Arthur Hayes is making a contrarian case: the next major Bitcoin rally may not come from crypto-specific catalysts at all, but from the unwinding of an entirely different bubble, artificial intelligence.
In an interview, the BitMEX co-founder, said he remains “very long Bitcoin as always,” though he has parked some capital in Treasury bills while he waits for a more asymmetric setup. His reasoning centers on where speculative money has actually gone this cycle.
“AI is the fastest horse and has proven itself to be the fastest horse,” Hayes said, arguing that investors looking for a hedge against currency debasement have chosen AI stocks over Bitcoin and Ethereum, limiting upside for both this cycle.
Related: Mark Zuckerberg eyes another billion-dollar market
AI has soaked up crypto’s speculative capital
The bigger argument Hayes is making isn’t about sentiment, it’s about credit structure.
He believes the AI buildout could eventually become a larger credit bubble than the subprime mortgage crisis, driven by aggressive data-center spending, circular revenue arrangements between AI firms, and debt backed by hardware that depreciates fast.
“If we do get an AI credit event, number one, it’ll be bigger than 2008,” Hayes said. “The whole world is on this delusion that AI is the biggest technology ever.“
GPUs are being financed on multi-year repayment schedules, he noted, even though the chips themselves improve and lose relative value at a much faster pace. That mismatch between asset life and debt assumptions, in his view, is the fault line.
If that imbalance breaks, Hayes, a veteran crypto trader who regularly shares his market outlook with followers on social media, expects regulators to respond the way they always have, with large-scale monetary stimulus.
Popular on TheStreet Roundtable:
“Where’s the revenue? Where’s the capital returns? Does this make sense?” Hayes said.
“The implosion of the AI bubble and the follow-on money printing that’s going to happen, is going to dwarf subprime and is going to take us to Bitcoin a million,” he added.
Ethereum, not Bitcoin,…
..
