Arthur Hayes：BTC 价格目标、交易建议、熊市与更多话题 | TG Podcast

Welcome, dude. You picked an interesting day to come on the stream in the markets, huh?

Yeah, I just woke up and went down—technically, Bitcoin’s below $100,000. I’m sure people are freaking the shit out.

Yeah, people are freaking the shit out a little bit. But look, I don’t honestly think there’s a better day for you to come on the stream. I’ve been watching some of your stuff and reading your tweets. There’s some optimism seeping through, so I’m happy to have you on.

I’ve become a pretty big fan of yours recently.

Oh, thank you.

You’re welcome. A little bit of glaze. The reason I think I’ve become a good fan of yours recently is that, out of all of the more institutional-side, VC-side people in crypto, I feel like you’re the one who trades liquid markets the most and is the most in tune with Crypto Twitter. Why do you think that is?

I really enjoy the whole grassroots crypto movement. I’ve been doing this for 12 years now, since 2013. I spent 5 years at banks—Citibank and Deutsche Bank—and I’ve spent 12 years in crypto. That’s my adult professional career, so I’ve spent more than twice as much time in crypto as I did in banking. This is my life. I love it.

What better place is there to understand why I bought Zcash? I got shilled by Naval. I had heard about his tweet—someone mentioned it to me and wanted an interview. The only way you’re going to figure out the next thing that’s going to pop is by being in the trenches.

I’m not fucking grinding on NFTs and memecoins or shit like that. But if you’re not understanding what people are talking about, then you’re just going to buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and whatever dogshit some TradFi institution thinks is real crypto, which is probably 2 years too late.

Do you think there’s a disconnect between the venture side of crypto and the on-chain, liquid-market side?

Hold on. No, I don’t think so. I think it’s incentives. These guys have a particular set of incentives that they have to follow, and that’s why they invest the way they do. If you have to attempt to earn returns for LPs and charge fees in the ways you do, then you act the way crypto VCs act.

It’s no surprise that most of them underperform Bitcoin and Ethereum, depending on the type of fund they are. Traditional VC, except for a16z, Kleiner Perkins, and the very well-known firms like Sequoia—those types of funds—doesn’t make money. They don’t return more than the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq.

You’re paying all these fees, and all you literally have to do is buy an ETF. You’ll do better than 99% of all VC funds. I remember pointing this fact out to a high-net-worth individual who was an investor for his family office. He was part of the family and one of the principals in the family office.

I asked, “Why do you invest in these VC funds? They always underperform.” He was talking about how you need to get into the next hottest new VC fund. He said, “You know what? I hear what you’re saying,” and finally admitted that it was about the vibes.

They like the vibes. They like the guy and the gal showing up in the fancy suit, getting their ass kissed by all these people, with the banks kissing their ass. Then they show them these shit, underperforming products, and it’s like, “Oh yeah, cool. This is what it means to be an investor—to be feted by the institutional money managers.”

They like it. We’re all human, right? We like to be complimented and feel good. So they invest in this shit that doesn’t make any money. Again, these VC funds—yeah, there might be a disconnect, but for their core audience, they’re doing exactly what they need to do.

Honestly, I like that take. I guess, to start, I didn’t even give you a chance to do this. A lot of people who watch the stream are very new-generation crypto. I think a lot of our audience is the 2024 Solana memecoin, Axiom crew. Could you start with a quick introduction to who you are, and then we can get into some of the fun stuff?

Sure. I got into crypto in 2013. I used to be an ETF market maker at Citibank and Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong. I lost my job, and I read the white paper in the spring of 2013, when Bitcoin was around $200.

It really resonated with me as somebody who was into gold and the whole idea that the Federal Reserve is fucking over the world, central banks are destroying money, and finance is fucked, especially given what you’re taught in business school. I thought, “Okay, this crypto thing makes a lot of sense.”

As a student of financial history, I was really excited that I believed in something that could possibly be as big as the printing press. How lucky was I to have read this white paper and have the ability to essentially not have to get another job because I had enough savings and a nice couch to sleep on at one of my friends’ places, so I could try to build a Bitcoin and crypto business?

That’s what I did with BitMEX. I wanted to build a derivatives exchange that I, as a trader, wanted to trade on. I found my 2 co-founders, Ben Delo and Sam Reed, in 2014. We built BitMEX and invented the perpetual swap in 2016. We became the largest exchange in the world in 2018.

I got fucked by the US government, almost went to jail, got a pardon, and now I’m back. I trade my own money, and we have Maelstrom, where we do early-stage token investing and advisory work.

Our biggest success is probably Ethena, and next is Ether.fi. We also do liquid trading, which you see me on X—or Twitter, whatever you want to call it—pumping my bags periodically. We’re launching a private-equity vehicle to invest in the equity of up-and-coming, small but very integral crypto infrastructure projects.

Congratulations on that, by the way. You’ve also been on a bit of a media tour. You’ve been doing a lot of media recently, which is awesome. Thanks for the introduction—crazy lore.

We touched on it at the beginning: Bitcoin is at $98,000 right now, and my timeline’s in shambles. I’m just going to be completely honest with you. I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily in shambles yet, but my timeline is in shambles.

