Bitcoin Ready For $250,000 As ETF Basis Trade Dies, Says Arthur Hayes

Arthur Hayes believes Bitcoin’s October flush to $80,000 marked the end of a liquidity-driven reset, not the start of a new bear market – and that the structural forces that pushed BTC down are now reversing.

$80,000 Was The Bottom As Dollar Liquidity Turns

In a Milk Road Show episode recorded November 26 and released November 27, the BitMEX co-founder argued that the much-celebrated US spot ETF “institutional bid” was largely a leveraged basis trade that has now run its course at the same time as US dollar liquidity appears to have bottomed.

“And so that’s why I believe that the $80,000 dip on Bitcoin recently is the bottom,” Hayes said. “And now we’re going to have a supportive liquidity situation, at least marginally on the dollar, and we’re bottom here and can go higher.”

Hayes is still openly targeting a blow-off move into the $200,000–$250,000 range by year-end, repeating the call from his recent “Snow Forecast” essay. “I’m going to stick with it,” he said. “If I’m wrong it doesn’t matter. I’m long, right? I’m still happy either way. It’s either $200k–$250k or not.”

At the time of recording, the host noted Bitcoin was “back above $90K.” Hayes said ETF flow charts that dominated crypto social media in the spring and summer badly misled retail. He pointed to the largest holders of BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) – Brevan Howard, Goldman Sachs, Millennium, Avenue, Jane Street – as evidence that the dominant players were not long-only allocators.

“These entities are not places where they’re just going to go long Bitcoin,” he said. Instead, they were running a standard basis trade: buying IBIT, pledging it as collateral and shorting CME futures. “They were making, let’s call it 7 to 10% per annum on that trade. They fund Fed funds at four-ish percent and they lever it up.”

When the futures basis collapsed following the October 10 liquidation cascade, that trade had to be unwound by selling the ETF and covering futures shorts, flipping net ETF flows from strong inflows to outflows. Retail investors misread that as “institutions turning bearish.”

“Retail thinks, ‘Oh no, institutions loved Bitcoin in the summer and now they hate it in the fall, therefore I need to get rid of my exposure as well,’ not understanding what was driving those flows in the first place,” Hayes said.

He paired this with a second temporary pillar: listed digital asset treasury (DAT) companies that issue stock or debt to buy Bitcoin. Once those vehicles traded at net asset value or a discount, new issuance became uneconomic and in some cases incentivized selling BTC to buy back shares, removing another marginal buyer.

Macro Conditions Are The Key Catalyst

Against that micro backdrop, Hayes situates a much larger macro shift. He tracks a proprietary US dollar liquidity index built from Fed balance sheet series and commercial bank data. In his telling, roughly a trillion dollars of liquidity was drained from dollar money markets from July onward due to Treasury General Account (TGA) refilling and Federal Reserve quantitative tightening.

In 2023, then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen could offset that drain by issuing huge amounts of high-yielding T-bills that pulled about $2.5 trillion out of the Fed’s reverse repo facility back into the system. In 2025, he argues, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had no such reservoir to tap.

Now, Hayes says, both the TGA rebuild and QT have effectively run their course. The TGA has been restored to its target zone, and the Fed has halted balance sheet runoff.

“We have essentially bottomed on the liquidity chart and the direction in the future is higher,” he said, adding that markets are still waiting to see how the Trump administration actually delivers on promises of massive credit creation via industrial policy, bank lending and a more dovish Fed. He expects the next leg of liquidity to come more from commercial banks than the central bank, citing early signs of rising bank lending and public commitments from institutions like JPMorgan to finance large industrial programs.

Hayes was equally direct on the October 10 wipeout, calling it a harsh lesson for underprepared leveraged traders rather than a coordinated hunt. “People think that I’m going to get off of work and trade leveraged crypto for a few hours and I’m going to somehow make money. No, you’re going to get liquidated,” he said. “If you are a proper trader, you should not get liquidated. Period.”

On positioning, Hayes said he used the post-crash environment to buy what he considers fundamentally strong altcoins like Pendle, Ethena and EtherFi at levels last seen months earlier. He expects those to outperform ETH in the short term but still backs the long-term “institutional DeFi” narrative that could take Ethereum to “the $10,000 to $20,000 price by the end of the cycle.”

For now, his core thesis is simple: the ETF basis trade is largely gone, the liquidity drain is over, leverage has been flushed – and the macro tide, in his view, is turning back in Bitcoin’s favour.

At press time, BTC traded at $91,004.