Why Arthur Hayes Is Confident the Fed Just Set Up New Bitcoin Highs in 2026

Arthur Hayes has never shied away from bold calls. And now, the BitMEX founder and Maelstrom CIO is making another one: The Fed just quietly set Bitcoin up for a solid 2026 — whether they want to admit it or not.

“We’re at the end of the beginning,” Hayes said in a new Coinage interview while delivering the formal eulogy for the usual four-year cycle. “The meat of the bull market is going to happen in mid 2026 to mid 2027.”

But Hayes' confidence isn’t built on traditional indicators. In fact, Hayes made it clear he doesn’t pay attention to them at all. “I don’t look at CPI numbers, unemployment numbers, any of that stuff,” he said. “All this talk about inflation and CPI and labor market productivity is all just gobbledygook that these academics can put in their paper to justify whatever the Fed was going to do anyways.”

What matters instead, in his view, is the structural reality of how the U.S. government funds itself — and how that forces the Fed’s hand.

“If the Treasury has to issue more and more debt, then the Fed has to find a way to make sure that the banking system and the financial system can allow that debt to be purchased in an affordable manner,” the former Citibank derivatives trader explained. “If no private sector individual or company or foreign country wants to buy this debt at a price that the U.S. government believes they can afford, then the Fed has to step up and buy it and that’s it.”

In Hayes’ eyes, the so-called Reserve Management Program recently announced by the Fed is just another version of quantitative easing — only with better branding.

“You can’t call it QE. There will never be another QE,” he said. “Even if you do the exact same thing, they’ll call it something different because the voter associates QE with money printing. Money printing means inflation."

And while headlines around inflation or unemployment may dominate political discourse, Hayes believes they’re largely irrelevant to the actual direction of markets. “The ultimate goal of every central bank and every finance ministry is: How do I fund the government and the politicians and their spending?”

And while the Fed's new stance and a new Fed chair replacing Powell in May next year might be a boost for Bitcoin, Hayes is not sure there will be much relief for altcoins. Hayes was blunt in assessing the damage still hanging over the market since the October liquidations.

“Most of these things are zeros. They were zeros before October 10th. They’re zeros after October 10th,” he said. “It’s just a bunch of liquid funds passing a hot potato between each other.” And with redemption requests stacking up for funds that underperformed during the downturn, Hayes thinks there’s still more pain ahead.

“I don’t think we’re through that yet,” he said. “A lot of funds who own this stuff… gotta sell it because their investors say, ‘I want my money back.’” But that doesn’t mean he’s bearish on the cycle. “It’s still a bull market in my mind,” he said. “The four-year cycle? I think that’s dead. We’re in an extended cycle.”

At Maelstrom, that means waiting for a better entry point — and focusing on what comes next.

“The new narrative in my mind is privacy,” Hayes said, highlighting Zcash as one of the best-performing privacy bets in recent months. “What is going to be the one or two projects that are going to stand out in the way that they apply this technology… and create something potentially valuable that’s going to, you know, return our fund like Ethena did for the last two years?”

Still, Hayes cautioned that even the best crypto projects won’t be immune to market structure. “Do I think their tokens are going to ratchet up quickly? Probably not,” he said.

That’s why his long-term view comes back to macro — not crypto sentiment or legislation. “I don’t care about regulations. They don’t matter,” Hayes said. “Bitcoin went from zero to however many trillions with adversarial state support from around the world.”

And that liquidity, in his view, is already on its way. Even if the Fed doesn't want to call it QE.

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