Arthur Hayes, chief investment officer of crypto-focused venture capital and investment fund Maelstrom, said the bull market is back and he’s not waiting for confirmation.
Bitcoin found a bottom of $60,000 earlier this year, and repeating its October 2025 record of $126,000 is a “fore-gone conclusion,” Hayes wrote in a Substack essay Monday. The largest cryptocurrency briefly rose above $82,000 on Tuesday and recently traded around $80,600. A return to the high from the current level would be a gain of around 55%.
Hayes, who also co-founded the BitMEX exchange, marked $90,000 as the level where the rally would turn explosive. At that point, writers of call options with higher strike prices would be forced to buy bitcoin to cover their positions, accelerating the advance. Call option writers are betting that the price will not rise above a certain level; buyers are betting it will.
Hayes pointed to two tailwinds behind his goal.
The first is capital spending on AI, which, he said, has shifted from being funded by cash flows at the biggest software companies to requiring credit creation by commercial banks and central banks. He noted that the Federal Reserve and the People’s Bank of China were loosening financial conditions to support the buildup, with Chinese banks specifically redirecting capital from real estate to technology.
The other tailwind is the US-Iran war, which has forced sovereign nations to rebuild domestic infrastructure and stockpile commodities instead of saving in dollar assets.
“Higher for longer” is how Hayes framed the inflationary impact of the two combined.
War is inflationary, AI deployment is inflationary, and the political will to print money to finance both is what creates the environment for bitcoin to outperform, he wrote. He pointed to bitcoin’s performance against the Nasdaq 100, the IGV software ETF and gold since the start of the war on February 28 as evidence that the asset has already begun to price the shift.
Hayes also revealed Maelstrom’s altcoin positioning. The fund has large positions in Hyperliquid’s HYPE token and Zcash’s ZEC, with NEAR identified as the next pick. The NEAR thesis, which he said he will explain in a follow-up essay, rests on the combination of the privacy narrative and the protocol’s intent-based architecture, which creates a positive cash flow.
“This will flip the script on the token’s disastrous price performance,” Hayes wrote.
Hayes also flagged two scenarios that would end the rally. The first is an irresponsible mega-AI IPO or merger in the US or China that the market cannot absorb, snapping investors out of the manic phase.
The second occurs if the Democratic challenger in the 2028 US presidential election runs on an anti-AI platform that promises to limit the expansion of equity stakes, with the popularity of this message forcing lenders to reconsider whether credit will continue to flow to the sector.
The November 2026 midterm elections could be a “slight speed bump” before then.
“It’s a bull market; close your eyes and hit the button,” Hayes wrote. “There will be a time to sell, but it’s not right now.”