The reason I say it’s a good day for you to come on is that, based on the recent media of yours that I’ve listened to, you’re pretty optimistic about where we are in the cycle and how things are going to play out. I’m curious: how are you positioned right now, and where is your head at seeing Bitcoin at $98,000 this morning?

Maelstrom is probably 98% invested. We have a little bit of cash sitting around, but a lot of our stuff has a very, very low cost basis, so I think market moves don’t really affect me that much. I don’t really care. We don’t use leverage, which means I can be a lot more sanguine about my calls in the market.

I understand that a lot of people listening to this probably have some sort of leveraged position on Bitcoin or another shitcoin that they’re trading, probably on the long side. It’s painful, right? Not only do you have to get the direction right, you have to get the timing right, because you’re paying for this leverage through periodic funding payments.

That’s what makes you sometimes make bad decisions: “Okay, it didn’t perform for me in the last 24 hours, so I need to change it up. Why hasn’t it gone up 1% or 2% when I’m bullish, and all the people I listen to on relevant social-media channels say they’re bullish? The macro is favorable, all this stuff, but the price of Bitcoin dropped a few percent, and now it’s below this psychological level of $100,000.”

You have this leveraged position on and you’re paying for it. You think, “I need to get out of this position.” You don’t have the patience or the ability to stay in a position because you’re using leverage.

I think that’s the biggest issue people are facing. I don’t say it’s a mistake, because I understand why people use leverage. If you’re trying to level up in terms of your financial stack, you only have so much savings and so much time. You’re like, “Fuck it. I need to hit this out of the park immediately because the situation is not good.”

Then you go trade some perpetual leverage or whatever, and now you’re freaking out because it’s not going the way you want immediately after you put on a position. I think that’s the biggest issue people are facing.

I think the macro is very favorable for crypto. I’m still buying stuff, mostly Zcash. Again, there is an altcoin season happening. If you were in Hyperliquid and Zcash over the last probably 18 months, you did exceptionally well as a trader.

Yes, I understand that 99% of the other dogshit coins are down, but again, that’s trading. Not everything goes up. I love the markets right now. I think this is a great opportunity for those who have the patience and the cash, and who have the ability not to use a lot of leverage, to allocate in a responsible way right now.

If you think about it and read the newspaper, this is my sentiment: go back to November and December 2021. We were at all-time highs, everybody was happy, and then think about the rhetoric coming from the central banks around the world. It was, “Oh no, there’s this inflation problem.” If you listened to the Fed…

It was, “We’re going to have to slow things down.” They announced that they were going to start raising rates in March 2022. In November and December 2021, if you looked at a chart of central banks and a hiking cycle, it was going up and to the right.

If you contrast that with today, that obviously peaked. Credit growth sort of stalled, less fiat was created, and we peaked and then went down. If you take a look at today, you have Fed governors talking about how we don’t have enough reserves in the system. We may need to just restart QE. We definitely need to stop the balance-sheet contraction, QT.

I don’t have the chart here, but if you pull up a chart of central banks in an easing cycle versus a hiking cycle, the predominance of central banks are cutting rates rather than raising rates. If you listen to the political rhetoric, it’s all about this disruption caused by AI, immigration, or whatever, and it’s all about, “I’m going to hand you some sort of goodie.”

I don’t really hear anyone talking about a general increase in taxes. Yes, you hear, “I’m going to raise taxes on the top 1% of the population,” because that’s very popular political rhetoric, but that’s not going to plug the gap. The politicians are saying, “I’m going to give you free shit. It’s not going to cost you anything. Vote for me or support me.”

So how is it that you’re going to have a credit contraction over the next 12 to 18 months? I don’t see that happening. That is a distinct difference from what I was hearing in 2021, at the top of that market.

That’s why, yes, it’s a bit weak right now, because we’re in this transition phase between when I think specifically the Federal Reserve and the PBOC in China start really ramping up money printing. In the United States, there’s an election coming up in 2026. The red team, the Republicans, got their asses kicked in a few races that mattered two weeks ago in New York and Virginia and some other states.

Trump is a politician. He knows what he needs to do to win. Socialism, in Republican-speak, is AI data centers, weapons production, and mortgage relief. Socialism for the blue team, the Democrats, is climate change, social justice, free meals, and bus passes.

I know the money is going to different places and different constituencies, but there’s still money being created, and as crypto investors, that’s our lifeblood. This system is a reaction to too much money being created. At least in the largest economy in the world, both political parties are talking about how they’re going to print money and hand it out to their supporters.

They use different terms: socialism, industrial state capitalism, whatever you want to call it. It’s all the same thing.

It’s just a different marketing message that hits with a different constituency. You’ve got to take a step back and think about what they’re doing, not what they’re saying, because what they’re saying is trying to confuse you as to what they’re really doing.

They’re always printing money, and they’re not going to pay for it by increasing taxes. They’re going to pay for it by increasing the inflation tax, and that’s the only politically acceptable way to get the entire world out of this massive debt problem that we’ve encountered over the last 40 or 50 years.

This is why I’m very bullish. I just pick up the newspaper. I don’t have any sort of special indicators or voodoo magic charts, any sort of TA out there. It’s literally just: read the newspaper. What is the politician trying to sell you about the future?

