BitMEX co-founder and Bitcoin billionaire Arthur Hayes is known for making big, bold — and sometimes controversial — Bitcoin price predictions, and says it doesn’t faze him when he gets it wrong.
“Nothing really happens,” Hayes tells Magazine, who asked if he worries about backlash when his Bitcoin predictions fall flat.
Win or lose, Hayes doesn’t sweat his calls
The youngest African-American crypto billionaire in history is the first to admit that most of his price calls don’t land. “I get it wrong, and I’ve gotten most of them wrong,” he laughs.
“I don’t know why people are hesitant to do it; it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day.”
“If you’re generally correct, you’re okay,” the 40-year-old former investment banker adds.
Hayes is pretty upfront with his calls; he doesn’t hide them if he’s right or wrong.
In September, Hayes — now the chief investment officer at the VC firm he co-founded, Maelstrom Fund — made a short-term bearish call on Bitcoin, linking it to the sliding Japanese yen. However, things didn’t unfold as he had expected over that particular weekend, and Bitcoin held strong.
Fair play to Hayes; he later owned it on X, posting, “I was wrong.”
“Time to trade some dogshit memecoins,” Hayes said. Similarly, on March 24, Hayes said that Bitcoin would hit $110,000 before it retests $76,500. But just a month later, on April 9, Bitcoin sank to $76,500.
Of course, credit where it’s due; Hayes gets it right too sometimes. In December, Hayes predicted a crypto downturn and a “vicious sell-off” after US President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration…and he was spot on.
Probably because over the years, the New York-raised Bitcoin OG has developed a super-secret method to come up with his end-of-year price targets:
“Pick round numbers that humans like.”
Hayes holding strong on $250,000 Bitcoin call for 2025
His latest call is that Bitcoin will reach $250,000 by the end of this year and is confident that Bitcoin won’t see another $70,000 drawdown on the way there.
“I really don’t see there’s going to be sort of a big binary risk-off at the moment that could spook the markets, and people will dump risks that would get us down to those levels again anytime soon,” Hayes says.
That said, Hayes isn’t on board with the super-bullish $1 million Bitcoin calls that some Bitcoiners, like Jan3 founder Samson Mow, think are possible by the end of the year.
“I think it’ll happen before the end of 2028; I don’t think it’ll happen this year,” Hayes says.
However, he’s not rushing to make any short-term predictions anytime soon. “I don’t know, we’ll see, it’s really dependent,” he says. “I usually try to make those if there’s a setup where everyone thinks one way and I think another way,” he says.
Unlike most of the wannabe trading geniuses on Crypto X, Hayes actually knows his stuff — he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 with a BA in economics. Just six years later, in 2014, he was just 28 when he co-founded the crypto derivatives giant BitMEX alongside Ben Delo and Samuel Reed.
Hayes reflects on the home detention period of his life
In 2020, Hayes stepped down from BitMEX after the US Department of Justice charged him, along with Delo, Reed and Gregory Dwyer, for allegedly violating the Bank Secrecy Act.
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Hayes and Delo pleaded guilty in February 2022, admitting they “willfully fail[ed] to establish, implement and maintain an Anti-Money Laundering program” at the exchange.
He ended up spending six months in home detention, confined to his house. It was a rough time, but Hayes also saw the positives.
“It sucked having to be one place you couldn’t leave and all that for six months, but I was in Miami; thankfully, it wasn’t a jail cell,” Hayes laughs.
In March, US President Donald Trump pardoned the four former BitMEX executives.
Despite the whole legal mess, Hayes remains one of the most respected Bitcoiners in the world. He’s treated like an A-list celebrity at crypto conferences, and even with his hit-or-miss track record, people still pay serious attention when he makes a price prediction.
Hayes now lives life on his own terms
Hayes can afford to make bold predictions because, unlike many crypto executives who stick to safe predictions, he’s already a multi-billionaire…
cointelegraph.com