Signals the crypto bull market may be starting early

Transcript

You could look at this and say they've only made a few million dollars. You could also look at this and say that the next century of finance is getting figured out in real time. >> What's up everybody? It's LG Ducat here and welcome to the Milk Road Show. The daily crypto show that is absolutely without a shred of a doubt in Ben McKenzie's mind. Back like you would not believe. Today is September 4th, 2026. Recording on the afternoon of the 3rd, right after the market had a nice little pop. I'm back to host a very special Friday edition of the show as we turn the camera back onto your favorite podcast host and ask him why did he make his first crypto purchase in over 2 months and when will his shopping rampage on alts end. I'm not kidding.

John was holding 30% cash for months in his Milk Road Pro portfolio after buying all those big red days on Bitcoin and ETH. But last week he finally bought Unis swap and he's already up 30% on it. And this week, he finally got the bull market signal he's been waiting for and has decided to unload even more into alts, which you'll need to unlock Milk Road Pro to check out for just a dollar at the link below. But we're giving you the freebie telling you about Uniswap. Enjoy this episode. Enjoy this market. And also check out our stocks episode today over on the other channel where Vincent shares his thesis on Coinbase, Robin Hood, and how the Agentic Finance wave is coming very quickly, but has yet to really hit. John, welcome back. I haven't talked to you in a long time on a podcast. Uh, but I've talked to you a

lot uh both in person and digitally in the last week or two and my my what a difference a week or two can make, man. Like I don't think we actually I don't have we done a show since everything went off. We did one we did one last week uh the last week of August I think to discuss uh Bitcoin going off. But since then things have significantly improved yet again. Um so welcome back to your own show. >> Well I'm happy to be on my own show LG. I'm happy to have you back too. These are exciting times and uh yeah, there's a lot going on in the markets right now.

>> Yeah, absolutely. We got to send people into their Labor Day weekend feeling good and I think the crypto market is doing that. Uh John, we're recording this in kind of the afternoon on September 3rd and this morning woke up to some big big green candles. Bitcoin kind of breaking out of its kind of chop range there for a bit. Uh what's going on? Like why are we why are we suddenly surging again? because I was right and everyone was wrong and we're going to Valhalla and no one can stop me and uh yeah. No, I'm just Okay, so I think there's been a number of things that have led up to this. The first thing that happened was I mean if you want to go all the way back to the initial short squeeze, Trump said hyperlquid in the White House. Scott Bessant announced

buybacks of Treasury bonds. Um the market reacted very positively to this. A lot of shorts got wrecked and liquidated. A similar thing seems to have happened today. Um Scott Bessant announced that his buybacks are not just going to be $2 billion to $4 billion. It looks like they're expected to on I believe September 9th begin Treasury buybacks of $12 billion of longdated bonds and reissue shortdated bonds. So this is shortening the duration of the outstanding US government debt which effectively adds liquidity and is a a a strong sign of of an indication from the Treasury Department they're willing to weaken the dollar um in order to be supportive to the the markets support the bond markets and sort of just in general give liquidity to the markets uh

where it's needed. I think that's one of the things that's kind of kicked this off. The other thing that's happened is this huge amount of demand and activity that we're seeing uh in the Robin Hood chain ecosystem. Uh they have the pawns launchpad. They have tokenized stocks. They have them reinforcing each other. They are putting up incredible amounts of numbers of of volume of revenue of fees of users. The adoption has been wild. Um, and so you're seeing this sort of cascade throughout the market, drawing attention, bringing back the hot ball of money that was in AI, which has been stagnating, coming rushing back into crypto trenches on Robin Hood chain. The Salana trenches are moving over from um from Salana and and coming into this ecosystem as well. So, there's just a lot of um capital that's gotten

excited, gotten um >> re-engaged, re-energized. And so, you're seeing all of this sort of compound into this very strong bullish thesis. A lot of people were expecting Bitcoin to do that Bart pattern back down to where we started the short squeeze. That hasn't played out. And today we're I mean right now we're sitting above 81,000 on Bitcoin and climbing as we record this. We're above 2500 on Ethereum. >> So look, all of this could change, but it seems like again we've gotten a a macro catalyst that seems like a positive indication there. And you know, Fed Fed rate hikes uh could still happen, but seem less likely. I still think that they're going to hold rates where they are. The Clarity Act could pass Congress in two weeks here. Robin Hood chain has brought the life back to

crypto and all of this kind of sets up for a really strong bullish thesis. We we this may fade, it may not hold, but that's the market is reacting really sponding really positively to this today and we've seen like a 5% rally over 5% rally in Bitcoin so far. We'll see how how far all this goes. >> Why why does Robin Hood stand out to you? cuz I I I mean obviously as somebody who loves like more DGEN stuff like it it's been an exciting couple weeks but si simultaneously like their their volume and their revenue from the last month or two on this chain is is minimal. You know what I mean? Like their fees on the on their entire chain yesterday were like 34 million bucks which is good for them. It's going to grow but that's not like that's that's not that much. You know what I mean?

