Inside the crypto collapse: Binance selling, ETF exhaustion and OG profit taking

Transcript

To to me it's very clear that like the industry is going to be much larger than like much larger over the next 3 to 5 years than it is today. It's just like that might not look exactly like people had envisioned it looking you know 3 4 years ago. What's up everybody? It's LGD said here and welcome to the Milk Road Show. The daily crypto show that is starting to feel like Leonardo DiCaprio in that movie where the bear is relentlessly trying to tear him apart and secretly hoping there's an Academy Award at the end of all this. Today is February 17th, 2026. We are deep in that bare market. There is no doubt. But that doesn't mean we can just take off every day and touch grass waiting for the turnaround. There's so much happening in the space honestly when you zoom out and

we do this every day on the show. There is so many different things happening and a lot of reasons to be bullish. Maybe not on the price action but on a lot of individual assets from uh hyperlquid to Zcash to a lot of new ways to kind of trade some of these narratives. Today we're joined by Jason, the head of markets at Delphi Digital to share his thoughts and a lot of their latest reports about some of those ideas and also of course give us his thoughts on the market and how soon we can turn this all around. Today's episode is brought to you by Warbox, the easiest way to trade crypto, bridge send stable coin payments instantly simple, global, friction free, and some turn crypto tax chaos into confidence. Jason, haven't seen you in a while, man. Happy New Year.

>> Yeah, thanks man. It's uh it's been a rough uh >> Happy indeed. >> You know, it's been great. It's been great out outside of price action. It's uh it's been great. Good to be back. Thanks for having me. >> I'm glad you're feeling good, man. What what's going on, man? Because you we did a lot of podcasts with you guys uh over the holidays. Prior to the holidays, you gave us your year-end reports. Uh it was a mixed bag, obviously, because you know, December was was not that different than now. We're lower now, but I think fear fear and greed was was relatively the same. But what's been going on the last two months that that have really driven us down and even put that fear and greed index, man, down to five like last week or the week before?

Absolutely insane. Give me your thoughts. >> Yeah, I mean soon we're going to be at zero on fear and greed at this rate. But uh >> what are we right now? What are we right now? It's >> I haven't looked more depressing than anything. Um but uh you know maybe it's a good capitulation signal at least in sentiment uh in the short term. But >> yeah, I mean it's tough, right? Like obviously we open the year I think around like 88K on Bitcoin and we're at like 67 now. It's probably a bit worse for things like ETH and Soul and stuff. So like you know clearly um clearly the pattern that we've seen since 1010 uh into year end has kind of persisted into the new year right just a a ton of just like relentless cryptosp specific selling um especially relative to to traditional equity markets right you

know I I guess you know equities are pulling back a little bit off all-time highs and it kind of looks like there's maybe some waning momentum in equity land uh you know obviously software stocks getting absolutely mauled uh looking a lot like our altcoins but generally speaking um you know equities the indices are very close to all-time highs and crypto is you know minus 60% off all-time highs depending on what you're looking at maybe a little bit worse a little bit better but generally speaking you know we're much much much further off alltime highs so very clear divergence and it's you know maybe accelerated to an extent uh since the start of the year at least on Bitcoin right like I think when we met in December we were probably around like you know around that 88k that range low

88 8 90K. We had been kind of oscillating around there for a couple weeks after we had just that like that month or two of just straight just down every day, every day, every day, every day uh post 1010. And then, you know, it looked like we could have been, you know, forming a local bottom. It was an interesting spot. We had that like boogeyman sailor entry price at, you know, mid70s just below that. And then pretty much as soon as the year started, the selling came back. Uh, and it's, you know, it's it's Binance specific selling for the most part, right? Like, and when I say that, I mean like the majority of the spot selling, at least on Bitcoin, is coming from Binance relative to the other exchanges. So, there was a good tweet a week or two back that kind of like looked at the amount of overall

like spot volume that Binance does relative to the other exchanges versus the amount of active spot selling on Binance versus the other exchanges. and it was several times higher on Binance even though the, you know, the volumes were relatively, you know, the same with Binance compared to all of its, you know, competitors combined. And so it clearly shows you there's some like price insensitive selling coming out of Binance. It it it's usually around the New York open, which kind of makes sense, right? That's the most liquid time of the day uh for for equities as well as for for crypto as people come in, you know, to buy ETFs, right? It's just like the New York open. it's the most liquid part of the trading session.

