Arthur Hayes Says He’s Buying Tokenization Trade, Calls Profitability Questions ‘A Secondary Concern’

Hayes said Bitcoin remains the core holding in his family office Maelstrom’s fund.

• Arthur Hayes said he is avoiding new token launches and looking for existing assets with heavily beat-down charts.
• Hayes said his interest in tokenization is driven by Wall Street’s tokenization boom.
• On AI agents, Hayes said he would go long on tokens or companies that would benefit from the “agentic wave.”

Flop Labs CEO Arthur Hayes said on Tuesday he has been buying into the tokenization trade, even as he questioned where the money in it was actually made.

In an interview with The Rollup at Token2049 in Singapore, published on Tuesday, Hayes said the question of how tokenization actually makes money has dogged the narrative “for a long time.” But he called it “a secondary concern” next to where the market was heading. 

Hayes dismissed the idea that moving a stock held at the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which settles U.S. stock trades, onto a blockchain was a breakthrough. He said founders talk it up, but "you're doing better bookkeeping. Thank you."

Even so, he said he had been "buying more stuff,” and his analyst was researching tokenization plays.

'Wall Street Guys Are Muppets'

Hayes said his reason for buying had less to do with the technology than with who else was about to buy. A recent Citrini Research note on tokenization changed the setup, he said. 

"Wall Street guys are muppets, and so these guys have given them a playbook," he said. "So you might as well get in the sandbox." He added that if Wall Street's go-to source for contrarian ideas said it was time to buy tokens, "then you buy tokens."

Hayes said the best pitch for tokenization was that AI agents would run all of people's financial services, rebalancing portfolios around the clock and generating fees. 

"If I can tell that story with a straight face and people can nod their heads and believe me, then that's just going to pump," he said. He said he would go long whatever plugged into that "agentic wave," whether it was a token or a company.

Hunting 'Busted' Charts

Hayes said he wasn’t looking for safe bets, and wanted assets down 75% to 80% from a recent level. "That's how you generate like 5x in a few months," he said, without putting a lot of capital at risk.

He said that he was steering clear of new launches, and pointed to tokens with a high fully diluted valuation and a low float, meaning most of the supply was still locked up. Many have large pre-sale investors, so traders have to track when tokens unlock and how many. Hayes also said he wasn’t looking to do new deals in tokenization projects. "The stuff that's going to 10x is going to be already tradable right now," he said.

Bitcoin Remains His Core Holding

According to Hayes, the projects likely to last were the ones that have been around since decentralized finance (DeFi) summer in 2020, still made money and returned some of it to token holders. 

For his family office Maelstrom’s fund, Bitcoin (BTC) remained the core holding. "We just trade other stuff to make money to buy more Bitcoin," Hayes said. His comments came as BTC rebounded, nearing the $84,000 range. 

Bitcoin’s price was up by 0.7% over the past 24 hours. On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around BTC remained in the ‘bearish’ zone, while chatter stayed at ‘low’ levels over the past day.

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