So what is your invalidation, then, to this bullish outlook that you just painted? If I ever heard a politician—

In 1929 or 1930, I think the Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon—

He was a famous banker.

—and he was speaking about what I believe Hoover needed to do to solve the start of the Great Depression. I’m butchering the quote here, but it’s something along the lines of: “Liquidate credit, liquidate capital. Those who’ve been living high on the hog essentially need to get their comeuppance. Let the system reset and all this bad credit be expunged so we can live honestly as an economy again.”

It’s a better quote than that, but I’m just paraphrasing it. He was basically saying: You took out a bunch of credit. The thing you did or built didn’t generate enough income to justify that. You should go bankrupt. There should be no government bailout for you.

Again, credit contracted massively in the early 1930s. You get the Great Depression, and all that sort of thing happened. You can read about it in the history books. No one likes Andrew Mellon, and obviously Herbert Hoover lost the next election. That’s not a very popular way to deal with a problem.

Yeah. So is any politician—I don’t care if it’s Chinese, supposedly communist, or American capitalist, whatever, because those are just random names—is any politician around the world saying, “You took out credit, it didn’t work out, therefore there’s no government bailout”?

Nobody is saying that. I don’t see anybody running on an austerity platform except for Milei in Argentina, but that economy is so small and irrelevant, it doesn’t really matter. No major politician in any G7 country is talking about allowing credit to fall so that the excesses of the past are rectified and we start from a better base.

Again, too many people lose their jobs, too many rich people lose money, and they can’t stomach that at the ballot box. If you’re not democratically elected, you’re not going to have support within your own political party.

This is why we need you on today, man. This is why we need you on today. Explain this to me, Arthur. The sentiment among crypto natives is, “Okay, we just trade the worst shitcoin market in the world,” because it’s not like risk assets are going up. Equities and stocks are at all-time highs. Gold—I had Peter Schiff on four weeks ago. He’s fucking grave-dancing and victory-lapping on my head top, celebrating that gold is at $4,200.

Everything kind of looks crazy, and then you look at crypto and you’re like, “Yeah, there are a couple of spots. I’m a Zcash bull. I’m going to ask you about that after this. HYPE has done pretty well.” There are spots, but basically, you either held Zcash or you’ve died over the last 3 months. How do you explain the crypto underperformance that’s happening right now?

There’s your key phrase: over the last 3 months, over the last 6 months. If you bought Bitcoin in January 2025 and you look at today, you’re probably flat to a little bit down. If you have a particular shitcoin you’re trading, you’re probably down a lot more.

But if you bought Bitcoin 2 years ago, you’re up. If you bought Bitcoin on April 9, 10, or 11 of this year—Liberation Day—you’re up 30% or 40%. So, yes, if you’ve just entered this situation recently or you just put on a leveraged position recently, I understand you’re down.

But let’s take a look at the history of what Bitcoin has done versus fiat debasement. It’s been the best-performing asset ever in human history. It’s just that either you learned about it today, or you have to generate a return immediately, and therefore you need things to happen on your timescale. The market doesn’t give a shit about your timescale.

I think it’s just the impatience of people and using too much leverage. At certain times, certain assets are going to outperform other assets, but give it enough time and enough money printing, and we’re going to see Bitcoin be the best-performing asset. We’re going to see selected altcoins do even better than Bitcoin.

But if you pick a random 3-month time period, it might as well be a crapshoot as to whether or not you’re going to be successful.

You know what’s a little ironic? It’s kind of interesting to hear you say it. The inventor of the perpetual swap is not trading on leverage right now.

Well, because I’m not dedicated to trading. I say this: There’s nothing wrong with leverage. You say you want to be a leverage trader? Okay. You are not sleeping 8 hours continuously throughout the night. You have your phone. You have alarms on. You are awake. You have your stops. You have all these things.

Tell me what the open-interest situation is. Tell me about the time series and how people trade at what parts of the day. Who are the flows in the Asian, European, and North American hours? These are all specific things you need to understand as a leverage trader.

If you’re not that, then don’t trade it, because you’re not dedicated. You need to be 24/7, 365 dedicated to leverage trading, and you can do a good job and be successful. But if you’re like, “I’m just going to get off work and put some positions on and then hope I’m going to make a little bit of money,” you’re going to get fucked.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with leverage. I just think there’s a dedication problem among traders.

I honestly like that take. Valid. One more macro thing I want to ask you, and then we’ll do some Zcash stuff—I’m pretty Zcash-bullish, too. I have some Zcash stuff for you.

I think you have a pretty interesting take on the Bitcoin-gold catch-up trade and how you view gold. You think other people view gold as a different level of risk asset than they view Bitcoin.

I'm curious where you stand on how you frame that right now. For the people who are still really clutching onto this Bitcoin catch-up trade, how do you think that plays out?

I own a lot of gold. As a percentage of my non-crypto portfolio, it's basically 100% physical gold, gold miners, and silver miners.

My whole theory on markets is that Bitcoin is the people's answer to monetary debasement. Anyone can own a lot of Bitcoin. Nobody knows that we own it. We can store the private key in our head, this kind of thing.

But a central banker who has the same issues—if you're a non-U.S. central banker, you need to make sure that the savings of your nation or economic bloc are in a currency that's going to protect you against the inflation sponsored by the U.S. government. So what has been, for sovereigns and individuals, for the last 10,000 years, the asset that you use? It's gold.

