Bitcoin's glory days are over 💀

William Quigley (Co-founder of Tether & Co-founder of WAX) basically came out and said the four-year Bitcoin cycle we all loved? Dead. Gone. 

William beleives BTC is now permanently coupled to traditional markets - it moves in lockstep with equities, gets shorted by hedge funds, and behaves like a recently IPO'd stock that nobody trusts yet. 

He doesn't see a 10x coming anytime soon because BTC is a multi-trillion dollar asset now. 

His big conviction? 

The real crypto legacy won't be BTC price appreciation - it'll be USD stablecoins replacing the world's ancient, broken payment plumbing.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

There’s a bull market happening, just not in retail 👔

Matt Hougan (CIO of Bitwise) sees a "runaway institutional bull market in crypto" right now… 

It's just that it's being expressed in stablecoins, tokenization, and vaults, not in your favorite altcoin pumping. 

(Has Matt been talking to William?)

And the disconnect between institutions and retail is wild: 

Institutions are deploying capital at record levels, AI builders think crypto is essential infrastructure…

Meanwhile crypto-native retail is sitting there watching memecoins bleed out, thinking it's all over.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

The internet's business model just broke 💔

Sam Ragsdale (CEO, Merit Systems) says the entire economic contract of the internet (the thing that made Google a $2.5T company) was based on one idea: 

Humans get distracted. You search for a recipe, you see shoe ads, you click and buy, somebody, somewhere makes money. That's the deal. 

But LLMs don't get distracted. They can't be shown banner ads. They don't impulse buy shoes. 

Sam says that model is now obsolete.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

Your local bank is crypto's biggest enemy right now 🏦

Adam Meinhardt (Head of Public Policy at Chainlink) just dropped some serious D.C. intel. 

He says the biggest blockers of the CLARITY act aren't who you think - it's not JP Morgan, not BlackRock… it’s your local 50-person bank. 

Adam says these small banks have insanely powerful grassroots lobbying operations because the local congressman literally knows their employees by name. 

Their kids go to the same school. They don't want exchanges paying yield on USDC because it would crush their deposit margins - and they've got the political muscle to stop it. 

Adam calls this a once-in-a-decade window to pass crypto legislation. 

If it doesn't happen now, it may literally never happen.

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

Silver could 4-5x by summer and Bitcoin could collapse again 💣

Michael Oliver (Founder, Momentum Structural Analysis) came on the Milk Road Macro pod and made two massive calls. 

First: silver has been trapped under $50 for 50 years while every other metal broke out of its historical range. 

Michael says that compression is about to snap - and when it does, $300-$500 silver is "only fair priced" if you adjust for M2 money supply growth since 1980.

(He's loading up on silver miners.)

His take on Bitcoin? Equally bold. 

Michael says his momentum charts gave major sell signals when BTC was above $100K last year, called the drop to $60K, and now he thinks this sideways chop between $60K-$80K is just a resting pattern before the next leg down. 

He doesn't think BTC will be a safe haven in the near term. 

(Ouch!)

🎙️ Listen to the full episode here.

PRO INSIGHT OF THE WEEK 🔮

What were you doing at 9pm last Saturday?

If you’re our ‘always on’ macro wizard, John Gillen - you were answering a request to give your take in the Milk Road PRO Discord, on a particularly bullish article from Andreas Steno Larsen.

John’s response:

“I like and respect him. He's a great analyst. I think he's underestimating this.

There's lots of huge assumptions all over the place in this. First, assuming the U.S. is just going to let itself be dealt out of the global energy market is cray.

Trump just asked congress for a $1.5T military budget and I think like a $2.1T discretionary.

That's like a 50% increase year over year spending on military largest increase in the U.S. since WW2.

I don’t think Trump is going to spend that money to not use the military to protect dollar hegemony.”

P.S. Want direct access to our PRO analyst team, so you can get your burning questions answered in real-time and make the right moves?

👉 Go PRO to unlock access!