That's still less than than uh Tether or Circle are making in revenue, right? So it's just something where it's like is that and especially for a hundred billion dollar company having a new line of business making $4 bill million a day. I mean it seems significant but does that does that ignite the whole industry? You know what I mean? >> I think that's like a very myopic view of it. It's not just about the fees that they're generating or the revenue they've made this week but it is a signal of the future of capital markets the future of tokenization of equities markets of crypto markets of how these things are coming together of the real and strong user demand for these things.

Um, and it's it's a proof of concept. It shows that this works. It shows that this business model works. It also compels a lot of their competitors to step up their game because Coinbase and their base chain are having to respond to this in real time and and in a very aggressive way. Other competitors are going to have to do similar things. OKX, I interviewed um the general manager of OKX on the channel. Um, and he talked about how they're really pursuing tokenization, how they're trying to be regulatory compliant, maximize their distribution, plan for artificial intelligent uh users to come onto their platform as well. So all this is accelerating and it's not so much just about this week or what numbers they put up or how much fees they made from this.

It's about the future of finance and where this is going and that is the big takeaway from all of this and it's important to not lose that just for the the fact that it's a few meme coins right now. The other thing too is that the mimemetic activity is forcing the market makers to mint more tokenized stocks of some of the largest market cap assets on the planet. And so now this memecoin activity isn't just limited to, you know, trading pairs like Salana, Ethereum or USDT. Now the trading pair is Nvidia and Tesla and and Alphabet and Meta. So now this is is going to become a major way to drive mimemetic investing and memecoin activity and and the value of that that's created in that ecosystem in that sort of like onchain casino.

driving value back into the real economy and real markets and expanding the the opportunity set there and the product offerings there, the services there. And then once Agentic Finance and AI agents start to become more mainstream adopted tool for uh human assisted trading, but also Agentic unsupervised trading that continues to accelerate and adopt and and expand. Um and so this just continues to grow from here. So I think you know you could you could look at this and say they've only made a few million dollars. You could also look at this and say that the next century of finance is getting figured out in real time and it's a really exciting time to be paying attention and just looking at what what happens, who launches what. Um cuz there's just so much happening right now. There's there's so much signal and the noise here. So don't don't miss

this. Just saying there's only a few million dollars that of fees that they're making. There's a lot more changes and impact that they're making than just that. Hi everyone, this is John. Listen, our Milkroad Pro analysts nailed this AI bull market. They had dozens of calls pay off in a big way for our community. If you want to see how our entire team of analysts are positioning for the crypto bull market that's going to come after this bare market finally ends, you can join us now at Milkroad Pro. It's just a dollar. Link is in the description. You'll get access to all of our analyst trades, their watch list, and see how they're navigating this in their portfolios and get access to ask us questions in Discord anytime, day or night. It's just a dollar. Links in the description. Milk Road Pro. Join now. I'll see you there.

>> Can you I I want to move on to Uniswap and and some of the other stuff that we'll have teased in the intro. Um, but maybe you can explain what those tokenized pairs actually are because I think that that's something I've realized like I immediately understood and you know when I was playing with this stuff, but I realized that it's not something a lot of people necessarily understand about how some of these meme coins are are are actually related to their their RWA counterparts. >> So, I think a good place to start for this for anybody to start with this is with Hayden Adams. Hayden Adams is the founder of Uniswap. Um, and I think he he on his Twitter it says invented the unis swap protocol. Uh, and he's the founder of the project. But if you look under articles, he wrote his first blog

post since 2019. And this is significant I think because this guy has been a major player, a major founder and one of the most important figures in decentralized finance for many many years. And after a period now of I think almost seven years of silence, he wrote his his own blog post on something. But what he talked about was the title of it is correlated pairs. how AAM AMM's sorry automated market makers win the biggest market. Yeah, here it is. You got it up right. So, this is what he's he's talking about here. So, what you ask like what are they trading against? The answer is everything. Everything is going to be traded against everything and you're going to be able to tokenize everything. So you're going to be able to trade like if I have a rimbrand painting and I want to swap directly

