Arthur Hayes warns Bitcoin Nasdaq divergence signals tighter dollar liquidity

In a Substack post titled This Is Fine, the BitMEX co-founder pointed to bitcoin’s slide since its October 2025 peak of $126,080 while U.S. tech equities have held up, describing the gap as an early read on tightening credit conditions.

Hayes linked the thesis to artificial intelligence and employment, contending that rapid automation could pressure household balance sheets and spill into bank losses. He estimated that if 20% of the 72.1 million U.S. knowledge workers lose jobs tied to AI adoption, commercial banks could face about $330 billion of consumer credit losses and $227 billion of mortgage losses, based on roughly $3.76 trillion in consumer credit held by that cohort. Hayes argued that a deflationary credit shock would ultimately force the Federal Reserve to respond with large liquidity support.

Ryan McMillin, chief investment officer at crypto fund manager Merkle Tree Capital, told Decrypt that the divergence is worth monitoring but should be treated as one data point rather than a confirmed alarm. He pointed to falling dollar liquidity as a plausible partial driver, including the Fed keeping rates elevated and reducing liquidity in facilities such as the reverse repo, while noting bitcoin-specific factors can also move the market.

Colin Goltra, chief executive of payments settlement layer Morph, told Decrypt that the relationship between bitcoin and equities has not been stable over time and that short-term decouplings are not unusual. Hayes also cited gold’s recent strength relative to bitcoin as another sign of a risk-off setup. Data from CoinGecko show bitcoin trading around $67,000, down about 2.5% over the past 24 hours and about 27% over the past month.

As GNcrypto wrote on 20 December 2025, Arthur Hayes argued that the altcoin cycle has not disappeared but has become more fragmented, with gains arriving in short bursts across a narrower set of tokens. He said stronger BTC and ETH dominance, reinforced by exchange-traded product inflows into the largest assets, has limited the broad rotation traders expected and concentrated liquidity into select narratives rather than lifting the whole altcoin market.