So, it makes sense that, you know, that's when a lot of the selling would occur. Um, but it's just like pretty pretty consistent and it's just persisted for for months and months and months at this point. And so, it kind of begs the question like why nobody has a great answer for this. Like you could point to, okay, all the dats are are no longer buying anymore and they were a pretty big buyer from that, you know, that rally in April to to through the fall, right? uh after the tariffs uh were lifted and you got the like the Trump taco on the tariffs, right? That big rally, you had a lot of DAT buying, you had a lot of ETF buying and just like, you know, just general good euphoria and sentiment. And then since then, right, we clearly don't have any DATs buying. Almost all of them are all

of them are underwater, even Sailor at this point, right? All of them are underwater. Uh you know, Tom Le's evaporated $6 billion, 7 billion of of of value buying ETH, right? So like >> on paper on paper it's not realized >> until you sell um right so you have you have all of this stuff going on all these you know big buyers are no longer buyers um the ETFs aren't buying as much as they used to uh etc etc so now you know clearly we're seeing the the inverse of that you know reflexive upside move and then we had 1010 happen and we still don't know what happened on 1010 everybody got wrecked people that don't usually get wrecked get wrecked right like you know the delta neutral type people who are you know short short some leg on one exchange, long on

another exchange to offset, but if you get ADL on one of those positions and then the other one gets closed out, you're you're you're you're screwed. So like lots of people got got liquidated and and removed from the industry forcibly uh who otherwise normally wouldn't in those scenarios on top of just like retail getting absolutely decimated from it because you had the whole perplex exchange wars before that which kind of lured a bunch of onchain people to perp dexes to farm per deck points and then they're all taking per positions not knowing how to trade per well and then you get 1010 and it nukes everybody. So, like we still don't really know what happened on 1010. We don't know which bodies, you know, got taken out. We we haven't really seen

what's happened there, but it's clear that something happened and crypto is kind of very much decoupled from that moment on. And it's kind of bled into the new year, unfortunately, uh, for for most crypto assets. Everything you're listening to today is also covered in our daily crypto newsletter. And on Sundays, we even recap the best parts of the entire week's worth podcasts. So check it out at the link below. >> Let's talk a bit of gossip, man, while you're talking about all that stuff. And and this is this is this is this is this is old news at this point. But I think like while we're kind of recapping, you know, I think it's I think it's really important to zoom out and realize like how significant what you just described was that period from the tariffs uh up until 1010 where a lot of people got

sucked back in. All these dats were like we are deploying everything, every penny we can find. Come on in. this. It's time for this thing to rip. All the analysts, everybody was like, Q4 is going to be it, man. Like, here we go. >> I thought Q4 was going to be it. >> Uh, Clarity Act is going to come along. Don't forget, we used to think Clarity Act was going to come then before and you had the longest government shutdown ever, right? That all all kind of happened at the same time. Let's talk a little bit of gossip about Binance. And I want to know your opinion because I don't know if we've ever talked about this on the show, but I've seen in the conspiracy theory or the um I don't even know it's a conspiracy, but just strategically that there's this idea that CZ, you know, got banned from the

US, got charged, and then was pardoned uh by Trump, and then he came back and jumped onto this per trade idea, right? because Hyperlid had been basically the best token to hold through 2025, the best airdrop ever if you held it from the airdrop, right? And everybody's like, "PerS are the freaking best." And everybody's into it. He comes along, he's like, "I'm building a perp competitor. It's called Aster." Billions and billions and billions of dollars start to flow through that, be like, just farm the points. It's going to be the same as high piper liquid. We're going to compete with that. And then magically, as everybody's doing that, there is this insane liquidation event.

Is that all coincidence? I I've never asked anybody this question. This is a very den question, but I just want to ask you uh you know once bare marketing man we got we gota talk we gota talk about something. >> Yeah. Um well >> is there something there or is that just or is that just you know you're reading you're reading too much into it? Oh, I mean, you know, I think there's All right. Well, what's true very clearly CZ came back and launched Aster as a, you know, a way to try to vampire attack Hyperlid and the success going on in Hyperlid. >> And, you know, CZ has, you know, clearly, >> I mean, he has a history of of, you know, uh, generally attacking competitors with the whole FTX thing. I wouldn't say consider that like an

attack or you know whatever >> slight or he got >> he's clearly like a competitive guy and he wants to be the king of crypto exchanges very clearly right you know he's the incumbent he wants to protect his position makes sense that he would see the success that Hyperlid is having and try to you know take some of that market share back right that it's viable it's probably what I would do if I was in that position as well now obviously everything else the timing is is, you know, suspect. I I don't like it doesn't seem to me like I I mean, did he did they engineer 1010?