If I'm a central banker or a government and I need to make sure that I'm protecting myself from asset confiscation by the U.S. government, or from the inflation caused by the amount of Treasuries issued, I'm going to buy gold because that's what I understand, and I've been buying gold off and on for many thousands of years, depending on where you're based.

I'm not going to buy Bitcoin because, again, it's a cover-your-ass situation. If Bitcoin fails, it's been around for 15 years, and there's this gold thing that's been around for 10,000 years that people before me have bought to solve this problem that I have as a sovereign—I'm going to lose my job. If I believe that these things are going to happen, I'm going to buy gold because that's what everyone else before me has bought, and institutionally, we understand it.

I have the vaults. I have the people with guns who can guard my shit. I don't have to understand cryptography, private keys, custody, and all this shit. I know custody. I have the legalized violence. I can put a guy with guns in a hole to guard my shit. I know private keys, so why do I need to? I'm not going to buy Bitcoin. I'm going to buy gold.

The flows in gold are all about sovereigns who are like, "Oh, shit, the U.S. is going to steal Russia's money. They might steal my money. If XYZ politician acts up and Trump doesn't like them, or whoever comes next after Trump doesn't like this person, I'll buy some gold and make sure I physically custody it within my borders, protected by my own military."

I'm not going to buy Bitcoin, even though maybe I own it in my own personal account and believe in it. It's just not something that I'm going to do.

If I think about how I want to invest, I want to own the thing that states own to protect themselves against fiat debasement—gold and silver—and I want to own the thing that the people are going to buy to protect themselves against fiat debasement: Bitcoin and selected cryptos.

I own both. They're both going to perform in a similar sort of manner. They might not go up or down the same amount, but it's a similar sort of trade with a different flow in terms of who is buying them. That's why I own both, and that's how I think you should conceptualize gold.

It's not one or the other, because if you take a look at who the biggest buyers of gold have been over the last—let's say since February 2022, when the U.S. stole Russia's money—it's been central banks. Do you think that's going to continue? Do you think there's going to be more conflict in the world, more disagreement about how things should be structured? Yes. Then buy some gold, because that's what countries are going to buy.

Do you think the people are going to keep getting fucked by inflation, with every single country in the world just going to print more money to solve its problems? Yes. Buy Bitcoin, because it's the people's money, and that's how we're going to solve this thing in a digitally connected era. We're going to make money in both spheres.

That's how I view gold. It's not a one-or-the-other type of thing. It's sort of a—but own both of them. Obviously, I'm more crypto than gold, but I own both.

There you go. There you go. The framing makes sense, and you can understand why someone doesn't want to be a hero and go the Bitcoin route rather than traditional gold.

I guess moving to some of the Zcash stuff, I've heard you say this a couple of times now. Can you tell me the story of how Naval Zcash-pilled you? What did he tell you that got you so fired up about Z?

I heard your story. I think you said BitMEX was the first exchange to list Zcash when it first came out, or you built the first futures contract.

Basically, back in—I think it was 2016—Zcash was the hottest shitcoin. Zooko was doing the rounds. Everybody was so bullish on privacy: privacy, privacy, privacy. We were going to make Bitcoin private, all that sort of stuff.

I was deep in Zcash. They obviously chose a much slower start to distributing the token. It was basically a mining situation. You had to mine it to create it, just like Bitcoin, and it started seven years after Bitcoin.

We launched a futures contract on the value of Zcash before there were any tokens or a mainnet. We were the only place to trade it, and it was a fucking wild, fun contract back in the fall of 2016.

Then, obviously, the Genesis block happened, I think in late 2016, and the price spiked to something like $3,000 a coin on Poloniex, one of the first places people were trading it. That's because there was no supply.

Right, there was no supply because the mining had just started.

As mining inflation kicked in and the supply increased, the token price collapsed, as it should.

My biggest issues with Zcash at the time were this trusted setup. We had to trust these folks to do this thing, and they had the whole theater of keeping the laptops from the public. They had the livestream and all that sort of stuff.

Another problem was that people were a little bit pissed off at the 20% mining subsidy that would go to the founding Zcash team. It is what it is. People have to get paid.

The biggest criticism was that, of the small circulating supply of coins, most of them were not shielded. So then what's the fucking point? What are we doing here? We're not actually creating anything new. It's just a shittier version of Bitcoin because it started seven years later and doesn't have as big a network.

I kind of forgot about Zcash for a long time. I remember I was doing some privacy interview the night before I met Naval at this dinner. We were talking, and the interviewer asked me, "What do you think about this 100% move in Zcash overnight?"

I was like, "That's interesting. I haven't really thought much about Zcash." I looked later and saw that it was sort of a tweet by Naval that galvanized people to reignite this narrative. I didn't think anything of it. It moved up, whatever. I had other shit to do.

So I go to this dinner and sit down. There were about 40 people there. Naval and I got to chatting, and I said, "Congratulations on the Zcash thing." He said, "Yeah, this is my next biggest bag. I think it's a 1,000x-er. This is the last thing in crypto that can do a 1,000x."

I said, "That's interesting," and laid out the issues I had with Zcash back from 2016. He started batting them down one by one.