into Pepecoin and or into Nvidia, I'm going to be able to do that through an automated market maker that automatically sources that liquidity, settles those trades and does it in a secure, scalable, decentralized um and and uh efficient manner. So you read that essay is what I would say for that because the understanding of what this unlocks is really important. Jordy Visser um included the interview I did with Tom Lee in his weekend video this weekend because this idea really got Jord's attention. But what what Hayden is getting at here is that you're going to be able to have unlimited liquidity, infinite numbers of trading pairs and and between things that before, you know, what had weeks of delay and lots of slippage and just difficulty of

liquidity and finding a market and finding a buyer. All that is going to now be created on chain once all these assets are tokenized and brought on chain. And then once you introduce AI and you have Aentic Finance trading all these things as well, the velocity, the speed, the amount of capital, all these things accelerate and grow rapidly. So it's really hard to overstate how big of an intersection is happening between tokenization, crypto, digital assets, and agentic finance. And the not only the different kinds of products and services that are unlocked, but the new kinds of markets that never could have existed before are going to be created.

And all of this is going to be settling down through things like unis swap and ultimately Ethereum. >> So, okay, that that's a helpful explainer. I think I think what I also wanted to kind of help people understand too is like how the actual pair works, you know. So, for example, No, but no, no, no. Say, oh, what you said was way more intelligent and way more interesting. Um, but I think people I think just saying that some people might not like I just say that you know they've traded ETH and tokens on ETH and they real they maybe they understand that th those tokens are paired with ETH or with USDC but that in this situation what what the DENS have created are tokens where instead of let's say let's say maybe I can explain from my perspective when there were meme coins

on Salana every one of those tokens was paired with Salana right so the liquidity pool that you could contribute to as a as a you decentralized enjoyer. Uh you could contribute some of the so you would contribute to the liquidity pool and get some of the fees and you contribute some Salana and some Fartcoin for example, right? So you contribute both of those tokens and they would the FCoin would trade against Salana and back and forth and if Salana crashed 50% so did Fartcoin. Um what these are are that people are creating a token that's paired with a stock with a tokenized stock. So for example, one of them uh is called artificial enu which is like sheibba enu the dog a beloved meme memecoin dog [snorts] and uh that one is called AI and I'm not not showing it but what I'm saying is that that trades

against Nvidia. So its trading pair is Nvidia. So if you want to go be a liquidity pro provider you are providing tokenized Nvidia and also this token right. So that's very diff a different primitive um than we've seen before. John, what I wanted to ask you though is that the you know we've talked about RWAS for a long time on our show and this has been especially through this bare market has been one of the main institutional bulk cases and we have um things like figure where you're like you're you're making you're bringing you know housing mortgages and stuff like that on chain. Um obviously all stable coins are are in a sense RWA. Did you expect this though when we talked about tokenized stocks? anytime anybody would talk about WAS, did you think that one of the ma the Could you ever imagine one

of the first velocity moments for this would be kind of like, you know, naughty meme coins? >> Well, I think it's hard to speculate on this, but it does seem like Vlad Tennv figured this out. Like I I don't think this is an accident. I think this guy actually figured this out. I think he realized that he had a huge amount of um meme stonk enjoyers and realized [clears throat] that if he could bring meme coins and tokenized assets to one place, he could weaponize the uh let's say enthusiasm of the memecoin trading crowd uh against uh trading pairs that are, you know, matched up with Wall Street assets and he could do something

really powerful and novel that had never been done before. We wrote about another example of this of him's equity being paired with a meme coin called Bonercoin. Um, we wrote about this in the the Milk Road newsletter. >> Yeah. Well, we I mean, we laid this out cuz it's it's hilarious, but it's also important. And that's that's the thing I think is so important about all this stuff, right? Like when Trump launched his Trump coin, everybody had a take on this one way or the other. And I'm not like there was a lot of there's a lot of a lot of takes to have, but the thing I kept saying was that the thing you're missing is that this was $70 billion of capital formation that a guy did while he was at dinner, right? Without talking to anybody, doing it's like the the amount of changes that are coming to