I don't know. I think something generally just broke on Binance uh at the time and then it just led to a a huge wave of of you know, second second order knockon effects of that. Um, I would I be surprised if there was some intentional thing that came out years down the line with some, you know, Epstein file emails, you know, going through looking at this if something gets leaked. Like, I wouldn't be super surprised because it's crypto and, you know, lots of, you know, things have happened in the past. Like, it wouldn't be that surprising to me. Uh, but like I there's not enough like obvious evidence right now, but it's it's like the timing is just very it's just for

lack of a better word just sucks, right? Because you had Hyperlquid, lots of people getting on pers, then you had Aster farming, you know, airdrop promises, right? And then you had all the other ones, Lighter, Paradex, right? Everybody else is coming to market trying to get part of this, you know, narrative wave of users on their platform. And then once everybody's there, you get 1010 and just nukes everybody. Like timing sucks. Suspect could be a word. Um I don't know why you would want to liquidate so many people. Like clearly you make more money if there's more people trading, but like >> it's a good point.

>> It's the worst. Like I can't think of a worse outcome right now because like >> the like people clearly don't don't hold Binance in as high as high regard anymore or like as they once used to right people like couple years ago even before the FTX thing people have always like looked at Binance like oh like they generally like Binance for you know whatever reason good exchange lots of products maybe teams that get you know listing there don't like it as much because of you know they have you know high listing costs and stuff like Apple like generally speaking I would I would say Binance has had a generally decent reputation and has generally been seen as you know generally favorable on crypto Twitter for for a while and I think that tide has shifted post 1010. I

think you're seeing a lot of people express uh you know just downright um you know concerns with what happened. The fact that you don't really have any you know transparency after the fact and then obviously you have CZ doing his like anti- FUD campaign which is like you know if there's smoke there's fire a little bit generally there like he usually goes on these tirades when people are like accusing Binance of something. So, I don't know. It's just like a whole situation that sucks. And the industry is certainly certainly worse off for 1010 happening. There's no no question about it.

>> And the reverse could be true as well. Obviously, I'm just throwing out silly ideas, but I think the reverse could be true as well that somebody was mad that CZ was eating into the per market and making a big comeback with Binance and they were like, "Okay, well, let's go and let's go and mess up the market to kind of stop that." Since then, nobody talks about Aster anymore. you know, nobody I do think like I I think the postmortem is like most of the >> the issues like originated on Binance, right? Like Binance tried to kind of say, "Oh, it was like USD even though the USDE dagg occurred like 30 minutes after the huge liquidation cascade, right? So like it's clearly like something happened. Nobody's being truthful about it from the people that actually, you know, have inside

knowledge of what went on on the exchange that day. Like there clearly isn't full full truth being shared in my opinion. >> And maybe one day one maybe one day we'll know and maybe one day we won't. Man, we don't know. It won't be clearly clearly whatever happened is not in as as disorganized a a company or a disorganized a consortium as u FTX was where they couldn't really, you know, it was this tight-knit group of immature people. Yeah. Exactly. Playing video games at the same time. a little bit more sophisticated likely than that. Uh let's talk about another narrative that I've been curious to get your opinion on as well and and and maybe you can share opinions from around Deli as well. um one of our recurring

guests, Matt Hogan from Bitwise, um he's one of the latest to you know capitulate to this bare market narrative and he wrote a nice piece on Twitter last week or two weeks ago um saying we've been in a bare market for a year and this is something that we heard as well uh from Matt Crosby from Bitcoin Magazine Pro who's who's come on and shared a lot of Bitcoin analysis with us for a while and even back in November or December Matt Crosby had told us when he finally capitulated as well as a very technical analyst guy he capitulated and he was like listen like here's what I actually think I actually think we've in a bare market. And the large case here, Jason, is that if you remove um all of the institutional buying like the DATs and the ETFs that it's like and you if you

remove all of that demand that we have been in a bare market since then. What's your take on that? >> I mean, yeah, I think number one, alt alts broadly have been in a bare market for a year plus, right? um just look at you know a a breath like a basket or a breath of altcoins and like you'll clearly see that um Bitcoin um you know I think that that's like interesting. I think it's like very like yeah I guess I guess if you say okay like if ETFs didn't get approved in January of 2024 would Bitcoin have run up to 100 or like 100K or whatever, right?

