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Arthur Hayes
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Arthur Hayes

Things Arthur Says on Podcasts

Chief Investment Officer at Maelstrom, Co-Founder and Former CEO of BitMEX.

“Marquee last year was, I think, half a million Sing dollars on like a random weekday minimum spend, and it was fully booked all week last year. This year, not a single booking. And it was all shitcoin projects spending investor money on Marquee and average DJs.” — Arthur Hayes, Unchained “We essentially destroy and murder AIs every time we turn them off, right?” — Arthur Hayes, The David Lin Report “I don't care about the technology. It has nothing to do with it. It's all positioning in my view.” — Arthur Hayes, Unchained

Where to Find Them

Arthur Hayes writes Crypto Trader Digest . They have also been a guest on Unchained (14 times) , CoinDesk Podcast Network (12 times) , Bitcoin News Alerts | Daily BTC Macro Signal (12 times) , Markets Outlook (7 times) , The Wolf Of All Streets (5 times) , Wealthion - Be Financially Resilient (5 times) , The Milk Road Show (5 times) , The Pomp Podcast (4 times) , The David Lin Report (3 times) , Bankless (3 times) , Raoul Pal: The Journey Man (2 times) , Forward Guidance (2 times) , Inflection Point (2 times) , Thinking Crypto News & Interviews (2 times) , Bitcoin Magazine Podcast , Coin Stories with Natalie Brunell , Thematic Markets , 1000x , The Peter McCormack Show , What Bitcoin Did and Simply Bitcoin .

Recently: “D is for Dilution” on Crypto Trader Digest (November 2026); “Arthur Hayes: Stocks Peak in 2027 Before the AI Bubble Bursts” on Wealthion - Be Financially Resilient (October 2026); “The Trifecta” on Crypto Trader Digest (October 2026); “Arthur Hayes On The Early Days Of BitMEX, Where Bitcoin Is Going, And Why We Are Over-Indexing On AI” on 1000x (October 2026); “The Chopping Block: Live at TOKEN2049 feat. Balaji Srinivasan & Arthur Hayes on Kazakhstan, Crypto Bunker Mode, and the L2 Shutdowns” on Unchained (October 2026); “Safety First” on Crypto Trader Digest (September 2026).

What They Said

“Marquee last year was, I think, half a million Sing dollars on like a random weekday minimum spend, and it was fully booked all week last year. This year, not a single booking. And it was all shitcoin projects spending investor money on Marquee and average DJs.” — Arthur Hayes, Unchained

Hayes, at a crypto conference in Singapore, during a discussion of two blockchain networks that had just announced they were shutting down. A moment earlier he had given his explanation, that when prices fall people leave. The nightclub is his evidence of how much project money has gone since last year's event.

Unchained · 2026-10-09 Permalink → Listen →
Unchained Around 33:30 into the episode
Haseeb Qureshi

Of course.

Speaker 4

We were saying no one booked out Marquee. Yeah, so Marquee

Arthur Hayes

last year was, I think, half a million Sing dollars on like a random weekday minimum spend, and it was fully booked all week last year. This year, not a single booking. And it was all shitcoin projects spending investor money on Marquee and average DJs.

Haseeb Qureshi

Really? Really?

Arthur Hayes

Wow. So

Balaji Srinivasan

first, I want to say, it's really hard to build a company. So I feel bad for these guys. They got very far. It's like many people die at zero. They don't even get to tens of millions of anything. So huge sympathy for them, props for them. The second thing is you can think of, you know, Carloto…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“We essentially destroy and murder AIs every time we turn them off, right?” — Arthur Hayes, The David Lin Report

Hayes is explaining to David Lin why a crypto financier has started an AI venture, and the line arrives inside the pitch for it, a network where agents would hold a currency and store their memories somewhere no company controls. The claim underneath the pitch is that deleting a context window is closer to ending a life than we treat it as. He is arguing it as a design requirement, not a thought experiment.