capital markets overall because of this are really uh just just be beyond anything we've ever seen before. I think Robin Hood CEO Vlad Tennv figured this out, brought this to market, and I I think it was a, you know, a long shot if it was going to work or not, but it seems to have worked so far. Now, again, how long this lasts, I don't know. None of this is financial advice. I'm not recommending anybody go out and buy, you know, artificial enu or bonercoin by any means. However, it's the proof of concept is what's not to miss here, right? is that you can have trading pairs of almost any asset to any other asset. And if it finds product market fit, in this case it's finding it because it's funny, but if it finds product market fit because there's a huge market demand for that or there's a

huge choke point that can't get liquidity or capital can't flow in any other way, there's a huge value ad that comes to the market in that and that's just beginning. We're just now at the the early stages of figuring out how these things work and what that can look like. [clears throat] >> Absolutely. So, I think that that's a good jumping off point to because I think people are going to listen to this and maybe you've heard about this stuff or not. There's there's there's it's it's it's pretty onedimensional. It's basically exactly what we've explained, but it is it is a lot of fun. And I was explaining to you, John, that this is also this is the kind of stuff you see at the start of bull cycles is you see new ideas, new primitives, uh, and and and a lot of liquidity flushing into it.

And I think it's also really exciting because like you said, Vlad Tennov, one of the most important people in the space with one of the most promising um you know, finance systems companies of of of of really in in the world or or whatever in the financial system kind of behind this and and wanting this to succeed, right? So, it's very important, but this is a good jumping off point into what I wanted to talk to you about today, which is unis swap. And you've already kind of brought it up. Um but and and I think a lot of people are going to be listening to this and be like, "Okay, well, how do I capitalize on this? Do I just buy Robin Hood? Uh, do I do I go and buy, you know, boner token? There's, you know, or do I buy some of the other, you know, do I try

and buy the pump fund of Robin Hood, which is pawns? Like, where am I going with my money? I don't think I wouldn't recommend most people to go into the trenches to try and trade this stuff. Um, but a lot of roads point back to Uniswap because they're definitely the ones routing a lot of these trades. >> Okay, I'm going to I'm going to take this from a lot of different directions. First of all, I think it's hilarious that there's a boner boner token. This is great. Um, I love crypto. >> You brought it up. I tried to keep it clean by just talking about the ENU one. Okay. I tried I didn't try You went there. You went there. >> There's not There's nothing dirty about onchain finance. [laughter] Okay. Let's let's let's stay on target here. Okay.

>> It's just another fartcoin. Far is another fartcoin. It's always it's always the this always happen. It always has to have some kind of leader like that. Yeah. >> Yeah. [snorts] It's the joke of the month. Okay. So, I have a good friend who I really like a lot. His name is Kelly Kellum and he and I used to work together on the Discover Crypto YouTube channel. But he says that trying to trade meme coins is like trying to catch a single pellet that comes out of a a bird shot from from a shotgun. And he says it's there's everything is moving too fast. You can't see any of it and it's almost impossible to actually plan that and do it. It's it's just not a thing you can reliably do as an investor. So if you want to have some fun with some of these things that are

actually being launched on these launch pads, you know, that's choose your own adventure, but I don't recommend that. it's it's not really an easy way to to deploy your capital with any kind of reasonable expectation for a return. So, one level down from that is the launchpads themselves, which you know, our friend of the channel, Michael Naidal, calls fast DeFi, things like Pump Fun or Ponds. And these things can be good investments, but I think that the the thing I would say there is it's a little bit like buying a stake in the the crypto casino, but there's not really a ton of emote. There's not really like anything you're betting there on there other than like the frenzy keeps going, the momentum keeps going. It's not that it's a bad trade necessarily, but it is um highly volatile and speculative and you know it's it's really driven by um sentiment

and momentum and and just like the frenzy that's created as opposed to like necessarily like a stable business necessarily. Um although Michael is a much better resource on that than me. So, but fast DeFi is another way to play this. Slow DeFi or you know regular DeFi is I think a much more attractive layer because it's also a call option on things beyond just the memecoin casino. It's a call option on the rest of the infrastructure that is served and it has a much deeper amount of distribution, much bigger markets, um much more transparent, much more liquidity, a lot of different things, right? Bigger market cap, bigger pools of liquidity, more trust, um more network effects. So things like uh Uniswap, you know, I had Alex Cutler, who's the the founder of the CEO of Droo Labs from Aerodrome,

