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.
Crypto’s Next ‘Dominant Narrative’ Will Be Privacy: Arthur Hayes
“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.