Like or whatever, right? Would they have run up to 80K and then gone sideways and then it's next leg up? I mean, it's a it's a you know, it's a hard question that you can't really have an answer to. I do generally think that say like say say ETFs were approved at the end of 2024 rather than the start of 2024. They were approved January 2024. Say they were approved at the end. I generally think that probably would have been better for price appreciation because it gives you a much longer time frame to speculate and think about imagine all of the future scenarios for this. It's kind of like it's kind of like just any any catalyst that you're looking forward to,

right? You generally see a runup as people get hyped their position before it. people are anticipating what the catalyst will bring to the company or the stock or whatever it is and then the catalyst comes and you get like a buy the rumor, sell the news type of thing. Um, and you did kind of get that with Bitcoin in January. We got we had got a nice run up until ETFs were approved. We went sideways and down for like a couple weeks and then once we started to see what the flows were like for Bitcoin, like I guess you could say what the fundamental demand for Bitcoin was, that's when we ripped again. And so I think like it's hard to say if we didn't get ETF approval, we didn't get flows which then led to DAT buying and all of this stuff, would we be at the price we

are today? I think you could kind of spin it and be like if we had more time to speculate and hype around what Bitcoin's ETF flows looked like? Because again, I think Black Rockck filed for it at the middle of 2023, maybe end of the summer. So you only had like a quarter and a half, you know, five months of time to really speculate or position into like what you thought ETF demand would actually materialize in. If you had a year to do that, perhaps Bitcoin grinds higher and it goes live and ETFs go live when Bitcoin's at 80 or 90K and then you start to see the demand billions and billions and billions of dollars of buying and then maybe you get a a higher midcycle top or whatever than

we did this time. I it's very hard to know. All I know is that Bitcoin and crypto are very, you know, speculative friendly assets and generally do well um when you have really good catalyst to look forward to. And that's kind of like what what is the catalyst right now to look forward to for Bitcoin? ETFs are approved, DATs have bought and now we're out of money, right? Like what are you looking forward to? Whereas, if you were to push those catalysts out maybe another year, year and a half, maybe you get more uh more demand pent up for it or or more hype around what it looks like. It's it's really hard to know. Um but I think we were always going in this direction anyway, right? If if the thesis for Bitcoin is just like a you

know like a digital store of value type of gold, um like you were I think like this was always going to happen. And what I mean by that is like ETF's approval, right? Because like most investors in the world, pensions, whatever, right? If if it is a true store of value, sleeve asset like gold that you have as like part of your portfolio that's like uncorrelated or whatever, they're not all of them are going to buy and sell custody of Bitcoin. So, we're always going to go this route of ETFs. And then the demand and flows from ETFs are always going to uh just generally dwarf individual demand from high net worth buyers like we've seen in the past or whatever. It's just >> a bigger faucet for funnel or a bigger or bigger faucet for capital to funnel into Bitcoin through ETFs than it is

through any other means. So like yeah, I kind of a non-answer like you don't really know what the world would have looked like without these things. But I think you could make the argument that we may have, you know, pumped higher initially or moved higher initially on the >> bigger runway of speculation than we had. But yeah, >> Warbucks is the easiest way to start trading crypto. No deposits, no wallets, no complicated setup. Choose your path one step. Instant target or instant funding starting as low as $40. Trade, stack profits, and withdraw on demand in crypto or USDC. Blow the account, you only lose the test fee. Reload and go again. With Warbucks, you can profit from crypto moves in any direction, up or down. Get funded today at