which is a big player um with tokenized stocks with Coinbase right now, and they're growing and expanding rapidly. So players like those I think are are a more interesting place to look because a lot of this volume is going through there right now. Like when when a a token a meme token like boner coco coin or whatever launches on ponds on Robin Hood chain once they reach a certain level of capital to get through their bonding curve they do go into a locked pool on unis swap v4 and that is driving a huge amount of demand um for swaps and for for volume on unis swap. And unis swap is is you know I I decided to get a stake in this but they they fixed their tokconomics and they changed a lot of things about their protocol so that now when there's these liquidity pools are

being created they're also taking um some of the the fees that are being generated there from for the liquidity pool and skimming some of that and turning that into buyback pressure for the uni token. So unis swap. So Robin Hood has seen this huge explosion of meme coins and uh real world assets on their chain that is using uh unis swap behind the scenes once these things get to a certain point. Then unis swap is using that volume that demand which is exceeding their all-time records, right? They're doing record volume on unis swap now and they're taking some of that and using that to buy back the uni token.

Ultimately this does all again I'm going to say this again because this is really important not to get lost in all of this. This all does ultimately settle down to Ethereum in ETH and ETH is money and it's the root of global finance and this is proof of concept 101 for that and this is what the next century of finance looks like and welcome to the the future. But in any event, the point is that there's a strong thesis for some of these slower DeFi layers um that are much bigger, more stable, have stronger investment thesises in my view. Um and that's it fits more where I want to put my capital and then also the layer ones that all of this is settling on. I think it's also very bullish for them too for the long term because this is going to bring more competitors to do similar

things that what Robin Hood is doing. Um and it's going to bring more capital into um into this space. More uh asset issuers from legacy uh finance, tradinance are going to want to launch a tokenized version of their product in order to get access to this huge um flywheel of capital that's being generated here. So there's just a lot of places where there's going to be benefits from this and there's a lot of places you can, you know, as an investor look at if you want to, you know, think about how you want to get a position there. I'm not giving anybody financial advice on this, but I'm just saying like there's a lot that's happening here. There's a lot involved. There's a lot of winners in this and I think you have to kind of make your decision for yourself.

Do I want to go try to buy one of these like DJ meme coins? Do I want to just buy Ethereum or do I want to be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum? And you know, you have to do what's right for you and your thesis. You know, one thing we've talked about a lot on this show is that crypto is quickly becoming a huge part of the global payments infrastructure. And nowhere is that more obvious than in Asia. But if you're actually running a remittance company or a payment business, you know that the hard part isn't moving the stable coins. It's dealing with local banking partners, compliance, liquidity, and all of the operational headaches that come with sending money into places like India and Southeast Asia. That's why today's partner is Saber. They give payment companies stable coinpowered infrastructure to collect and make

payouts across Asia without having to build all of that complexity themselves. They've already processed more than $3 billion in transactions across 40 different countries. So, this isn't just a concept. These guys are actually doing this for real. If you're building payment infrastructure or expanding into Asia, make sure you check out saber.money. Can we just go back to [sighs] what changed for UniS swap because I think that's been something that you've explained to me a few times and I'd love to hear it again. Um, and also this is what motivated your first Milk Road Pro purchase in a long time, John, which was a week ago of of scooping up some UNI um and and you're discuss you're saying that they changed their fee structure.

What was wrong with Uniswap for the last couple years? cuz when I came into the space 2020 uh there's unis swap airdrop during that huge defi run of that that bull cycle uni and all these other D5 tokens obviously with a lot of promise for the future which maybe is now coming to fruition you know that thing ran to like 40 50 bucks or something like that right but is now last cycle like a lot of other DeFi tokens never really did much but you're telling me that it's been it's been almost like a self-inflicted wound this whole time that they haven't been able to figure out their toe economics what does that mean >> it hasn't been self-inflicted exactly but they haven't been allowed to do certain things because of the regulatory overhang that has been put in place by the Ginsler regime and and operation

choke point 2.0 and like if they were directly doing buybacks based on their revenue then they would be considered a security and like you know thrown in jail basically. So um the way unis swap got around this was instead of doing direct buybacks with their revenue they skim a little bit of the liquidity provider generated revenue and then use that to buy unis swap tokens on the open market and then just burn those tokens. So that's that's the way they're kind of getting around this. It's not a I mean it's buybacks, but it's not direct buybacks cuz it's coming from the liquidity pool, the liquidity providers. Um, and you know, Alex Cutler says that he thinks that this is unfairly penalizing the liquidity providers on their protocol and that they may eventually become incentivized to look elsewhere to get more of the the reward

