Crypto Investor Arthur Hayes Doubts Trump Will Get Around to Doing a Bitcoin Reserve

Arthur Hayes, chief investment officer at cryptocurrency venture capital firm Maelstrom, says he doubts that Donald Trump’s government will succeed in creating a strategic reserve for bitcoin, a policy on which many cryptocurrency enthusiasts are pinning their hopes.

“I don’t think Trump will be able to create a bitcoin reserve,” Hayes, 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 on any of Trump’s platforms helps.”

Trump certainly sees the benefit that cryptocurrencies could bring him, having launched two lucrative cryptocurrencies (crypto tokens that have no use other than to be volatile speculative vehicles) before his inauguration. For hardcore Bitcoin supporters, the US Strategic Reserve held in Bitcoin would be an apotheosis of the most valuable currency.

“I hope I’m wrong” regarding Bitcoin reserve implementation, Hayes said. But he pointed to the limited time frame before the midterm elections, which could limit the ability to implement substantive policy changes, as well as the fact that there are many other things to devote time and money to.

“You have a lot of borrowing capacity before you destroy the bond market. Are you going to borrow money to buy Bitcoin? Are you going to borrow money to provide health care to the elderly who voted for you, or are you going to build more bombs so the defense lobby will like you?” Hayes said.

“There are a lot of different things you can borrow money to spend it on. I don’t think he would spend it on bitcoin. As important as the bitcoin bros think it is, there are a lot of other interested parties that want this borrowed money to go into their pockets,” he added. .

Hayes could be called a contrarian. A sly understatement when it comes to investing through his new Maelstrom fund – “We like undervalued things.” [shitcoins] – It is based on insights into macroeconomics, with a particular pessimism about the ways in which governments erode the wealth of ordinary people.

Maelstrom mostly writes checks worth between $50,000 and $100,000 in the seed stage of cryptocurrency projects and acquires tokens instead of shares; Recent successes have included investing in Ethena Labs, a stablecoin project.

Speaking about Maelstrom’s investment thesis, Hayes said: “Let’s not kid ourselves, it’s just speculation. Most of these things are going to be zeros. So I don’t want to dress it up in kind of high-level language. We’re speculating.”