On May 22, Arthur Hayes posted three tickers to his followers and called them his holy trinity. HYPE, NEAR, and ZEC. No elaborate thread, no macro essay. Just a brief declaration that when you are in position, trading is easy, and then three token names.
Three days later he posted a NEAR chart with the caption “pack your bags for da moon.”
On June 4, he sold everything.
Hayes said in a post on X Thursday afternoon he sold his entire HYPE and NEAR positions, citing higher energy prices, a wave of upcoming AI IPOs, and his expectation that risk assets could peak between now and September.
Ten days. Holy trinity to full exit.
I just dumped my entire $HYPE and $NEAR position, I will explain why in my essay “Reality Test” dropping next Tuesday.
TLDR:
– Higher energy prices due to Iran war and inventory restocking
– 3 Mega AI IPOs between now and early Q3
– Prediction that Trump goes anti-AI to win…— Arthur Hayes (@CryptoHayes) June 4, 2026
The Timeline Is the Story
We have been covering Hayes’ HYPE and NEAR thesis for months at DailyCoinPost. The $150 HYPE target. The Grayscale ETF filing. The Bitwise BHYP launch and the $600 trillion addressable market argument. The NEAR AI rally driven by the same IPO cycle.
Hayes was the loudest voice on all of it, setting the $150 HYPE target in a widely read essay, accumulating over 26,000 HYPE tokens, and calling NEAR a moon mission ten days before selling it.
This is not the first time Hayes has done this. He previously sold his entire HYPE position shortly after predicting a massive 126x rally, citing future monthly token vesting of $500 million as his reason, and joked that the profits would go toward a Ferrari Testarossa deposit. The market dropped 8.3% the day he confirmed the exit.
The pattern is consistent. Hayes builds public conviction. He exits. He explains afterward.
The Four Reasons He Gave
Hayes outlined four reasons for the sale in his X post, with a fuller explanation promised next week.
1. Iran war energy prices Higher energy prices from the Iran conflict are feeding inflation and suppressing rate cut expectations. We covered this exact mechanism when the trendline broke. Hayes is not saying anything new here. He is saying it is now serious enough to exit.
2. Three AI IPOs before Q3 SpaceX prices June 11. Anthropic and OpenAI are filing. We wrote two weeks ago that when these companies go public, someone has to sell something to fund the allocations. Hayes is acting on that thesis now, not in September.
3. Trump turning against AI for midterms This is the angle nobody else is running. Hayes believes Trump will pivot against AI companies ahead of the midterms to protect Republican voter sentiment among workers concerned about job displacement. If the administration turns hostile to the AI narrative, the tokens riding that narrative lose their tailwind fast.
4. Markets top between now and September Hayes expects a cycle top in the next three months. He is not calling a crash. He is calling a peak and taking profit before it arrives. The WLD long he announced yesterday, targeting $10 on the SpaceX IPO catalyst, suggests he still sees short-term trades but has reduced his structural altcoin exposure.
What This Means for HYPE and NEAR
HYPE at $68.59 after pulling back from the $73-$74 range where Hayes exited. RSI at 36.50 on the 1H, showing selling pressure following the exit announcement. Source: TradingView / Binance
HYPE fell after the sale was confirmed. The platform’s fundamentals have not changed. Hyperliquid still generates close to a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate and has separated itself from competing perpetual futures exchanges with real usage rather than incentive-driven volume. Hayes is not saying the protocol is broken. He is saying the price has run far enough that the risk-reward no longer justifies holding into a potential macro top.
NEAR is in the same position. The AI narrative that drove a 69% weekly gain is real. The Anthropic IPO tailwind is real. But Hayes is betting the tailwind reverses when the IPOs actually hit and institutional capital flows to Anthropic and OpenAI directly rather than to the tokens riding their narrative.
The Honest Position
We covered Hayes’ thesis because it was well-reasoned and the price action validated it. HYPE ran from the low $20s to $73. NEAR ran from $1.57 to $2.24. Both calls worked.
Now Hayes is out. That deserves coverage too.
The four reasons he cited — Iran, AI IPOs, Trump midterm politics, and a September top — are the same macro threads running through every article on this site for the past three months. Hayes is not discovering new information. He is concluding that enough of it has accumulated to take the exit.
Whether the top is in June, July, or September is unknown. Whether Hayes is right or early is unknown. What is known is that the person who called these trades is no longer in them.
That is the piece of information that matters most right now.
