Miami, FL – Crypto doesn’t need regulation – something that charting the price of bitcoin over successive US governments clearly shows, according to the provocative co-founder of BitMEX and CIO of Maelstrom, Arthur Hayes.
Hayes’ thesis is simple: fiat liquidity—precisely printing more units of fiat money—is the only thing that affects bitcoin’s value proposition.
“If you want to talk about the price of Bitcoin and what is the fair value or what is the future price, the only thing that matters is how many units of fiat are there today,” Hayes told the audience at Consensus Miami 2026. “How many units of fiat will there be in the future and what is the pace of this fiat creation?”
While there’s a lot of talk about tradfi and regulators and crypto coming together and having this “bastard child,” the majority of people who attend conferences like Consensus only want to see the numbers increase, Hayes said. But they forget what made the price of Bitcoin go from zero to the trillions of dollars it is worth today, he added, hammering home his thesis:
“The more money that is printed in the United States and around the world, the more value bitcoin will have in fiat currencies,” Hayes said. “And it’s this liquidity part of the equation that really drives the price of bitcoin, and nothing to do with politics.”
Few leaders in crypto maintain a social presence as lively, chaotic and oddly insightful as Hayes’. Behind the lapel-grabbing theatrics lies a track record that traders are aware of. Hayes was, for example, early on in the emergence of several AI-adjacent tokens, a sector that dominated speculative flows through 2024 and 2025. He also championed Zcash (ZEC), which rose more than 450% over the past year.
Looking back at the last few US administrations, key factors can be picked out that have greatly strengthened the value of bitcoin, Hayes said. This started with the bailout of banks during the banking crisis and the printing of a lot more money, which sent bitcoin “off to the races.”
Recently, events like COVID, stimulus checks, Biden’s New Green Deal and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have driven up the value of bearer assets like bitcoin and gold.
“This is the value that bitcoin provides outside of the regulatory apparatus,” Hayes said. “That’s the very reason why it doesn’t comply with the regulatory regime that some of you want to put it under with bills like the Clarity Act and other things.”
