Opinions about crypto investments change in less than 24 hours these days.
Arthur Hayes, co-founder of crypto exchange BitMEX and chief investment officer of family office Maelstrom, said on Friday that the firm had sold its entire stake in Worldcoin, the digital token linked to Sam Altman’s eye-scanning identity project, a day after he said it would continue to hold the token.
“Dumped $WLD. I’m out. See you at the cop,” he wrote alongside a chart of SpaceX shares sliding. WLD fell 10% in the past 24 hours, with part of the move coming after Hayes’ tweet.
A day earlier, Hayes had said that Maelstrom was keeping Worldcoin. The firm had just sold all of its Zcash, a privacy coin, and blamed an error in its Orchard privacy pool, which he said undermined the reason for owning it, and Hayes said the firm would buy it back higher if he was proven wrong. Worldcoin it wanted to keep, he then said as he waited for ‘Lord Elon’ – referring to Elon Musk – to raise the price.
The connection ran through artificial intelligence. SpaceX has increasingly pitched itself as an artificial intelligence and connectivity play rather than just a rocket company, so a strong debut promised to lift the broader AI and technology trade.
Worldcoin, an AI-themed token that trades 24/7, was the fund’s quick way of running, a liquid stand-in for SpaceX stock that retail can’t easily buy and which isn’t yet traded.
SpaceX trades under the ticker SPCX but won’t list on the Nasdaq until June 12, so the price Hayes was reacting to is a private markets pre-listing quote for a company that is not yet public. Worldcoin is also Altman’s project, not Musk’s, and the two men run rival artificial intelligence firms.
Pre-listings for SpaceX shares have fallen more than 50% in the past few days on Hyperliquid, data shows, giving AI bettors less reason to hold the proxy.
Hayes is a frequent, market-moving voice in crypto. Worldcoin withstood a market-wide slump, rising 70% over the past month, a gain that has been trimmed to 45% over the past week on Saturday’s drop.