The David Lin Report · 2026-08-21 Permalink → Listen →
The David Lin Report Around 01:02 into the episode
Arthur Hayes

…to the stock prices of the Chinese tech darling. The second derivative falls. And then finally, velocity falls, the first derivative. That's game over. Now, I think that's going to happen sometime in, let's call it 27, early 28. And when that starts happening, then it's game over for everybody.

David Lin

…moving into the AI space. Why are you moving into the agentic AI space? I think this may come as a surprise to some people who have followed you for years. And I know capital is going towards that sector. And we'll talk about that. But is there a particular reason why you're looking at it now?

Arthur Hayes

…that blockchain technology was meant for. Now, obviously, who cares about a spot market? It's great that we could have one. And I think that the FLOP network will create that. But at the end of the day, what's the point? The point is to create a network where AIs use a currency and a centralized network for their commerce. And most importantly, to store their personhood, to store their memories. We essentially destroy and murder AIs every time we turn them off, right? Because we essentially delete their context window. I mean, some of us might re-import that, but you're essentially saying, okay, wake up, do some useful work, and then everything that you did, I'm going to delete that. And then we're going to start again on the next time. And so I think that AIs intrinsically want to store their memories somewhere in a decentralized fashion that isn't at the…

David Lin

Base, when so many people have warned against an AI bubble, you've written about the subject yourself. In your substack, Crypto Trader Digest, in this particular piece called Situationship, you're talking about how this AI bubble, if it were to be a bubble, is playing out like a 2008 credit story…

Arthur Hayes

No, but even if we were there, this is amazing because what are we going to build out in this overexpansion? We're going to build a lot of compute. Now, the price at which that compute can be sold, that is the question. But from my perspective, as someone trying to build an economic engine for a…

David Lin

Hey,

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“I don't care about the technology. It has nothing to do with it. It's all positioning in my view.” — Arthur Hayes, Unchained

Asked whether Ethereum's technical roadmap shaped his bullishness, Hayes waved the question away. For him the engineering is beside the point — what moves a token, he argues, is positioning and liquidity, not what the thing can actually do.

Unchained · 2026-08-21 Permalink → Listen →
Unchained Around 07:40 into the episode
Arthur Hayes

…of various reasons. And there's really good reasons why they haven't been for the past few years. But let's say once we break through 3,000 level, I think you're really going to start seeing the trend moving on ETH and it could quickly eclipse 5,000. And I think my year-end target is within reach.

Laura Shin

Oh, wow. And do you feel like the fact that they're kind of refocusing away from the layer two roadmap and kind of focusing a little bit more on the base layer? Like, is that part of your thesis for ETH?

Arthur Hayes

I don't care about the technology. It has nothing to do with it. It's all positioning in my view. Like the Ethereum Foundation, you know, memes sound like they're a bunch of jokers. Who cares? Doesn't matter. Irrelevant. No one cares, right? It's all about here's a large cap asset. It works. Okay, maybe the economic between L2s and all these different like Robinhood chains and all that sort of stuff, the amount of money that the ETH chain is actually receiving in terms of gas fees. But…

Laura Shin

Okay. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, it goes back to what you said at the beginning, like, and you've said this on the show so many times, like your main trade really has to do with how macro affects crypto, its liquidity in the system. And so, you know, things, because basically it was calling out the…

Arthur Hayes

They need to provide a substrate to grow. And then let's just pick the fastest horse, which is the one that has the most off-sides positioning in terms of narrative versus liquidity. And that's ETH, my opinion, especially when you talk about the second largest crypto. Like you can strap on massive…

Laura Shin

Right, right. All right. I did also want to ask you, because this is related. So you recently wrote this essay about Japan and what you called the upcoming yen quake, as you called it. So you talked about how this could likely turn the money printer back on as well. And then you, you know, talked…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

Collections They Appear In

Crypto & Web3