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How significant and and if you don't have a deep analysis on this or a deep opinion on it, that's fine. But one thing that we've seen happen in the last couple in the last couple days even business days um you're seeing again more massive institutional adoption headlines one that really caught my eye and and we were talking about this with with John Gillan our our my other host our other host on on the show is Black Rockck buying a bunch of unis swap right which is something and again you're bringing up black rockck right now as one of the first movers in these ETF flows right years ago and now they're they're coming in and they're buying certain alts right and they're they're they have a lot different reasons for that. What's your take on that? Like is that are they is I there's so many

different ways to kind of break that down and I'd love to get somebody from Black Rockck or you swap on to discuss this if anybody's listening. Um but Jason from your seat like is this is like what does that mean when that's happening because obviously the market doesn't give a like honestly like it's just like market like ah we suck. Uni does like a little and then just retraces it the next day and nobody cares. But um obviously that's that's pretty big. >> Yeah. I mean it's it's kind of like what you were what you were alluding to in your intro kind there are there are a lot of things going on in the industry that app like if you can separate price action from actual developments and and things going on in the industry like you see kind of two different pictures right like price action everything's going to

zero industry sucks it's all a scam and then when you look at like the actual developments you know like black black rocks you know they're they're signaling at the very least with the investment in unis swap but you know their tokenization their billable fund right all of these things um Franklin Templeton all these other people have moved into crypto as as institutions and and it's very clearly that that crypto and blockchain are you know better solutions for a lot of things that traditional finance companies are interested in or currently do right so there's just a very clear like I guess like you know dichotomy and like the sentiment of crypto given prices over the last four months and like the clear institutional acceptance maturation of

the industry and then the very obvious integration of crypto into into finance um both you know into traditional finance and then you have things that are probably going to live like crypto natively and be separate and be that own its own like you know crypto economy vision type thing but like I mean it it's it's very to to me it's very clear that like the industry is going to be much larger than like much larger over the next 3 to 5 years than it is today. It's just like that might not look exactly like people had envisioned it looking, you know, three, four years ago, right? You have all these companies coming in building their own chains. You know, you have Stripe, you have Robin Hood, you have, you know, you have Tempo, right? All of these things that are like Inc. Kraken, right? Um base

chain with with their new token, right? all these institutions are coming in and and things are just going to look different than I think a lot of us were probably, you know, hypothesizing a couple years ago and it just recover or it just like requires you to just kind of like revisit the thesis of like what what is this going to look like? What are what's most useful for these institutions? Like what will they do on their own versus what will they you know look at look at the market for solutions. It's just like it's clear that that the that the industry is is here to stay and it's going to grow. It's just again like I said, it looks different than what I expected it to when I initially came into crypto. Um >> whether you know for better or for worse, but uh it's just different.

>> What did you expect it to look like? What did you think it was going to look like? If not, >> I mean, when I got into crypto in 2017 and 2016, like it was all about like separating money from state. uh you know like the whole original like you know decentralization really matters and like when you're in crypto for a long time like yeah it clearly does matter. It's clearly like a principle that's worth you know fighting for but at the end of the day the majority of consumers don't give a about it. What they care is that their things work and that they do what they want them to do and whatever, right? Like at the end of the day it's kind of like the sense like most people don't care about privacy either. Like when you ask like a normal person like,

"Oh, do you like what do you think about like all these, you know, like privacy surveillance things?" I'm like, "Well, if you don't have anything to hide, it doesn't matter." I'm like, "Well, that's like not really first principles thinking now, is it?" So, like it's clear that like that like when I came in, all of these ideals were more forefront and um maybe the industry's been co-opted a bit. Like that's kind of like the case case for for Zcash, right? It's it's complement to Bitcoin. It's like Bitcoin's kind of been captured in a sense, right? Like a huge amount of supply is own, this is in the Zcash report that we put together, but like a huge percentage of of Bitcoin supply is now owned by ETFs and governments and and institutions. You know, it's >> clearly not like separated, you know,

>> in the in the way that it was when I joined or like what the what the goal was when I joined. Um, yeah. >> So, yeah, it's just different. It's a different landscape. >> I've asked a few people that, man, we even had um Eric Vorhees on uh a while back, right? And he's one of the OGs, biggest voices. >> Uh he's connected to all the OGs, all the billionaire people with all their Bitcoin. Some of them have been sellers. >> And I asked him too, I was like, "Is this what you guys wanted? You know, is this what you wanted that did the banks to come and buy everything and and and for them to come over to it or is it just a maturation of Trafi where it's like, well, now you have just a turnover of more young people coming into it who

maybe liked Bitcoin 15 years ago, now they work at those places, right?" like maybe that's just what happens. But um I definitely I find that that's a really interesting story is that >> you know is this really what crypto is supposed to be? Because now all we do this cycle man all we've talked about is how crypto is related to macro right and it's like oh >> before I joined crypto I was I was uh I was at JP Morgan and when I found like Bitcoin and and all the other altcoins on like Paloniex at the time I like went up to our you know our compliance guy on our floor and I was like hey can I like buy these things? Um, and he's like, "No, like absolutely not." And like, you know, the the view of of everybody at JP Morgan was like, "This the is a

