On Saturday, Arthur Hayes dumped Maelstrom’s directional book, with on-chain trackers tallying the sales at around $22.28 million across seven tokens.
The BitMEX co-founder cashed out on Ethereum (ETH), Ethena (ENA), Uniswap (UNI), and other altcoins and took a step back.
Seven tokens left labeled wallets in a 40-minute window
On-chain trackers identified 6,400 ETH (~$15.2 million), 14 million ENA (~$2.76 million) and 323,000 UNI (~$2.24 million). The rest were smaller quantities of ETHFI, AERO, PENDLE and ZAMA.
Etherscan records show a bigger ETH number. Another address associated with Hayes sent 8,000 ETH in four transactions, 3,200 ETH to a Galaxy Digital deposit and 1,600 ETH each to Binance, FalconX and a fourth address.
The main wallet shifted 14 million ENA to a Binance deposit and 323,000 UNI and 3 million ZAMA to an address tagged for Wintermute. Minutes later, a Wintermute wallet returned 2,425,850 USDC.
The same wallet transferred 1.89 million ETHFI to a FalconX deposit and 120,000 PENDLE to the fourth address. On Base, it channeled 546,610 AERO to Binance.
The tokens were out between 1:34 a.m. and 2:14 a.m. ET Saturday. Hayes posted at 2:18 a.m. ET.
The labeled wallet still retained some 14.45 million ENA after the transfers.
BitMEX co-founder trades the bailout bet for the sidelines
“Instead just trade the eventual multi-trillion dollar bail out. Long $BTC $ETH,” Hayes wrote Oct. 15. The address behind the ETH transfers on Saturday had taken in 8,012 ETH from his main wallet on Oct. 14.
“Going to sit on the sidelines and wait for the all clear signal,” Hayes wrote.
He exits in a way that contradicts his May essay, “The Butterfly Touch.” In it, he pegged a Bitcoin (BTC) bottom near $60,000, floated $126,000 and said he would take Maelstrom’s portfolio “to maximum risk unless anything drastically changes.”
Hayes has quit positions on macro grounds before, announcing full exits from HYPE and NEAR in June. He was accused by ZachXBT of selling HYPE, NEAR, ZEC and WLD within two weeks of boosting each token.
Days after Hayes hyped the token, on-chain observers flagged Maelstrom sending ~$1.92 million of CARDS to market maker Flowdesk later in June, Cryptopolitan reported. Hayes replied to ZachXBT, saying he “sold to a willing seller at a price.”
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