I said, "What about Monero?" That was what I thought was the most privacy-secure cryptocurrency. He said, "Guess what? In an age of AI and the ubiquity of all our data being everywhere, and the government seeing everything, people have been able to deanonymize Monero, especially in Japan."

I was like, "That's interesting. I had heard that." I kept that in the back of my mind. I'll verify that for myself in my own time.

He said, "If everything I'm saying is true, and people care about privacy again, this thing can go up big."

This guy is a very good investor. He's hit a lot of home runs. I've lately been in the school of thought—I think this is a Soros thing—invest first, investigate later. Fuck it, I'm just going to put on a position big enough that I care, but small enough that if it goes up 50%, I don't really give a shit. It stings.

At dinner, I pinged all my brokers and bought a few bucks' worth of Zcash. It was funny that six out of eight of my brokers wouldn't let me trade it. That made me want it even more.

So I was able to buy my first bag. The next day, I went home, did some research about all the things Naval had told me, and verified them one by one.

They changed some of the trusted setup with, I think, the Halo 2 upgrade to the cryptography. The Japanese authorities were able to deanonymize Monero for a criminal syndicate. The mining subsidy, I believe, went away maybe two years ago. I believe the 20% was phased out.

It was like, okay, in this privacy narrative, grassroots crypto people are a little pissed off that Bitcoin has basically just been, "What does Larry Fink say? What does JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon say? What's coming out of the SEC and CFTC regulations?"

Is this what we're really here for—to pass shitty bills in the U.S. Congress and care about what some bankers think about how they're going to allocate into ETFs?

This isn't Bitcoin. This isn't what I came here for. Let's buy something for the people that's actually private and solves a real problem.

I like the setup, and then I just started aping and watching the price perform. Bitcoin's been pretty much down. I think it was around 110,000 when I started buying it. Now it's down to a little bit below 100,000, and Zcash just keeps pumping and pumping and pumping.

I like the energy of the stock. I like the volume profile. I like the feeling that I get when I look at that chart of the humans trading this thing and getting excited about it. I like the hate and I like the praise that you get on social media when you talk about Zcash because, at the end of the day, I want pathos. I want emotion. I want to see people hate it. I want to see people love it.

That's where I know I'm in the right situation for a coin, because the last thing that you want to be investing in is something that nobody talks about.

No one talks about it.

Because then you're just sitting there holding your dick in your hand, and you're like, “Okay, fuck. I could be investing in something else. My capital is just sitting here doing nothing,” most likely going down in price because there's no attention on it.

But at least it's Zcash. There's attention. So I was like, “Fuck it. I'm going to scale into this thing.” I fully buy into Deval's vision here, and I think it could go to 10% to 20% of the value of Bitcoin.

I set a target in my mind for the amount of capital that I want to invest in terms of the entry price, and I've been doing that. I think I'm pretty much done buying my Zcash. I might buy a little bit more if we dip, but it looks like we dipped down into the low 400s, and I think we're holding strong here at around 500.

I think we're going to reaccelerate the Zcash move, especially as people start to understand: How do you shield your Zcash? How do you take it off a centralized exchange and get a wallet?

I've been playing around with the Zashi wallet, and I got a Keystone hardware wallet. I'm playing around with the technology and making sure that I understand how everything works. I'm there. I'm ready to rock and roll on this thing.

Would you say, “I like the feeling I get when I look at this chart”? I love that you love this shit. It's honestly electric to hear you talk about a shitcoin. It's like an emotional, primal reaction. I feel you on that, though. You want to be in a coin that everyone either loves or hates, that people are talking about, and you really feel it.

I saw this clip of Mert, who's been doing the rounds on Zcash. He went on

Yeah.

Bali's podcast, and there's this clip from Bali where he's basically like, “The next 5 to 10 years in crypto is basically going to be adding a privacy layer and encrypting all of the existing foundations and systems that we've already built.” Basically, ZK-ing everything that exists in crypto. Privacy is the new norm, the number one focus.

Do you follow that? Do you think that this is just going to be a privacy decade, especially in crypto, over the next 5 to 10 years?

Of course, because we have superintelligent AIs. Whether or not they're AGI or whatever you want to call that doesn't really matter. Basically, we have this really intelligent mimicking computer, a predictive engine, and the state is going to apply it to making sure that they can control every aspect of our digital lives.

For good or for bad, we the people are complicit in this because we like to use these smartphones with social media. That essentially is the largest voluntary gift of our data to central governments in the world that's ever happened, right? We voluntarily gave all of our photos, our location, and our chats with others to the government because we wanted to be connected over the internet. We wanted this community. We wanted this power that is computers. The cost of that is we'll have no more privacy.

I like to say, people are like, “The Chinese are going to take our data.” I'm like, “You use Google, right?” That shit goes straight to the U.S. government. Don't fucking tell me this China shit. Choose one, okay? You want to give your data to the U.S. government, or you want to give your data to China?

You can have a debate about who is better than who. I don't really care. You don't have your data anymore. If it's possible to deanonymize crypto transactions because you want to charge taxes or you want to locate funds for whatever, that's going to be trivial to do in everything.

