Arthur Hayes is a famous figure from the early days of Bitcoin, who co-founded the off-shore BitMEX exchange in 2014 before running afoul of U.S. regulators. Hayes recently pleaded guilty to failing to implement sufficient money-laundering controls, and accepted a sentence of probation and paying a fine, but early this year he received a full pardon from President Donald Trump. Today, his focus is on managing Maelstrom, the fund run by his family, but Hayes also remains a deeply influential figure in the digital assets world. Fortune freelancer Anna Tutova caught up with him on the sidelines of Token2049 in Dubai, where he shared his view on current market trends—including a prediction that Bitcoin could hit $200,000 in the near term and $1 million by 2028.
In the Q&A, Hayes also offers insight into the market for Ethereum and alt-coins, and explained his surprise 20% allocation to gold. He also offered some dire warnings about ballooning U.S. debt. (The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity).
Anna: You’ve described recent borrowing maneuvers by the U.S. Treasury as a slight of hand. Why?
Hayes explained that the Treasury has been draining its “checking account” (the Treasury General Account, or TGA) and tapping “Extraordinary Measures”—underfunded programs—to bypass borrowing limits, resulting in the TGA dropping from $750 billion to $450 billion this quarter. He points out that that’s $300 billion spent without new debt, meaning the effective borrowing far exceeds official figures.
“It’s confusing,” he says, “because we are in a period of the debt ceiling. So the US government cannot borrow net more money. There are various different ways in which they can spend money and still remain underneath the debt ceiling. January to March of 2025, the Treasury was borrowing 22% more than they were in the same period of the previous year. So the deficit is higher”.
What are the implications for Bitcoin?
“I believe that the US government has to borrow more money than what we think, and therefore, [Treasury Secretary] Bessent will have to issue more debt and therefore he needs to find a way for these individuals to obtain as much leverage as possible through the banking system and ultimately that means that there’s more dollars floating around in the world because the US government is spending more money on stuff.
So that’s kind of the TLDR on what a buyback is and how I believe it’s positive for liquidity in the market and which is why I think Bitcoin bottomed on April 9th and will continue much much higher as the government continues to borrow money and Bessent does what is necessary to make sure they’re funded at an affordable rate.”
So which point should Bitcoin reach so that alt season starts? And what will be the factor for the start of the alt season?
“I think Bitcoin needs to go above $110K and increasing volumes reach $150K-200K. I think that happens sometimes in the summer or early third quarter and then the rotation starts into various altcoins.”
Do you think it will be just like a slight pump of altcoins or will it be like back in 2021 when we saw a crazy alt seasons super cycle?
“I don’t think it’ll be like that in 2021, that every single coin just goes up 100x. We’ll have a new narrative, that people are going to try to trade and it’ll trade some crazy price, but the old dino coins in your portfolio that aren’t moving probably aren’t moving for a reason. I think a lot of those coins have high FDV, low float, no customers, no revenue, just some CEX listings, that went down 95%, I don’t really see why those should do well in the next cycle.”
So what’s a good return for you on this market, what price targets, what returns do you target usually?
“They need to beat the return of Bitcoin. So if we’re going to deploy capital, it needs to outperform Bitcoin.”
And what are your expectations from Trump’s policy?
“I think they’ll do crypto positive stuff. That doesn’t mean that your particular project is going to go up in value. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to do it on a timeline that makes sense for you.
I think people’s expectations are very very high and they think that crypto is the number one thing that Trump needs to focus on. You know, Trump’s a politician, he’s got a lot of things he’s got to focus on, so I think people need to be patient.”
Additionally during this uncertainty on the market, we saw that gold rose quite a lot. So did you invest in gold or are you purely in crypto?
“I’ve owned gold for a long time, so I have physical gold in a vault. I own a lot of gold mining equities that I think are still undervalued, given the massive rising price in gold. I think that gold can go much higher from here because central banks are buying gold.
And I still believe that the U.S. is going to revalue their gold holdings much higher to depreciate the dollar against gold. So, I think gold could be $10,000-20,000 by the time we finish with this rally.”
So what percentage of your portfolio is in gold?
“Probably like 20%.”
That’s quite a lot! There’s also a lot of talk on Ethereum vs. Solana. Which will perform better?
“I think Ethereum has a better performance outlook mostly because it’s very hated, everyone thinks Ethereum does nothing, they haven’t done anything correctly, but it still has the most TVL, it still has the most number of developers and it still is the most secure proof of stake blockchain. Yeah, the price hasn’t done that well from 2020 to the current moment.
Solana obviously did very well from $7 to $172. But if I’m gonna deploy a fresh unit of fiat capital into the system, I think that Ethereum could outperform Solana in this next sort of 18-24 months bull run.”
You made a prediction before that Bitcoin will be traded at $1 million. When will that happen?
“I think by the end of Trump’s presidency, the end of 2028 Bitcoin will be about 1 million dollars.
Anna: Can you tell what’s next you see for crypto this year?
Arthur: So I think Bitcoin dominance continues to go up. I think Bitcoin in this next little run could go close to $200,000. And then altcoin season comes around and we’ll see some interesting things. And by the end of the year Bitcoin price target is about $250,000.
