GM. This is Milk Road, the newsletter that uses a hydraulic press to compress EVERYTHING you need to know about crypto into a single edition.

Here’s what we got for you today:

• ✍️ July was massive! Here’s a recap…

• 🎙️ The Milk Road Show: The Best Risk-Adjusted Yield in Crypto Right Now w/ Nic Santomauro, Figure Markets

• 🍪 Do crypto treasuries pose a threat?

YEET is crypto’s casino featuring original games, slots and live events. Sign up with Milk Road for a shot at $10K.

JULY WAS MASSIVE! HERE’S A RECAP (P1) ✍️

*kneels beside office desk*

“Lord grant me your strength and guidance for the task I am about to undertake, amen.”

Brace yourselves: here’s EVERYTHING you missed in July across crypto, earnings, macro, government, and institutions.

1/ Crypto 🪙

Maybe this is just recency bias, but July feels like it was the biggest month for crypto milestones so far this year. We saw…

👉 New all-time highs for $BTC

Reaching a neat n’ tidy $123,236 on July 14th.

👉 The largest ICO in history 

PumpFun raised ~$1.3B in the span of a weekend, in hopes of building the next big social platform (with crypto at its core).

And tomorrow, we’re releasing a deep dive on everything you need to know about it (including whether $PUMP is a solid buy or not). 

👉 The dawn of the crypto ‘everything app’

In the span of ~2 weeks, we saw the two biggest public crypto companies announce their crypto ‘everything apps’.

Robinhood announced 12 updates to its platform including tokenized public stocks, the launch of their own Ethereum L2 – oh and this…

Meanwhile, Coinbase came in swinging with The Base App: a social feed, messaging service, and trading platform all wrapped into a single application.

Features that made us yell “niiice!” at our laptop screens include: 

• Group chat betting markets (where you prompt an in-chat AI agent to set up a betting pool for your group)

• Base Pay (save your name/address/email and check out with $USDC anywhere it’s supported online)

• A social feed where every post/profile has its own token (powered by Zora)

(So far, that last feature is booming in early access.) 👇

2/ Earnings 💰

Long story short, we saw two beats and one miss in public crypto company earnings this week.

Long story longer?

👉 Coinbase: missed

Leave Britney Coinbase alone! All you people want is more more more more!

• Revenue: $1.5B vs analysts’ estimates of $1.56B (3.3% year-on-year growth, 4.3% miss)

• Adjusted Earnings Per Share (EPS): $0.12 vs expectations of $1.49 (91.9% miss)

• Operating Margin (Profit Margin): -1.6%, down from 23.7% in Q2 last year

Don’t forget – for a good chunk of Q2, markets were in a panic and crypto volumes took a big hit (and volumes are $COIN’s bread and butter).

👉 Robinhood: beat

Customers seem to be loving what $HOOD is putting down…

• Revenue: $989M vs estimates of $920.4M (45% year-on-year growth, 7.4% beat)

• Adjusted EPS: $0.42 vs analysts’ estimates of $0.31 (35.2% beat)

• Operating Margin: 44.7%, up from 27.7% in the same quarter last year

Congrats to our PRO members who bought back in April when our PRO team put a buy call out on $HOOD at ~$35 (it’s now ~$102).

👉 Strategy: annihilated 

Specifically – Strategy annihilated analysts’ Earnings Per Share (EPS) estimates.

• Revenue: $114.49M vs estimates of $113.65M (2.7% year-on-year growth, 1.8% beat)

• Adjusted EPS: $32.60 vs estimates of -$0.07 (5,819% year-on-year growth, 46,671% beat – thanks to their unrealized $BTC gains)

• Operating Margin: 12,256%, up from -180% in the same quarter last year

Strategy also announced the launch of a ‘stable stock’ ($STRC) that holds a fixed price of $100 per share, targets 9% dividend yield per year, and will be backed by $BTC.

And all of that is just the tip of the iceberg – we also saw milestone events/announcements/releases across macro, government, and institutions.

Keep scrolling to get everything you need to know. 👇

JULY WAS MASSIVE! HERE’S A RECAP (P2) ✍️

*Gasps for air, chugs a Gatorade*

Ok, where were we? Oh, right…

3/ Macro 🌎

At the start of this week, we said we’d be looking closely at the results of PCE, PMI, and the Fed Meeting. 

We now have the results and they’re, um, not great.

👉 Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) data

PCE came in hot…that’s not what we want to see:

👉 ISM’s Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) data

Are manufacturers buying up goods/materials in anticipation of a growing economy? PMI data tells that story. 

Sadly, in July, that story did not have a happy ending. PMI dropped from 49% to 48%.

(And we typically need to see a PMI above 50% if we want to see altcoins run.)

👉 Fed Meeting

Fed Chair Jerome Powell announced that they’d be keeping rates where they are for now, as the market expected…

Though the market is now starting to worry if a September cut is still on the table. 👇

P.S. You can get a simplified look at the forces driving interest rate decisions in this article.

4/ Government 🏛️

The White House Crypto Report dropped this week and there were hopes we’d see movement on a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve…but nada.

Instead, we got a policy roadmap covering stablecoins, taxes, DeFi, and how to make the U.S. the global leader in digital assets.

Not a bad thing! But it’s kinda as if we’d been promised a trip to Disney Land and instead we were taken to a local carnival – the contrast between expectations and reality were stark.

(You can get a closer look at the details of the report here.)

You know what might make you feel better? This!

5/ Institutions 🏦

Alright, let’s end this sucker on a high note…

July was the month that institutional investors fell in love with $ETH! 

(I’m not crying, YOU’RE CRYING!) 👇

(All that, and we launched the Milk Road Macro podcast and Milk Road Degen PRO!)

*eyes suddenly widen, gasps for breath*

What happened? I blacked out.

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

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Do crypto treasuries pose a threat? Galaxy Digital just called them a ‘structural risk’ (yikes!).

Check out these charts! Ethereum returns outpaced Bitcoin returns by 6x in July (ok, now look at where things were at in June).

Wen $SOL boom? CME futures data is hinting it could be soon, driven by ETF momentum.

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