that they're generating from providing the liquidity. And that's as may be. I don't know what'll happen there. It's there's a lot of back and forth on a lot of this. People trying to figure out what the right system is. People are going to have different opinions. The market's going to decide. There's going to be different players who want different things. But the gist of it is unis swap for a long time was criticized for just being a useless governance token. They gave you rights to vote on the protocol proposals but didn't really capture any of the value the protocol is creating. And this is like a whole bunch of stuff about all this. It's a long history. Like people have been fighting about this for a long time. But the the thing I think is important is this unification effort that they've done. Um they have a unit chain. they have some

other things that have been done and they're trying to more closely align the token with the protocol and aligning incentives and aligning revenue and allowing the token holders to benefit from the business and the revenue and the volume that's going through Uniswap. And so I think that resolving that issue combined with this huge influx of of volume and a huge amount of new demand for Unicol's protocol and for their token uh it's just a really bullish setup for unis swap and I saw this starting to move. I wasn't like by any means early to this trade, but I saw it start to happen. I got a little position. The market started to move against me. I added to the position. I think I'm up around 30% now. But um there's not really any technical resistance because the chart has been mostly down only for ever. Um there's

not really much technical resistance until around $7. And then, you know, if we do go into a a strong sustained confirmed digital asset bull market, um I think that unis swap is is set up to do quite well in that environment. So, I'm just kind of content to have a position here right now. >> Mhm. Mhm. Okay. Thanks for explaining that. What you know, you have said for a long time, John, whenever I asked you this question, I've asked you this every day, every Monday for two months, is you know, I asked you when you were going to buy some altcoins, right? And and for our Milk Road Pro enjoyers, you know that John was scooping Bitcoin and Ethereum on the really red days, right, for the last 6 months, right? And this is excellent kind of accumulation strategy by you to just just buy

capitulation or buy fear, whatever you call it. Um, what did you call it? What's your thing? buy >> buying buying fear is a good deal at any price. >> Buying that's it. Buying fear is a good deal at any price. And I I absolutely love that. Um but you were you every time I asked you about buying altcoins, you would say the same thing that I said you're waiting for confirmation that we're in a bull market. And UNI was a unique thing last week cuz it was like even though crypto had gone up, it's like you were saying it's like for everything you just said, it's like well this makes sense. They've fixed everything. There's a lot of good reason to to get into this token at this point. But since then this week you've been on a rampage. you've been you've been there's several other tokens that you've

bought uh which has gotten our community very excited. What flipped for you? >> A few different things. So, number one, I think that Bitcoin historically has led the the crypto market and I do want to wait for confirmation that Bitcoin is in an actual technical bull market before I am willing to fully call us back. However, the amount of dispersion that we're seeing is increasing. So what I mean by dispersion is that even though Bitcoin is chopping, there have been enormous amounts of gains in a broad basically across the board and crypto lending protocols and DeFi protocols are among the biggest beneficiaries of these things and so or like the places that are seeing the most adoption, the most demand, the most growth. And so I think there's a lot of reason to say that

we've already bottomed a lot of these altcoin projects and there's not really much reason to expect we'll see a new low. Now, if Bitcoin pulls back, it's possible that we'll see some pullbacks in some of these things, too. But I don't really expect unis swap to just like suddenly drop below $4 again, right? So, it's like, okay, well, I'm not really going to get a better entry if I want a position. It's not really waiting too much isn't going to help me too much. You could maybe look for a dip, but, you know, it's kind of time to get off the sidelines and start playing. Um, and yeah, look, I I bought a lot of Bitcoin and Ethereum when they were down, so I'm very solidly up on those positions. I've been a little bit off sides on altcoins, but in my defense, it looked like for a long time there was

potential for more weakness in the market. And it was um one of those things where it was like I I just didn't feel like the need to rush in with the capital. I thought there would be a little bit more time, but this Robin Hood chain has really shifted a lot of the energy and um like we've shifted from a huge amount of time we spent in greed in in fear. Now crypto sentiment is is firmly in green in greed. I think it's around 80 right now. Last time I looked on the the the crypto fear and greed index which is pretty know that really >> and we've had two major major short squeezes. So it's just it's like a lot of things have flipped and you know we're seeing a lot of signs of the beginning early stages of a bull market.