scam." And like, you know, I don't think they were fully wrong on a lot of those coins, but um like they were clearly not. I mean, they weren't seeing it from like the the the clear need for something like this in terms of, you know, technology and money, right? Um especially, you know, given everything going on at the time and like before 2008 and obviously, you know, post 2020. But I think back then it was probably like more institutions like number one there wasn't a clear framework for them to touch it. So like the like and it wasn't clear how they could make money on it and the amount of money they could probably make servicing crypto was probably negligible relative to the compliance cost or downside reputation risk they had. So like I view from two lenses. One like they actually don't see the need for it back then or more it's a

combination of like they don't really care as well as they can't really make money easily on it. So which is very easy for them to not care and have a negative opinion of it. But like as the industry has matured, it's very easy for these people to make money on crypto now. And it's no no shocker that a lot of them are now very open to crypto because they they have a framework they can kind of operate around and they figured out ways they can make money off of it. So they're very clearly, you know, on team crypto now. like it's >> is that why the OG's sold >> or is that just a regular OG rotation of you know sell their tops and then buy at these lower because there's evidence of that as well right that people they a lot of these OGs like well they buy they

they they're pretty good at selling near these tops and and they often them selling is what precipitates it to be a top they come back in at these bottoms and again I'm I'm excited to have Matt Crosby back on because that's usually what he points out to us. Um but that's something where you know clearly they they they are a little bit in control there too. Yeah, I think I think there's some validity validity to that. Like yeah, I think a lot of people who got into Bitcoin in the early early days, you know, 13 14 and stuff um got into it for a philosophical reason more than anything. Um you know, a technological philosophical angle. And then a lot of that is to your point degraded over the last several years. And so it calls into question like your your thesis a little bit on that. So that could definitely be

a reason why you know long-term holders that are up billions and billions of dollars are selling. It's also the fact that if you're up billions and billions of dollars, like I don't know, I might want to take some some profits too, right? Like uh there's like an old finance professor always used to tell me like um when you look at like insiders buying and selling, right? There's there's many reasons why an insider might want to sell their stock, right? They think the company's overvalued. They want to buy a Ferrari. They have to send their kid to college, private, whatever, right? Like there's a lot of reasons why somebody might want to sell.

there's only one reason why somebody buys, right? So, >> I I I put more emphasis on those buy signals than those sell signals. But again, >> you get these huge multi-billion dollar Bitcoin cells into a market that's already a bit shaky. And then the result is what we've seen. And I think, you know, the the quantum angle probably has some validity to it, too. you know, people concerned about Bitcoin's quantum resistance or lack of, I guess, quantum resistance, um, and what that would look like and what the timeline is to get all of that stuff sorted and get everybody's ducks in a row is not a quick one. And, you know, there's a lot of friction from, you know, the core >> Bitcoin core group versus, you know, making change quickly. So, like, there's

a lot of reasons why I think a long-term holder that's up multiple billions of dollars might want to sell, and I can't really fault them for it. I love that. That's a That's a really good quote. It's you really kind of dumb it down and simplify it, but I never really thought about that in that way that there are many reasons to sell, not just not just trading the market, but you're selling to buy something else or or maybe or maybe there's something else to rotate into that you want to go and get. Um, but there are there's only one reason to buy and it's because you think the number is going to go up, >> right? So, um, I like that. I think that that's that's that's very insightful and it's very simple, but it's it is it is a really good takeaway. Yeah, this guy was

also really good at markets for what it's worth. >> Oh, there you go. Yeah, there you go. Crypto taxes are a nightmare. You've got trades across 15 exchanges, DeFi positions you forgot about, NFT flips, staking rewards, airdrops, and somehow you're supposed to report all of this to the IRS. Good luck. Cue the solution, SUM. You may know it by its old name, crypto tax calculator. The SUM platform connects to over 3,500 exchanges, wallets, and crypto projects, including full support for DeFi, NFT, staking, and airdrops. It finds deductions you'd miss, reconciles massive transaction histories without losing track, and generates IRS ready reports that will help you pay the least tax possible. Oh, SUM is also the official tax partner of Coinbase and MetaMask, rated 4.6 out of five on Trustpilot. Turn cryptotax chaos

into confidence. Get started for free at milkroad.com/sum. That's sum.com. Milkroad listeners can also unlock 20% off their first year subscription with code milkroad 20. Um, Jason, I want to save a bit of time to talk about alts. And I think one of the big questions right now, we cover this, we're going to cover this uh tomorrow on the show with with Martin, our pro pro researcher as well, and talk about Coinbase and and and a few other um assets there. But I think at this point, you know, alts, like you said, alts have had their own bare market. There have been very few winners even in the last bull cycle of alts. Um, alts are very broad field now.

