Arthur Hayes faces fresh exit liquidity accusations over $CARDS token sale

BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes is facing another round of exit liquidity allegations after on-chain observers flagged that his fund, Maelstrom, appeared to offload $1.92 million worth of $CARDS tokens within days of Hayes publicly promoting the project. 

The move, which is recognized as using others as “exit liquidity” to get out of a trade, is coming just roughly three weeks after blockchain investigator ZachXBT called out Hayes for similar actions that involved four different tokens.

Why is Arthur Hayes getting criticized? 

On June 23, Hayes posted on X that “$CARDS degens” had a “solid” thesis and predicted the token’s price would be “pamping,” according to his post on X. Maelstrom’s official account shared a link to the project around the same time, according to a post from the fund’s X account.

Four days later, crypto analytics account SolanaFloor reported on X that Hayes had set a $4 price target for $CARDS when the token was trading around $0.30 and that Maelstrom sent $1.92 million worth of $CARDS to market maker Flowdesk the following day. SolanaFloor added that it was “likely for selling.” 

That was all Crypto Twitter needed to fire a barrage of posts and criticism at the socially active Arthur Hayes. 

The token was trading near $0.23 at the time of SolanaFloor’s post, a decline of roughly 23% from where it sat when Hayes endorsed it. Currently, it trades around $0.24

Another on-chain analyst, Ericonomic, also flagged the sequence on X, noting that Hayes “shilled $CARDS 4 days ago” and that three days later an address sold “his entire stack through Fireblocks.” 

Ericonomic added that the wallet address was never publicly disclosed by Hayes, and the link was based on timing and token patterns.

What did ZachXBT call out Hayes?

On June 6, Cryptopolitan reported that ZachXBT confronted Hayes over a similar cycle of endorsing tokens and then liquidating his holdings of those tokens. That time it involved four tokens, HYPE, NEAR, ZEC, and WLD.

ZachXBT documented how Hayes exited all four positions within a two-week window after publicly endorsing each one. 

Hayes had called HYPE, ZEC, and NEAR the “Holy Trinity” on May 22, then went on to sell his HYPE and NEAR holdings by June 4 and dumped ZEC on June 5 after citing an exploit in its Orchard Pool. 

He also closed his WLD position the next day, less than 24 hours after framing Worldcoin as a SpaceX IPO play.

ZachXBT asked Hayes directly how much exit liquidity his followers had absorbed. Hayes responded that he “sold to a willing seller at a price” and that he “happened to call it right this time” regarding his trading goals.

ZachXBT’s history of flagging suspicious actions

ZachXBT has built a track record of flagging this kind of promote-then-sell dynamic across crypto.

His investigations into RAVE, SIREN, and LAB tokens over the past two months have all centered on the role insiders or prominent figures play in generating retail buying interest and then selling into the demand they created.

In a May 14 investigation into LAB, ZachXBT documented how insiders allegedly controlled over 95% of the token’s supply while the project reached a fully diluted valuation above $6 billion. He characterized that case as “everything wrong with the current meta of retail extraction on major centralized exchanges.”

So far, Hayes has not publicly responded to the latest $CARDS allegations, and the connection between the Maelstrom fund wallet and the Flowdesk transfers has not been independently confirmed beyond what was cited by SolanaFloor and similar sources.

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