Original author: angelilu, Foresight News
Looking back at 2025, Arthur Hayes remains the big winner that people both love and hate.
As the founder of BitMEX and the most prolific KOL in the crypto world when it comes to writing "short essays," every time he "shill" trades in 2025, he was able to ignite the trading enthusiasm of retail investors. However, looking back at 2025, you will suddenly realize that if you had bought in every time he shill, the result would have been that he made money while you lost money.
He tweeted "Bitcoin a million dollars" and "ETH heading for $10,000," but on the blockchain, Arthur Hayes would always inadvertently sell off the assets he had previously favored. If we lay out all his operations from last year, you will find an extremely calm, even ruthless, trading record of a top trader.
We can break down his operations into three categories.
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Hayes' most controversial moves usually occur in projects where he acquired early positions. It's a completely unequal game: he might have made 10 times his initial investment when he sold at $50, while you might only be starting to lose money when you bought in at $60.
The most typical scenario occurred with Hyperliquid (HYPE). As an early investor who obtained shares at extremely low cost, his operational logic was very simple and crude:
The first step is to leverage influence to shill buying at high prices and create a grand narrative (such as "HYPE will increase 100 times in three years").
The second step is to decisively liquidate your holdings when the tokens are unlocked or liquidity is plentiful.
For example, in August last year, Hayes predicted at a conference in Tokyo that HYPE would grow a hundredfold and made a high-profile purchase. Just one month later, he cleared out his position and made millions of dollars in profit before HYPE fell, citing "avoiding the risk of unlocking" as his reason.
However, Hayes did not completely abandon HYPE. In mid-January 2026, three months later, Hayes purchased HYPE again for approximately $499,000.
The same story keeps repeating itself, including ETHFI, ATH, and others, all of which have experienced similar scenarios.
But imagine you were Arthur Hayes, what would you do? To achieve profits with large sums of money, this seems to be the most standard trading manual: first, present a market analysis that is self-consistent, and conquer the audience with logic; when believers flock in, the market will naturally confirm his prediction.
For whale, the only window of opportunity to quietly exit is when there is a lot of noise and the liquidity is at its peak.
The "old narrative" that can no longer be invoked.
After reviewing Hayes's successful shill narratives, we discovered that Hayes also makes mistakes, especially when he tries to "revive" some old or niche sectors.
In early 2025, his family foundation, Maelstrom, published a long and esoteric article, "Degen DeSci," strongly advocating for the DeSci (decentralized science) field. He compiled a list, including BIO and GROW...
As everyone has seen, the DeSci sector was almost completely wiped out, with many coins falling by more than 85% from their highs. Hayes re-established a position in BIO worth $1.1 million in August, and finally deposited 7.66 million BIO into Binance in late November, incurring a loss of approximately $640,000 (-58%).
There's also Wilder World (WILD), which he called the "encrypted version of GTA6." It was touted for a whole year, but in the end, the price of the token sank along with the concept of the metaverse.
Hayes primarily shill tokens that are trending during specific phases, as summarized in the image:
ZEC's "smoke screen"
This may be Hayes' most exciting and intriguing move of 2025.
On the surface, Hayes's aggressive shill of Zcash (ZEC) stems from his claim that he initially bought millions of dollars worth of Zcash after taking advice from Silicon Valley mogul Naval at a private dinner hosted by Token 2049. He even declared a target of $10,000 last November.
Hayes even launched a withdrawal campaign, calling on everyone to withdraw their coins to the blockchain to lock up liquidity.
Many people were eyeing his wallet, wondering if he was secretly selling ZEC. It turned out he wasn't selling; in fact, he was adding to his position.
Perhaps Hayes' real purpose in creating this ZEC frenzy was to sell ETH and exchange it for anything that was rising rapidly at the time.
Hayes had actually made several moves against ETH before this. Although he predicted that ETH would rise to $10,000 in 2025, it experienced several ups and downs. On August 2, he sold about $13.34 million worth of ETH and other tokens, but on August 9, he regretted taking profits and had to buy them back.
On November 15, 2025, the same day he was heavily shill ZEC, Lookonchain detected that he transferred millions of dollars worth of ETH and ENA to Binance. On the same day, Hayes publicly announced on Twitter that he had "All In more" ZEC. On-chain analyst EmberCN also pointed out that this sell-off was most likely to provide "ammunition" for further ZEC purchases.
Due to ZEC's privacy features, his transparent ETH holdings were sold off and exchanged for opaque assets. On-chain, we can only see him "exiting" (selling ETH), but we cannot quantify the scale of his "entering" (buying ZEC).
However, in the last two weeks of 2025, Hayes sold off another 1,871 ETH (approximately $5.53 million) and used the proceeds to buy back the DeFi assets he had abandoned a month earlier.
This is a very cold signal: in his logic, Ethereum is the "cash reserve" in his investment portfolio. He sells it when he needs money to buy new narratives (ZEC) and sells it again when he needs money to buy the dips old tracks (DeFi).
Ultimately, you'll find that he used ZEC's surge to attract the entire market's attention, and then quietly completed his position rotation while everyone was discussing the "privacy renaissance." It wasn't until early 2026, when ZEC plummeted due to internal team conflicts, that people realized that although Hayes's holdings had shrunk, he had successfully avoided the peak of ETH, which was performing even worse at that time.
How to understand Arthur Hayes?
After reviewing the year, you'll find that Hayes, just as his background image says, is not a "faith" HODLer, but an extremely shrewd businessman.
He uses words to build his dreams in order to attract liquidity; he uses on-chain operations to reap profits in order to avoid risks; he dares to quickly admit his mistakes when he is wrong (such as giving up ETH) in order to protect his principal.
Therefore, his articles are still worth reading because his macroeconomic judgments have been validated. However, before you press the "buy" button, please do one more thing: don't listen to what he says, but check what his on-chain wallet is doing.
After all, in this brutal market, his loyalty to "volatility" far outweighs his faith in any particular project. And volatility is precisely the portion of money that moves from retail investors' pockets to traders' pockets.