Unless it's protected by ZK, your data about who you are as a person is going to live on all these different systems, which have to authenticate not only that Arthur Hayes is Arthur Hayes, but whether Arthur Hayes is a human or a computer.

This is very important. Who are you as an actor in this new digital economy? Again, we're going to have to give a lot of data up. It'd be nice if I didn't have my PII all over 15,000 different systems. If we can ZK that—ZKYC—people are talking about that now.

I think this is going to be very important: to prove humanity on the internet and to safeguard all this data. For people who want to run an AI and don't want everything about themselves just living on this global super-data sphere, they're going to want that encrypted in some way, shape, or form. That's going to come into some sort of ZK situation.

I definitely buy into this whole narrative, and I think it's going to start to grow as people see how pernicious the effect is of having an all-powerful predictive engine that is an LLM paired with a government that wants to tax you, wants to control you, and wants to understand what you think and feel on the internet based on what you're saying and what you're doing.

People are going to react to that by saying, “I want some privacy.” Maybe that's Zcash, maybe that's something else. But I definitely see this as a movement of people really concerned about this.

You know what's dark about it? I always say I'm down to give Sam Altman all of my intricate life details if GPT has better outputs. I'm down to do it too. So I feel like there's a barbell of “Buy privacy, invest in privacy,” and then “Give up all your fucking data.” There's a barbell of both sides.

I want to ask you about the HYPE trade, but I want to ask it in a different way. I know there was this time you went on stage—we all know HYPE. You had the PowerPoint: HYPE 126x. You sold it for 10%. Green is green. I know you've been asked about it a lot of times.

The way I want to ask you this question, though, Arthur, is: How do you balance having this long-tail thesis and vision, and being able to see—I believe that you believe you see a future where HYPE does 126x. I know you could see it—with trading the chart and managing your portfolio?

How do you split that when your portfolio is especially large? You might say, “The market's shaky. Unlocks happen in May. I think Jeff is going to sell. I'm out here.” How do you balance that?

I think it's Stanley Druckenmiller who said you have to be able to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time. The best investors are able to do that.

Again, I believe in the long-term vision of whatever, but short term, I want to maximize. For Maelstrom, I want to maximize the amount of Bitcoin that I have. We do all the stuff that we do to make a return, and I take that return, pay bonuses, and buy Bitcoin. That is the goal of Maelstrom: to stack sats.

If you're telling me that I can buy HYPE at X, sell it at 3x, stack some sats, wait for it to go back down to X or lower than X, buy it back again, and do the same thing all over again because I believe in the long-term power of not only the proprietary DEX, but also the amazing ability of Jeff Yan's team to execute relative to others, great. I've stacked more Bitcoin. I've done what I need to do as an investor.

I'm a professional trader and investor. This is my job. I love this shit. If you told me, “I'm just, you know, I have other things to do. I'm an artist. I'm whatever your passion is,” and you believe in 126x, if it underperforms a bit for 6 or 12 months, who gives a fuck? Just buy it and hold it. That's fine.

But I'm an active investor. This is what I do. If I'm an active investor, I'm looking at this chart idea and I believe that, yes, there could be a period of weakness and multiple compression, and HYPE is going to have to roll out something new and better than its competition to justify a higher multiple.

Yeah, I'm going to sell it, sit there, and wait for another entry point. If HYPE proves itself—that it can beat all this competition in low-to-no-fee perpetual trading, or HIP-3 is going to enable people to launch—I know there's an NVIDIA equity perp that launched yesterday by XYZ. That's really, really cool.

This is what I'm here for. This is when I sat with Dom and Jeff, and I said, “I really appreciate what you're doing with this permissionless listing.”

I love this shit. This is what you should be doing. But again, it's going to take time to see whether that's successful or not. My job is to stack sats, and I stack sats—that's what I did. I still believe that HYPE could do 126x, or maybe it couldn't. But again, I'm going to sit here and wait and see how it plays out. I have time.

So, you're obviously super bullish on HYPE. I think you're an investor in Lighter, too.

Yes.

You're super long perps, obviously. How do you feel, as the inventor of perps, that you're not actively working on one of these protocols? Is that a weird feeling for you, watching this unfold?

No, it's great because I'm usually skiing in powder and not managing a team of people or, like, at the club. I'm fine. CZ, you can have it.

You're just like, “Fuck it. I did my thing. I'm good. I did my thing.”

There are some youngins and folks who are energized and ready to rock and roll. I'm just happy. I want to see Hyperliquid make the CME worth zero. If that happens, I'm going to be so happy, and I don't need to be the one who profits from that. This is just a feeling of, like, “Fuck those guys.” I've got lots of stories about them over my time of doing this, but I want to see Hyperliquid, or whoever else—Binance, BitMEX, whatever—I just want to see somebody take all these TradFi exchanges and make them choose: You either adopt perps or you die. Choose one.

If the CME has every single product as a perp, that's freaking very validating—that the thing my team and I invented at BitMEX has become the only product that's successful at the largest derivatives exchange in the world. It's also very validating if Jeff Yan, with a team of 11—I met someone from their team at drinks a few days ago, and she confirmed there's still only 11 fucking people who generated this amazing protocol. Eleven people.

If 11 people can essentially dethrone every single major stock exchange in the world, that's so cool.

