Due to bitcoin’s tendency to move in sync with tech stocks, the biggest cryptocurrency could plunge to $30,000 by June, according to Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of crypto trading platform BitMEX.
Hayes wrote on Monday that the same dynamic could also push Ether to $2,500. Tokens were trading at $42,300 and $3,180, respectively, at 12:43 p.m. in Hong Kong. As part of his “long crypto position,” Hayes said he is buying “crash” puts expiring in June on both coins.
The expectation that the Federal Reserve will increase interest rates several times over the next year has weighed on crypto and tech stocks recently, with the Nasdaq 100 Index losing 3.6% last week and Bitcoin briefly falling below $42,000 on Monday.Fed rates may have to rise above 4%, said Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Economist Jan Hatzius on Friday.
Bitcoin’s correlation with Nasdaq 100 is at an all-time high, undermining the token’s appeal as a diversification tool. Hayes said it will be harder for tech stocks, as well as crypto, to thrive under weak global growth and less accommodative central banks. He admitted that he made predictions for Bitcoin and Ether based primarily on “gut feelings.”
Crypto markets “will lead equities lower as we head into the downturn, and lead equities higher as we work our way out of it,” he wrote. “Bitcoin and Ether will bottom well before the Fed acts and U-turns its policy from tight to loose.”
He has been sounding a cautious note recently about digital assets after he and co-founder of BitMEX Benjamin Delo admitted in February they failed to implement an anti-money-laundering program.
“As we move into year end and 1Q 2022, I don’t see how we can take out Bitcoin at $69,000 or Ether at $5,000,” he wrote Dec. 10, following a sharp drop in both tokens over the previous month. “I can imagine, though, a muddle-through, sideways, boring market with small bouts of downside volatility followed by a tepid recovery.”
“There are many crypto market pundits who believe the worst is over,” Hayes wrote in his latest post. “I believe they ignore the inconvenient truth” that crypto prices are currently correlated with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100, “and do not trade on the fundamentals of being peer-to-peer, decentralized, censorship-resistant digital networks designed for the transfer of money.”
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