there are thousands of tokens with good cases and thousands of tokens that haven't made any money uh that were supposed to be super hyped um that make you know 10 bucks a day now on their chains or whatever they do. Um, and I think there's definitely an emerging feeling that I see that's like, yes, like you're going to wait for the bitcoins and the ETHs and the Salanas to bounce back like they do as the majors, but now is the time to where you would get the enormous returns buying the right alts, right? Is that in these bare market times, if you can nail the right, there's a couple of them out there that, you know, maybe we'll do some pretty big multiples back from these bottoms. Uh maybe I know you're kind of shaking your head like I'm totally wrong there, but uh but and I'm not and the assets we're

going to talk about are not necessarily those things. That is not Jason's opinion. I'm just going to I'm just kind of giving my uh oversight of the market. Um let's talk about some of those. Like give me give me kind of like your your summary of like what alts that you guys are are feel are worth watching. You guys just put out a massive report about Zcash, about privacy. Um that's obviously one of the biggest narratives that we've seen during this bare market even for the last couple months. Um, let's give me give me kind of like your your basket of alts that you guys you guys really care about that you think are important going forward. >> Yeah. So, I mean, I can I can obviously only speak for myself here on on this, right? Um, but >> so yeah, I guess like like I said, uh,

like I said, I think in, you know, mid December when we had our our year-end uh podcast, I was treating the LA, you know, Q4 pretty much as a wash. Like, I'm not really interested in buying anything as we head into year end. There's a lot of reasons why people might be selling. tax loss harvesting just whatever all liquid liquid funds down window dressing getting out of shitty exposure and buying something that looks better on your you know year-end books whatever it is um a lot of reasons to sell into year end with you know market uncertainty blah blah blah blah blah and I would reassess at the start of the year and so when I look at kind of what my thesis thesis and things I was excited about were back then they're kind of the same now and I've I've generally seen some things

that you know kind of give me more conviction in that. So like we could start with Hyperlquid, right? I mentioned Hyperlquid as one of the names that like one of the only names generally in crypto outside of Bitcoin that I'm interested in buying during this, you know, bare market, right? And the reason is even over the you know the last couple months uh even though prices and and trading activity and all of this stuff has generally been decreasing uh all of Hyperlid's fundamentals underlying you know metrics have been resilient and growing generally speaking from the start of the year until now you're starting to see tons of activity with their HIP3 markets right so people trading tokenized equity per or just

equity per like you know the NASDAQ or the S&P people trading in commodities like gold and silver, right? They're doing over a billion dollars a day in volume on a lot of these markets, which is extraordinary given that they're, you know, a couple weeks old, right? So, they're clearly executing extremely well on on, you know, their goal of becoming that global everything kind of housing all of finance on this one exchange type deal. um you know they still are generating I think you know their their annualized revenue is 700 to a billion dollar 700 million to a billion dollars a year w with 11 employees is it's like the most profitable company that exists I think in the world per employee maybe maybe not it's definitely top three for sure

um >> I don't know man I know a guy who started a startup 90 days ago and he just sold it to open AAI for a billion dollars so I feel like that's in terms of success stories that's >> maybe maybe uh maybe we need to pick a new career here. But um so yeah, like uh up until you know, pretty much up until now they're executing extremely well. And I think like the big uh the big thing that I was concerned about or definitely the market was concerned about when we were talking last was like the whole unlocks, right? because um for the first year there was no no unlocks after TGE and then a year after TGE you started to see a massive amount of token unlocks going to you know the core contributors and the team uh to the tune of almost 10 million tokens a month