Um so I've started deploying capital and accumulating some things. Um >> so yeah, there you go. >> I did not I did not know that we were at 78 in the crypto grid. We were just at 16 two months ago. We're so we're so emotional, >> right? [laughter] But see, when this squeezed up, it looked like it was going to roll down again. It look it was looked like the downtrend was just going to continue and we got this huge short squeeze and then we got the Robin Hood chain and now sentiment is flipped and now people are like, you know, getting this meme frenzy on again. So, I don't know. I look, this is not by any means confirming that we're in a bull market and maybe I'm getting suckered into to buying a bull trap here, but we're close enough to the bottom to where I'm kind

of like okay either way, right? Like if we make new lows, fine. If we don't, fine. But I I do have still some dry powder. Um more so than any other analyst at Milk Road still. Um but you know, I just it seemed like a right time to take a position and a lot of things have been changing outside of Bitcoin that are really positive for crypto. Not not necessarily for Bitcoin, but for all of crypto outside of that. And so, you know, I needed to get some more exposure to those things. >> All right. I have a very specific ask for you guys. Somebody listening to this knows the person running marketing at a crypto or AI company that should be advertising with Milk Road. We reach more than half a million investors across everything we do and Q4 is filling up. So don't be the brand that

waited too long. And the cool part about sponsoring the show is this episode is still going to be getting plays months from now. So send this to them. Look like a genius and tell them to go to milkroad.com/sponsor. Look at that. Of all the signals, of all the institutions, of all the smart things, you needed the trenches to come alive to confirm the bull market. you. That's what it took after all that. It all comes back to the dgens coming in with their liquidity. Who knows where they're getting the money? I don't know where people are getting this money, man. I don't I don't know what this money is that's in pawns that drove it to 600 million market cap, but there's money somewhere. The dens shall inherit the earth. Um, no, it's it's not just the dens, but like there's just been a

lot of strengthening fundamentals. Obby has seen a huge amount of capital coming back in. Syrup, Maple Finance is severely undervalued by the market. I think that TOAO is going to see performance again. Lighter has been on an absolute tear is probably going to keep going. There's um reason to think that there'll be positive things in the news on the horizon for for per platforms like Hype and them or Hyperlquid and Lighter. Zcash is not a project that I have, but people are going absolutely berserk about Zcash right now and it's I think it's over or close to $1,000. So, there's just a lot of bullish activity happening and it's it's really hard to kind of ignore that, right? like um so you know if if the sentiment is flipping bullish strongly bullish in other parts of crypto just cuz Bitcoin isn't back in a technical

bull market just quite yet um it doesn't mean that it won't get there and you know look by the end of this call for all I know we could be back over 82 83k because when we started this we were over 81 and that's pretty close so anyway there's there's a lot of reasons to say that there's some bullish momentum that shouldn't be ignored here >> so John I want to take a second just to kind of plug that a little bit more because we're not going too long today Again, I I was really excited for to see you showing some activity. Uh we'll give people a little preview. So, when you go to Milk Road Pro, this is basically like John's portfolio here. You can see you can go ask him a question in the Discord right here if you want or put on your

notifications for John. Um we have this nice little interface, right? So, Uni is actually uh one of your your now your third biggest position. You didn't have too many positions before, but uh we have this nice little wheel that shows ETH, Bitcoin, Cash, Uni, and then you have these other positions here, like five or six other alts uh that people can go check out. So just a dollar of milk road pro to check that out. Um John for I want to dig into this sideline sentiment you know as kind of like the closing points for this show is that and we've we expressed that two weeks ago when Bitcoin popped or whatever it was when all this stuff broke out of that range and went into the mid70s is that it's like holy this is this is sooner than we thought. Uh one of those

theories that that maybe we would bottom earlier than people realized maybe true so far. Um, and you know, even this morning was another one where I think everybody woke up and the market opened and everybody felt a ton of FOMO that they just were not allocated enough and that maybe they were saving a big bundle of cash um for for a deeper bottom. So, like how do you man how do you navigate that, right? And you've kind of alluded to that, but I just want to dig into that because I feel like that's kind of that's the emotion of the moment for for for a lot of us. >> Yeah. Well, there's a lot of emotions. Uh, nobody knows what Bitcoin is going to do. Bitcoin is Bitcoining again and it's uh nobody's quite sure what to do with any of these things. I think that

