you so much for being here.
I'm looking forward to the next one.
This has been a lot of fun.
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