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GM. This is Milk Road, your daily crypto relay – we pass you the baton of insight, to make your bull run smoother.

Here’s what we got for you today:

IS SOLANA SEASON HERE? ☀️

On Saturday night, I went to dinner, put my phone on do not disturb, and started playing a good old fashioned game of “how many bread rolls can I fit in my mouth at once.”

Between the time I arrived and the time I left, two things had happened:

Here’s what’s crazy, re: that last point…

When I opened TradingView on my way out of the restaurant, $BTC, $ETH—pretty much everything in the top 10—they were all still flat.

Was I having bread-induced hallucinations? Surprisingly, no.

Turns out we may just have been entering ‘Solana Season’. 

We’re not ready to officially confirm it, but there’s a bunch of recent data that suggests we could be in the early stages of $SOL season – check this out:

1/ $SOL’s returns won the weekend (comfortably) against $BTC and $ETH

2/ Solana’s total market cap hit all-time highs this morning

3/ As of this writing, $SOL is at the top of the Daily Net Inflows leaderboard

Will this change by the end of the day, after the $ETH and $BTC ETFs have finished their first trading day of the week? 

Probably! But it’s still impressive, given that $ETH is 3.3x the size of $SOL by market cap, and Bitcoin is – wait for it – 16x larger!

4/ $SOL’s Real Economic Value (aka the revenue it generates) literally doubled it’s ATH last week

5/ From Sat-Sun night, $SOL’s volumes outperformed all major altcoins

All of this recent movement is huge for two specific groups of people…

WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR/LOOK BACK ON 👀

Ok, so it wasn’t just Solana racking up recent wins…

The entire crypto market was kicking goals last week! So before we take a look at what’s ahead of us, let’s take a second to check our rear view mirrors…

The three clearest objects being reflected back at us?

This:

This:

Aaaand this:

Multiple new records being made, and Saylor continuing his rampage? Hell yeah! That’s what we like to see!

Now…what comes next?

There’s a few charts/events worth monitoring that could affect the market – including, but not limited to:

1/ NVIDIA ($NVDA) earnings

NVIDIA doubles as a thermometer for the Tech/AI sector, if they can outperform expectations when they report their earnings on Wednesday, the excitement could well overflow into crypto.

2/ Funding rates are creeping up

In case you missed our article on funding rates: they help to reflect the amount of leverage (aka, loans taken out to buy more crypto) that’s in the market.

If a heap of people take loans and prices dip → they may be forced to sell and repay their loans → which can push prices down even further…

When the 1 year funding rates reach 50%+ (or, 0.05+) – that’s where things can get dicey and risks of pullbacks increase.

Right now, funding rates are looking like this:

Now, that’s not to say you should immediately worry about pullbacks if funding rates breach 50% (0.05) – they can comfortably push towards 100% (0.1) during bull runs.

But it is something to be wary of if you’re the type that’s easily spooked by market pullbacks.

3/ The US dollar is stronger than we’d like

See how the US dollar is bumping up against this level? 👇

Yeah, well – we don’t want to see it break above that. A strong US dollar encourages investors to tie their cash up in government treasuries, meaning:

The stronger the dollar gets → the less money tends to find its way into stocks/crypto.

(Here’s hoping for a nice clean rejection 🙏)

Aaaand scene!

That’s it. That’s everything we’ve got for you today.

If anyone needs us we’ll be practicing karate in the garage, trying to burn this excited energy off.

BITE-SIZED COOKIES FOR THE ROAD 🍪

Emergence, The Block’s debut conference, is taking place in the stunning city of Prague. A conference in early December, followed by a winter getaway in Europe—sounds like a dream, doesn’t it?*

Wen Bitcoin $100k? Everyone’s been asking us this question lately, so we dug up an article with 4 experts breaking down when Bitcoin might hit that all-glorious $100k mark. -DL News

Goldman Sachs plans to spin out its own cryptocurrency platform. Being one of the largest ETF buyers in 2024 while launching various tokenization products, Goldman Sacks is slowly becoming a crypto powerhouse. More institutions? Yes, please. Keep ‘em coming.

Monad rolls out its testnet. CT has been hyping Monad for a while now but we’ve seen no progress from them (until now).

Blockscout has just launched its Merits Program – an incentivized journey through the platform. With the Merits Program, Blockscout has added a whole new layer of interaction, making blockchain exploration fun and rewarding.*

*this is partner / sponsored content

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.