BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes is laying out a forecast for how the next crypto bull run could unfold.
In a new interview on the Blockworks Macro YouTube channel, Hayes says that there will always be “the new new thing” in crypto, which he argues will likely influence an upcoming market expansion.
“There’s always going to be the new new thing. Last cycle it was all these L1 (layer-1) blockchains that were going to be faster than Ethereum and they catered to some particular ecosystem. The Solanas, the Aptoses and all that…
[With] most of those, you get one shot. They had their one massive pump in 2021, and now everyone’s like ‘Well you actually didn’t really do very much and so you’re not going to pump again to your all-time high.’ So I do believe in that sequence of Bitcoin first, then ETH, then everything else.
Now obviously, at Maelstrom we play along all of the cycles. We want to invest in quality infrastructure and we want to invest in dogshit memecoins. We’re trying to make money here. So if we want to think about what’s going to happen at the end of the risk sector, it’s got to be something new. Whatever it is, the new narrative.”
Hayes previously called for artificial intelligence (AI) to contribute to the “most epic bull run in history.”
But the Maelstrom chief investment officer says that other narratives besides AI could play a part in crypto’s next bullish phase, such as gaming, mining or decentralized storage. In the end, though, Hayes says most tokens within these narratives will get “crushed” at the end of their speculative bubbles.
“I’ve put out there this AI crypto narrative, I have a stake in Filecoin, a mining company, and other things like that. It could be some particular type of Web3 gaming, it could be some particular type of way that we use social graphs. I don’t know, but we’ll see the zeitgeist change of what people are actually focusing on and new projects that are unproven will at the end of the cycle, people will say ‘oh my god there’s so many people in crypto, look at all the wallets created, we’re going to have all these clients and all of this stuff…’
And these tokens are going to pump, and again, they’ll get crushed like everything else because consumer adoption is hard. Getting people to change ingrained behaviors is hard. So yes, I think it will play out much the same as the last cycle, it’s just the type of things that we believe are going to be the next game changers are just going to change.”