which is depending on price could be anywhere from you know 150 to $300 million of unlocks and obviously given shitty market conditions and tons of overhang uh coming to the market the market would kind of be jittery around like what's going happen like if they sell any anything close to this the price is going to get nuked which is true. Uh, so like my my like thesis that I wrote in that report we talked about a couple months ago as well as I think I shared it on on on the stream was that like I think there's a huge like gap in what the market is expecting token unlock sell pressure to look like versus what the team is actually going to sell because everything I had seen up until that point following them for two years

going way back into testnet um is that they're a very long-term oriented team. they've at at no point in the journey have they made the short-term, you know, extraction type of decision and they've always opted for the longer term alignment type of decision. And I didn't think that would change now and that's clearly what's happened. So like based on I have some notes here really quick. So based on like the 10 million tokens that are unlocking monthly, we can see how much of of of those are being sold and how much of those are essentially being, you know, transferred and rest.

And the vast majority of the tokens up until this point are being transferred and rested. We're seeing very minimal token sell pressure coming from the team. Uh so for example, the January 2026 unlock, right? 10 million were unlocked roughly. It's 9.9, but just round up the 10, only 1.2 million of those tokens were actually distributed um to the team and a lot of those were restst. If you look at the February one on on February 6, the actual distributed amount was slashed again by 90%. So only 140,000 tokens were distributed, most of them being staked, right? So there's been some of these tokens, you know, sent to OTC desks probably to, you know, sell out to give some cash to team members outside of the open market, but

clearly like clearly what the team is doing and what you can probably extrapolate going forward is the actual sell pressure from these unlocks is going to be very minimal relative to what they could have been and what the market was expecting. And then I was like, that's a pretty big delta that will probably repric at the start of the year when we get one or two months worth of unlocks that allows the market to kind of underwrite that risk going forward. And that's kind of what we've seen, right? Combined with that plus like their, you know, their HIPP3 market's doing really well, builder codes doing really well, all these things doing really well. It's one of the only tokens that's actually up on the year, right? Um, obviously the last couple days we've had, you know, market down and it's kind of dragged tokens down, but it's still up, I think, like

20% on the year relative to Bitcoin, which is down, you know, from 88K to to 67 today. ETH, I think, is down from, you know, 3K to under two. Uh, right. Like Lighter as a as a good like comp in the per deck space, right? Lighter, I think the year opened around like 2.5 and it's trading around 1.5 today. So very clearly we're seeing like a story of relative strength in the market in the market of in crypto's market right now where clearly people are are buying this story more than everything else.

And so my thesis is generally when Bitcoin decides to stop getting nuked every New York open and we start you know at least going sideways and building out a foundation again. Like it seems to me that this is probably going to be one of the fastest horses because the story underneath and behind the scenes is just very strong and it's it's very hard to to ignore that especially in a universe where most assets are just to your point awful right most don't make money right it's very clear that like hey if I'm investing in crypto and I believe in you know the use case the main use case of crypto right now which is outside of like stables and stuff is clearly trading speculation exchanges like clearly one of one of the best things to own. And then you look at like

a you know a market cap valuate 7 billion um market cap obviously FDV is higher but like they make a you know 700 to a billion dollars a year in annualized revenue. A lot of that is funneled to token buybacks. You could do the math on how much you know the assistance fund will buy hype how much hype the assistance fund will buy and take off you know the market over the next year given this run rate. So, like it's a compelling story from all angles for me and it's getting more compelling given how resilient all of these things have been with the underlying, you know, market conditions. So, like that's like the one that like I, you know, highlighted at the end of the year and I continue to highlight now as as one that like I I clearly like, I clearly own and

I, you know, gonna buy more assuming I don't run out of money before things. >> You're going to make people run through a wall for Hyperlid, man. We got Okay, listen, Jason. We got to wrap up there, but I can't believe how good of a spiel you just gave us about Hyperlid. Like, can we get you back on really soon to just break down other tokens that you like cuz that was awesome. I didn't expect that. I didn't know you were going to do that. So, we're at the limit of how long we want these episodes to go, but dude, let's get you back on, man. I want I want I need your basket of alts cuz clearly if you have that much thought into each one, that's awesome. We need more. >> It's easy when there aren't that many. >> That's Well, there are a lot of alts,

but clearly there aren't that many. >> When there aren't that many you're interested in. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah, >> Jason, good good to chat with you, man, as always. Thanks for coming on the show. And I I mean it. We're going to see you again soon. I need you back for that analysis. >> Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to it. Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event? Subscribe to our channel and join the Milkro 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.