In brief
- Bitcoin’s decline is diverging from Nasdaq’s sideways movement, flashing a warning signal according to Maelstrom fund’s Arthur Hayes.
- Hayes estimates $330 billion in consumer credit losses if 20% of knowledge workers lose jobs to AI
- While experts agree with the idea, they disagree on the timeline, suggesting that disruption of that scale takes quarters, not weeks
Bitcoin is signaling a warning that traditional equities have yet to acknowledge, according to BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes.
The leading crypto has been on a downtrend since its October 2025 all-time high of $126,080, while the Nasdaq 100 Index has remained largely flat. That divergence is driven by job losses in the face of advances in artificial intelligence, Hayes argues, suggesting it signals an impending dollar credit crunch.
“This is how a banking crisis completely grinds Pax Americana’s economy to a halt,” Hayes wrote in his Tuesday Substack post titled “This Is Fine,” referring to the U.S.-led global financial system.
Not everyone is convinced the divergence carries such dire implications. “Divergence is worth watching, but only one data point rather than a confirmed alarm,” Ryan McMillin, chief investment officer at crypto fund manager Merkle Tree Capital, told Decrypt.
While Bitcoin’s decoupling from the Nasdaq is notable, McMillin argues that falling dollar liquidity is a credible partial explanation, citing the Fed’s decision to keep rates elevated and to drain the reverse repo facility.
Bitcoin-specific factors such as the four-year cycle dynamics, profit-taking after the October all-time high, a stalled Clarity Act, and ETF flow patterns have all played a role, independent of macro liquidity signals.
“The relationship between Bitcoin and equities has never been static,” Colin Goltra, CEO of EVM settlement layer for payments Morph, told Decrypt. “Bitcoin can trade like a risk asset at times and move independently at others, so short-term divergences are neither new nor inherently revealing.”
Bitcoin is the first to react to liquidity headwinds, according to Hayes, since it is the most responsive asset to fiat credit conditions. Nasdaq, by contrast, has yet to fully price in what he describes as an AI-driven wave of white-collar job displacement that will trigger widespread consumer credit and mortgage defaults.
“If AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude Cowork can reliably complete tasks in minutes that would take a human hours or days, why do you need all those SaaS productivity subscriptions?” Hayes wrote.
With the iShares Software ETF underperforming the broader Nasdaq, Hayes expects the next phase to target the workers themselves—and, by extension, the banks that lent to them.
Hayes estimates $330 billion in consumer credit losses and $227 billion in mortgage losses for U.S. commercial banks if 20% of the 72.1 million knowledge workers with roughly $3.76 trillion in consumer credit lose their jobs to AI.
McMillin pushed back on the timeline, if not the directional concern.
“The scenario is intellectually coherent but does overstate the speed of near-term disruption,” he said. Hayes’ model assumes 20% of knowledge workers lose jobs fast enough to create a synchronized wave of loan defaults, but “labor markets don’t work that cleanly.”
AI headwinds
Even rapid AI adoption translates into redundancies over quarters and years, not weeks, and many employers will reduce headcount through attrition and hiring freezes rather than mass layoffs, experts argue.
That said, McMillin acknowledged “the directional concern isn’t wrong: rising credit card delinquencies are already real, SaaS valuations are under pressure, and a rolling deterioration in consumer credit quality is plausible.” The crisis timeline, he argued, is “probably more stretched than Hayes suggests.”
The market is already telegraphing that outcome, Hayes argues, pointing to gold’s recent strength relative to Bitcoin’s slide.
Gold surging amid Bitcoin’s slump indicates “that a deflationary risk-off credit event within Pax Americana is brewing,” Hayes wrote. If such an event does trigger, the former BitMEX CEO expects the Federal Reserve to eventually print money to backstop the banking system crisis.
Goltra agreed the Fed would respond forcefully. For Bitcoin, such episodes matter because they “gradually change how market participants interpret the durability of the monetary system.” Large-scale liquidity interventions reinforce the case for assets with fixed supply characteristics.
For Bitcoin traders, the setup presents a two-scenario path. Either the leading crypto’s drop from $126,000 to $60,000 was the full downward move, and that stocks will eventually catch up with the correction, or Bitcoin will dump further as equities meet their maker, Hayes said.
The eventual outcome is the same: massive money printing that sends Bitcoin to new highs, he said.
“Everyone knows that everyone knows that AI is the most transformative general-purpose technology in human history,” Hayes wrote. “Faced with these ‘truths,’ the Fed must print bigger than it’s ever printed before.”
Bitcoin hasn’t caught a break in 2026. The top crypto is down 2.5% over 24 hours and 27% over the past month, according to CoinGecko. It currently trades at approximately $67,000 per coin.
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