Arthur Hayes (아서 헤이즈) forecast that the value of most altcoins could converge toward zero over the long term. He said this would not mark the end of the crypto market, but a natural cycle that repeats in markets.

On May 9 local time, blockchain media outlet Cryptopolitan reported that Hayes described the high failure rate of altcoins on stage at Consensus Miami 2026 as a “natural market cycle.” He said 99 percent of tokens he called so-called “junk coins” were not designed on the assumption of long-term survival, and many could see their value move close to zero. He explained that such a structure has also repeated in stock markets.

Hayes cited the S&P 500 and said many companies that had been included in the index since 1929 disappeared over time. In the long run, he said, most stocks in the U.S. market also experienced failure. He also pointed to speed as the difference in the crypto market. With tokens trading 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and with low barriers to entry, failures and collapses also emerge faster, he said.

He said the high failure rate is instead part of the capital formation process. He described it as a process of raising funds, testing products and identifying projects that draw real demand. Hayes said, “If you replace ‘token’ or ‘coin’ with ‘software,’ people accept it much more comfortably,” adding, “Just as many software products fail, most tokens do not survive.”

Hayes also pointed to fiat money supply, rather than regulation or politics, as the key variable for bitcoin prices. He said what matters in discussing bitcoin’s fair value or future price is how much fiat currency is released now and in the future, and the pace of that increase. “The more money that is printed in the United States and around the world, the higher bitcoin’s fiat-denominated value becomes,” he said, stressing that “what moves bitcoin’s price is liquidity, not politics.”

He drew a line on the recent industry focus on integration into traditional finance and regulatory discussions. He said centralized crypto companies want regulation to protect their businesses, but such moves cannot change the usefulness of bitcoin or crypto itself. He also said many participants focus only on price gains and forget why bitcoin grew from zero to a $1 trillion asset.

Hayes said bitcoin trading at around $81,000 that day was not due to regulatory approval. He said it was because the usefulness of moving value outside banking networks, the traditional financial system and state control is still working. “If bitcoin were merely an asset with a fixed supply and an asset that stayed only inside the balance sheets of traditional finance, there would be no reason to hold an event like this,” he said.

From a market perspective, Hayes’ remarks highlighted both the possibility of mass disappearances among altcoins and bitcoin’s differentiated status. Altcoins, like experimental software projects, may mostly fail, but bitcoin should be valued based on liquidity and remittance usefulness regardless of institutional acceptance, he said. In that situation, the market may respond more sensitively to global liquidity flows and bitcoin’s practical use value than to regulatory debates.