Yeah. That's so cool. I'm so happy for them that they're able to do that. That's crazy. It's really still 11.

How big was BitMEX at the top, when you were there?

250 people.

That's a big team.

Yeah, I know. As I said, it was me and someone from Paradigm and Paradex. We were talking to the woman from Hyperliquid, and we were like, “Oh, we'll stay small, because when you get big, it really sucks. You're just dealing with HR issues: this person hates that person, this person fucked that person, I’ve got to fire him or her.” This is not fucking cool. I spent most of my day dealing with HR bullshit as a CEO rather than trying to think up new ways to make money. I'm the CEO of a company that's not very large—not a Binance, 3,000- or 4,000-person sort of situation like CZ has—but fuck it, I hate it.

Okay.

I mean, 250 was too much.

I saw you buy UNI the other day. I don't think you bought a ton, but you bought a nice bag of UNI right after they turned on the fee switch. A topic I want to get your take on is this: I feel like you could be bullish on crypto in the short term, but I really have this viewpoint that the foundation being set right now is setting the stage for clear regulatory clarity in the U.S., where people can do more. It's also setting the stage for better tokens to exist.

I feel like we're heading toward a future where there are more HYPEs, more pumps, more UNIs—more of these tokens that make $1 million or $2 million a day. They take all that money and swap it back into the chart, and some of these tokens actually can go up long term. They don't just LARP as governance, and you're supposed to accept that for what it is. Can you talk a little bit about this future of pseudo-equity tokens from companies that make money and actually allow the coin to go up and be aligned with holders? Are we going to see more of this in the future?

I think so, because I've been around for every major cycle, and every cycle we've inched toward this particular situation. It's always been a wink-wink, “Oh, yeah, we're going to make money and give it to you, token holder,” and then, situation after situation, the founding team, for whatever reason—good or bad—never did it right.

Take a look at the chart of UNI. I think it topped out at around $35 or $40, then went all the way down to $3 or $4. Take a look at DYDX, the original Hyperliquid. They talked about permissionless listing and all this bullshit, right? That thing went up massively. I think it was up around a $28 billion to $30 billion FDV market cap back in 2021, and that's basically dead.

Again, they made a lot of money, but token holders never saw a fucking cent or satoshi. After all these alts that launched in 2023 and 2024, the majority of them were the high-FDV, low-float situation: no product-market fit, no customers, no real revenue. Or, if they did have revenue, they didn't give it back to us as token holders, and retail finally punished them.

We are not buying this bullshit anymore. We are not going to support your fucking project. If you do well, make me do well too as the token holder. Finally, the Hyperliquids of the world have shown what you can achieve with no venture-capital funding, a fucking rock-star tech team, and giving token holders the wealth that you are creating.

How is it that we're the ones filling your bags by buying your bullshit in whatever token round, and then you come around and tell us, “Oh, regulatory. Oh, governance. Oh, the DAO vote”? No, fuck you. Give me my money. Finally, finally, we're getting there. I think the price charts show it.

When I talk to project founders, I'm like, “Be like Hyperliquid.” They see the chart and say, “Okay, well, you can be like Berachain going like that, too, right?” Choose one. What do you want to be? You want to be Smokey? You want to be Jeff? They're both rich, but one person is loved, and one person is hiding in the corner. Choose one.

Now we have the validation of what is successful in this market for tokens. It's great that Uniswap, for whatever reason, finally decided they were going to hand out the fees they've been collecting. We saw the token pump. I think I'm down a little bit on the position, but we'll see. It's not that large of a position for me, so it'll be successful or it won't. We'll see whether people get rewarded or not.

But I think it's the trend, and I'm glad that finally, after three cycles—the fourth cycle, or the third cycle of altcoins—we've finally gotten to this place where this is table stakes. It's not a decision. It's not a question about handing the money back. You better hand the money back or be a zero. Choose one.

It also feels like this is where crypto is supposed to get to. This is the state it should have reached, and it's finally getting there.

All right, I’ve got a couple more for you. I’ll let you go in a few minutes. This is what I want to ask you: You obviously have more history than me and most people in crypto. You're like our wise uncle.

I showed up in 2020 for NFTs. I didn't really know what was going on. I feel like I'm only now starting to hit puberty a little bit and really understand what's going on in the markets. I had a lot of fun in 2024. I was trading memes, I loved AI, I was buying GOAT. I know you're a big GOAT fan. I had a lot of fun in 2024.

But a lot of the more OG, senior people want to come on Twitter and say, “This cycle was objectively the worst cycle we have ever had. Nothing comes close. Fuck this cycle. Fuck Solana and fuck you.” How do you view Solana going from the $8 bottom of 2023 to where we've gotten right now this cycle versus the prior cycles?

In every cycle there is a theme, and in every cycle there are those who made money in the prior theme who throw shade on the one that's successful, saying it's not serious, that it's for a bunch of kids, a bunch of immature bullshit, whatever. They're just venting their own frustrations at not being the darling of this particular cycle.

The whole point—and I believe this fervently—is that everything is in the price. The most important thing in crypto is the price and markets and allowing people to trade these things. It's volatile, I get it. That's the whole fucking point. It's vulgar.

