Arthur Hayes, BitMEX co-founder and Maelstrom’s chief investment officer, said on The Rollup podcast that Ethereum is now the biggest position in his fund. He also said the fund owns smaller stakes in EtherFi and Ethena.
The episode went live on Sept. 14, 2026 and lasted about 8 minutes and 39 seconds. The Rollup team hosted it, and one host was identified during the discussion as Andy. The disclosure attached to the show said Hayes plainly stated that Ethereum is the biggest holding in his fund, while ETHFI and ENA are smaller positions. It also said he had previously disclosed a Bitcoin position and had been involved in launching his own token. Any price targets and macro calls mentioned in the segment were framed as his personal views, not investment advice.
Why Hayes says Ethereum is his biggest position
When the talk turned to portfolio construction, the hosts brought up Hayes’s earlier writing, where he said he had built what might be the largest Ethereum position of his career. Then they pushed him on the thesis, the time horizon, and the overall portfolio shape.
Hayes answered: “Ethereum is the most hated large-cap coin. Put simply, if you want to add the biggest risk outside Bitcoin, but you do not want to worry about waking up one day to a 75% collapse because the protocol broke, that is Ethereum.” He cast ETH as the most disliked large-cap token, and to him, that is exactly the appeal.
He kept going: “Thank God it was the worst-performing large-cap coin of the last cycle and still did not break above its 2021 all-time high of $5,000.” In his view, that is not a warning sign. It is part of the setup. He said Ethereum has attractive risk-reward, and that is why it became the fund’s largest position for the current liquidity-driven trade.
Hayes also said Maelstrom owns smaller positions in similar names, specifically EtherFi and Ethena.
The edited notes that came with the podcast boiled the logic down pretty simply: tokens that already ripped higher have probably priced in a lot of the good news, while Ethereum has spent years getting mocked and still sits below its 2021 high near $5,000. In that view, expectations are low. Downside looks tighter. Upside sensitivity is still there.
Hayes says a bigger Fed balance-sheet expansion needs a real crisis first
Then the discussion shifted to macro timing and liquidity. One host said Hayes had described EUR/JPY in a recent article as the one number that can signal whether dollar liquidity is about to speed up, and asked why that cross matters so much.
The hosts also pointed to signals from Bessent and asked whether markets would buy the setup and sell the fact, or whether policy momentum would actually become money creation strong enough to push markets beyond what the signaling alone suggests.
Hayes said his current positioning assumes the Federal Reserve balance sheet will expand in a way similar to 2020 or 2009. He said the balance sheet is rising now, but it is nowhere close to those earlier extremes. That, he said, is why Bitcoin has only gone from $63,000 to $80,000.
His basic point was blunt: “To get around the perception problem of a surge in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, you need a real crisis.” The edited notes said that by “perception problem,” he meant the Fed would need a politically defensible reason to expand its balance sheet in a big way. Without a crisis, selling that publicly gets much harder.
Why he keeps watching EUR/JPY
Hayes argued that EUR/JPY reflects pressure building on both sides of the trade, yen and euro alike, and that either path could force faster liquidity creation in the U.S.
Yen side: Japan sells and the U.S. has to provide dollars
On the yen side, Hayes said the long-yen leg of the EUR/JPY story includes Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund, Nomura, and retail money often called “Mrs. Watanabe.” He said they are selling because the Japanese government wants them to.
According to Hayes, if those investors really dump their dollar assets, the U.S. side has to lend them dollars so they do not have to liquidate those assets outright and can fund themselves through repo collateral instead. He described that as one pillar of balance-sheet expansion and said it would strengthen the yen.
The accompanying notes said “Mrs. Watanabe” is a market nickname for Japanese retail investors. In the mechanism described there, Japanese institutions are moving foreign assets back into yen. If they had to sell dollar assets directly, that could hit the Treasury market, so dollar swap lines or similar funding channels would keep them financed. And that process itself would expand the Fed’s balance sheet.
Euro side: French banks and the U.S. repo market
On the euro side, Hayes zeroed in on the repo market. He said major French banks, led by BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, and Société Générale, make up 20% of the repo market, citing U.S. Treasury data.
He then argued that if stress hits the euro system, France would be one of the first places to feel it because Japanese investors own large amounts of French government bonds. In his scenario, they would not start by selling U.S. assets. They would sell European assets first. French sovereign debt. Debt issued by French banks.
As things get worse, Hayes said France cannot legally print money under the current euro rules. But he argued domestic politics could force another response. He laid out a scenario where a newly empowered French politician puts national voters and the French bond market ahead of EU rules.
In that setup, France would try to support its own debt market from inside the euro framework, even if that move clashes with EU rules. Hayes called that outcome a “soft exit” from the euro area: France would still be inside the euro system in name, but would effectively step around the shared monetary constraints when rescuing its own market.
What a drop to 140 or 120 in EUR/JPY would mean in his framework
Hayes then connected the thesis to specific exchange-rate levels. He said that if EUR/JPY drops from 182 to 140, or even 120, the French banking system would face severe trouble and the only answer would be money printing.
He also said that if France ends up creating money to stabilize its own debt market, and that money does not come from the European Central Bank at the center of the system, then the unity of the euro would effectively be over.
Hayes added that if French banks get sold off over capital-control fears or similar risks, they may have to retreat from the repo market and bring capital home. At the same time, he said, the U.S. would keep supporting the repo market through technical operations. He argued that the Fed had already gone back to quantitative easing in December of last year and was effectively backstopping repo. Repo, he said, is where short-dated U.S. government debt gets financed, and he tied that to Bessent’s issuance of large amounts of short-term debt.
From there, Hayes drew the crypto takeaway. In his words, EUR/JPY is signaling that the Fed will have to increase money supply “very, very quickly,” and that this is the path that would matter for Bitcoin.
He put it this way: “This is the path for Bitcoin to reach $250,000 or $500,000, not just Bessent standing there saying what he is going to do.”
The closing exchange on politics and pressure
Near the end of the segment, the hosts said that kind of policy route would also come with political cover, because France could present capital coming home as being in the national interest, and the U.S. would respond with its own measures.
One host then asked Hayes about the nickname “Buffalo Bill Bessent” and whether it referred to heavy issuance of short-term debt. Hayes replied that the nickname came from The Silence of the Lambs and used harsh language to attack the reach of sanctions and the dollar system.
The thread running through the interview was pretty plain. In crypto allocation, Hayes is making his biggest bet on Ethereum. In macro, he is not waiting for talk alone. He is waiting for a real crisis big enough to justify much faster liquidity expansion, with EUR/JPY acting as one of the main market gauges along the way.