Arthur Hayes, the chief investment officer of cryptocurrency venture capital firm Maelstrom, says he doubts Donald Trump’s government will get around to creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve, a policy many crypto enthusiasts are pinning their hopes on.
“I don’t think Trump will get around to doing a bitcoin reserve,” Hayes, the co-founder and former CEO of BitMex, said in an interview. “At the end of the day, I don’t know how borrowing money to buy bitcoin helps on any of Trump’s platforms.”
Trump certainly sees the benefit crypto can bring him, having launched a couple of lucrative meme coins (crypto tokens with no utility other than to be volatile speculative instruments) prior to his inauguration. For hardline Bitcoin supporters, a U.S. strategic reserve held in BTC would be something of an apotheosis for the most valuable token.
Hayes said, “I hope I’m wrong,” regarding the implementation of a BTC reserve. But he pointed to the limited time frame before the midterm elections, which could restrict the ability to implement substantial policy changes, as well as the fact there are many other things to allocate time and money to.
“You have so much borrowing capacity before you destroy the bond market. Are you gonna borrow money to buy bitcoin? Are you gonna borrow money to give health care to the seniors who voted you in, or to build more bombs so that the defense lobby likes you?” Hayes said.
“There’s a lot of different things you can borrow money to spend it on. I just don’t think that he’s going to spend it on bitcoin. Whilst as important as bitcoin bros think they are, there’s a lot of other interested parties that want that borrowed money to go into their pockets,” he added.
Hayes could be called a contrarian. Impish irreverence when it comes to investing via his new Maelstrom fund – “We love undervalued shits” [shitcoins] – is underpinned by penetrating insights into macro-economics, with particular pessimism about the ways governments erode the wealth of everyday folk.
Maelstrom mostly writes checks in the $50,000-$100,000 range at the seed stage of crypto projects and acquires tokens rather than equity; recent successes included investing in Ethena Labs, the stablecoin project.
Speaking about Maelstrom’s investment thesis, Hayes said: “Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s raw speculation. Most of these things will be zeros. And so I don’t want to dress it up in some sort of highfalutin language. We’re speculating.”