People thought having humans talk in a film—Charlie Chaplin—was vulgar. People thought television with women in miniskirts was vulgar. People thought the internet was vulgar. Every technology that defines the next age is viewed by those from the prior age as vulgar.

If you tell me that memecoins are vulgar and NFTs are trash, that they're not art—art is hanging on a fucking wall, with some coked-up fuck selling you shit, right? No, fine.

Cool. I want the vulgar thing because a vulgar thing is a person who's going to be the next Guggenheim of the next cycle, right? And so that's what I want to be in. I love it when I hear a bunch of people talking about, “Oh, I don't like this. This is immature,” or whatever. Okay, I want the immature thing, because that's going to be the best-performing thing possible in this particular cycle. So it's a great signal, in my view.

Does it always work this way? Does culture just work this way—that the most controversial, attention-striking things are the ones that seep through? Is this a theme? Is that just how technology progresses?

Because obviously, as we've proceeded along this technological journey as a human civilization, there's always the old guard that feels threatened by the new guard, and the new guard wants to adopt something new to have something relevant to offer to the advancement of the human race. It's just natural. The old people are always like, “Oh, the kids these days,” or whatever they want to say about children. It's always the same.

If you invest in the things that the new generation is excited about, they're going to be old one day, too. Then that's going to be the norm, and that's what you want to be investing in, in my view.

So how do you, Arthur Hayes, not become washed? How do you not sit on the ivory tower and say, “I've done well. I've made a lot of money”? How do you continue to stay finger-on-the-pulse and not become washed? 2017, I was hot, but whatever. Talk to people who actually like this stuff. Go to the conferences. Walk around the booths. What are people selling? What are the young people trying to do?

You can't just sit up here and say, “I'm only going to hang out with my private banker, who's going to show me some government bond or Bitcoin ETF.” Okay, cool. You can make money that way. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. But if you want to stay young, you've got to keep moving.

Like Bitcoin, Bitcoin is zero if you don't move. If you do not move as a human, you ossify and die. I like the universe, and I want to be here as long as possible, so I've got to move. Whether that's lifting weights or talking to people about what they're doing, if you do not move, if you do not try to be active in something, then you die. That's just how the universe is structured, unfortunately.

If you're not willing to go into the trenches, or just read the tweets of the young generation, if you're not willing to go to a conference and walk around the booths—you don't have to talk to anyone, just listen and see what's interesting and what the themes are—if you're not willing to do that and you just want to sit on your chair and have a whiskey and listen to some guy in a suit sell you some financial product, fine. I get it. But you're going to get fat and die. That's just the way the universe works.

That's sort of how I attempt to stay relevant. I'm sure there are others out there who are a lot more finger-on-the-pulse. But I really enjoy markets, and if I enjoy markets and want to see where things are going, at least in the crypto context, then I need to get into the trenches and at least observe. You don't have to participate, but at least observe.

That's a good take. It's a refreshing take.

As sort of a sign-off, it's been a quick hour. I know I had you booked for 30 minutes, but I kept going. You didn't tell me to stop, so I kept going. There's a lot of young people who watch this stream. There are a lot of first-cycle people. There are a lot of people who showed up for Solana in 2024. There are a lot of people who are in a different tax bracket than you are and are thinking, “Yeah, it's a little bit of a weird time in the market.”

Especially if you don't have a big bankroll or a huge portfolio, if you're relatively new, trying to get your head around things, and really unsure what to do, you hear all these takes that you have 2 years to make it or you're stuck in the permanent underclass forever. You read the GCR: hyper-gamble your way out. I think it's generally correct, but people feel the weight of it. It feels heavy. It's on their shoulders: “I have to make it right now. Now, now.”

What do you do if you're in this spot? How do you make it? What do you focus on? How do you get your mindset right to put yourself in a position to get where you are right now?

Time and the compounding rate of interest are two of the most powerful forces in the universe. Think about it: If the current inflation target is 2%, the Fed's target from 1913 until the present has generated a 99% decline in the value of the dollar. Even a small percentage increase compounded over time will generate massive returns.

Put all that hyper-gamblization aside. Understand the feeling, observe it, and say, “Guess what? I'm going to trust that if I can just make 5% compounded over a particular period of time and not suffer massive drawdowns because I was shooting for the stars, over time I'm going to get very wealthy.” Just understand the math and be patient.

But if you want to hyper-gamble through leveraged trading, be ready to be a 24/7 trader, 365 days a year. Understand the microstructure of the market. Understand the products you're trading. Understand the flows, and who was trading when and why. If you're really ready to dedicate yourself to that, then use the leverage.

If you're not willing to dedicate yourself to being a trader like that, then buy and hold with no leverage is the way to go. Set a percentage of your savings that you're going to allocate to the high-quality cryptos that you like. Set it and forget it.

Unless you're willing to dedicate yourself, this whole hyper-gamblization—all this stuff—is just going to lead you to financial ruin, because you're not willing to invest the time to be the trader who can profit from this high-volatility asset coupled with perpetual swaps and other things.

That was beautiful. That was awesome. That was a sick take. That was fun. That was lit. Arthur, dude, you're great. Thanks for coming on, man. I hope you enjoyed it. It was actually really insightful. It was a good day for it. Thank you, bro.

All right. This has been great. Thanks.

Have a good one, man. Hopefully we'll run it back at some point.