the, you know, there's this general thing to do here is to just not trade on emotion. You're not going to miss the whole market. The bull market is not going to get away from you. There will be time to get entries on these things. It's not going to be up only forever. I think what you want to do is take a look at the market. Make a s make a plan, a strategy that makes sense for you and, you know, set some trailing bids on some of these assets that you want to get into and wait because even in a strong bull market, Bitcoin could see 30% pullbacks, other assets could see more than that. Um, and so it's not like you've completely missed the boat if you haven't caught this first move here on some of these things. But yeah, I mean, uh, it's an emotional time for all of us

and we're all struggling. Um, that's, yeah, but, you know, I I still have a lot of cash. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with that. If I want to wait and hope that Bitcoin does pull back a little bit here. Um, if you know, because we'll see, right? Like there there are some things that could go against us on this, right? if the Fed does hike rates that the market won't react really kindly to that. If the Clarity Act fails, the market might not care, but it also might, you know, kind of take some of the the wind out of the sales and some of these things. Um, there's the midterms coming up. There's always uncertainty um beyond that. And then September is just historically September in a midterm year is like the worst month to hold Bitcoin, just full

stop. Um, so that there's there's some things that could uh maybe blow in the other direction as we get deeper in the month here. But my my view is that this is all kind of short-term chop and the long-term view on this is is really strongly bullish and only getting better every day. So, you know, quell some of the emotions. If you need to get a starter position, I this is the other thing too is I'll say is like if you don't have anything, figure out how big of a position you want and maybe take five, 10, 15% of that and just make a purchase and then wait so you quell some of the FOMO and then you can DCA in a little bit and kind of like calm [snorts] some of those those emotions.

But um yeah, just think about a strategy for doing that. The other thing I'll say, this always helps me, we have a really wonderful community in Milk Road and just engaging with our community, asking and answering questions and seeing what they're thinking and feeling. having a community to go through this with really helps sort of like um group think some of these decisions and uh sanity check yourself, protect against your own emotions. So, I really like having that wonderful community to go to in moments like this and just kind of strategize together and and figure out what we're all going to do individually. But um yeah, it's it's an exciting time. Emotions are high, but don't let them take control of your wallet because that's not the the best way to get returns on your capital.

[clears throat] >> Absolutely. I think that that FOMO is driven also by the fact that we just stared at the prices for like eight months. >> [laughter] >> We went into that range in February and then we just stared at it. We stared at it until like three weeks ago. I know you were bad. But I'm just saying is people were like, "Should I unload the bag now?" They people didn't have bag. People were down bad. But what I'm saying is that everybody who had a bag to unload was just like, "Should I just should I just do it now or should maybe a little bit lower? Maybe a little bit more." You know, I'll wait for another little 10% drop and now now they were waiting for 10% drop and now they're buying a 20% pop.

>> Yep. That's what happens. I buy on the way down so I don't have to worry about this on the way up. But that entire time I was saying if you're in a If you're in AI, rotate to crypto. If you're in [laughter] >> Wait, what the are you saying? No. No. What do you mean buy on the way down? You You bought more this week than you ever have. What are you talking about? [laughter] >> I bought in February. I bought in June. I bought in July. I've been buying. I'm going to still buy. Uh I don't [laughter] know what to tell you, man. I The bags got packed. You know what I'm saying? So, um >> anyway, >> you're funny, man. All right, John. Uh last Okay, last thing. Uh people want to enjoy their Labor Day weekends. What should they do?

>> Touch grass. I think that's the general advice, isn't it? You know, spend some time with people you love. Try to do something that makes your soul glad. And uh don't look too much at the charts. They'll be there when you get back. >> Trade meme coins. You got it. Okay. Thanks, John. Uh [laughter] >> appreciate you. Everybody have yourselves a good weekend. Don't listen to John. It's going to be a green September. Okay. Don't listen to his historical data. He's wrong. Uh we'll see you guys. Uh you'll be back with John uh on Monday. Thanks, [music] John. Thank you, LG. >> Thanks for listening to Milk Road. If you enjoyed the show, make sure you like and [music] subscribe. And if you're struggling to find winners in the market, that's exactly what Milkro Pro is built for. Our analysts have called some of the biggest winners [music]

early, and Pro lets you see what they're buying next, every trade they make, and the research behind every position. Check out Milk Road Pro at the link below. Everything you hear on Milk Road is forformational purposes only. These are our personal opinions, [music] not financial advice, and we may own some of the investments we talk about. Always do your own research and make [music] the decisions that are right for you.