Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and CIO of Maelstrom, said at Consensus Miami 2026 that crypto does not need regulation to justify its value. In his view, Bitcoin has one real pricing driver: fiat liquidity. The question, he said, is how many units of fiat exist today, how many will exist in the future, and how quickly new money is created.
Speaking to the audience, Hayes said that any discussion about Bitcoin’s price, fair value, or future valuation comes back to that single metric. His framing was blunt. Politics is not the center of the story; liquidity is.
Hayes ties Bitcoin valuation to fiat creation
Hayes argued that the more money printed in the U.S. and around the world, the higher Bitcoin’s value will be in fiat terms. He said the liquidity side of the equation is what drives Bitcoin’s price, not political developments themselves. Debate about traditional finance, regulators, and crypto moving closer together may dominate conference panels, but Hayes said most people in the room still want one thing: the number to go up.
His point was that markets often forget what carried Bitcoin from zero to its current scale. For Hayes, the answer is not a regulatory framework. It is the pricing effect created by expanding fiat supply across the global system.
He points to policy shocks across U.S. administrations
Looking across recent U.S. administrations, Hayes said several episodes clearly supported Bitcoin’s rise. He pointed to bank bailouts during a banking crisis and the large increase in money creation that followed, saying that period sent Bitcoin “off to the races.”
He placed more recent events in the same chain of cause and effect, including COVID, stimulus checks, Biden’s New Green Deal, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In his telling, those developments lifted the value of bearer assets such as Bitcoin and gold.
Being outside the system is part of the asset’s appeal
Hayes said this is the value Bitcoin offers outside the regulatory apparatus. He added that this is exactly why Bitcoin does not fit neatly into the regulatory regime some people want to impose through bills such as the Clarity Act and similar proposals.
The remarks match Hayes’ public style, which the report described as energetic, chaotic, and often insightful. Traders still watch his calls closely. The article noted that he was early in backing several AI-adjacent tokens, a segment that dominated speculative flows in 2024 and 2025. It also said he championed Zcash (ZEC), which gained more than 450% over the past year.