- Hayes says memecoins are out and high-yield DeFi is the new play.
- He backs EtherFi, Ethena, and Hyperliquid for 30x–130x gains.
- Bitcoin stays core, but Hayes sees bigger upside in DeFi.
Arthur Hayes spent the better part of the past year aping into memecoins like PEPE and MOTHER while endearingly referring to them as “dogshit.”
Now the BitMEX co-founder says he’s leaving the casino floor behind and putting his money into high-yield decentralised finance protocols that actually pay.
He now calls memecoins “too risky” for the kind of capital he wants to deploy.
In a recent interview with crypto investor Kyle Chasse, Hayes laid out his updated thesis: “The projects that are going to do well are going to be paying us as token holders for making them successful,” he said. “I don’t give a fuck if Sequoia and a16z are on your cap table. Where’s my money?”
He’s not just speaking in broad terms.
Hayes has publicly backed EtherFi, Ethena, and Hyperliquid, DeFi protocols he believes could soar as stablecoin adoption surges and yield-seeking capital floods the system.
“My 2028 target is in the 100x-plus sort of return,” he said, projecting a 34x move for EtherFi, 51x for Ethena, and up to 130x for Hyperliquid.
The common thread? Real revenue, product-market fit, and a model that returns value to tokenholders instead of just VCs and insiders.
“Investors have punished projects that either never made any money or made money and didn’t give it to tokenholders,” Hayes said. “We don’t want to touch it.”
All things considered, Hayes isn’t abandoning Bitcoin.
“Crypto is the faster horse,” he said, adding that Bitcoin has been the single best-performing asset of the money-printing era.
He believes it could still climb as high as $700,000 before the decade is out, but argues the real asymmetric upside now lies further down the curve, in DeFi protocols that can capture the tens of trillions of dollars he expects to flow into stablecoins and onchain markets.
Kyle Baird is DL News’ Weekend Editor. Got a tip? Email at kbaird@dlnews.com.
