Hayes bets on a printer's race; Wall Street discovers middlemen won't quit 🖨️

Arthur Hayes, chief investment officer at Maelstrom and co-founder of BitMEX, said US policymakers will likely turn to money printing to finance AI data centers and government debt, a move he argued would lift cryptocurrency prices. Speaking on Tuesday at CONNECT by Cointelegraph: Seoul Edition during Korea Blockchain Week, Hayes said AI companies require trillions of dollars even as the price of their services declines, leaving policymakers with few options. "They've not really given themselves a lot of options other than print money and make it less bad," he said. Hayes also pointed to a potential shift in China from what he called an "austerity lite" policy toward substantial monetary stimulus that could revive demand for scarce assets, and said he is watching financial stress in Europe, including credit-default swaps tied to BNP Paribas and French government bond spreads. "I think the money printing will essentially happen at some point, but that's sort of a slow motion train wreck happening underneath the surface," he said.

Wall Street's push into blockchain markets will favor institutions that already own customer relationships, according to Catrina Wang, general partner at Portal Ventures, who spoke on the "The New Financial Establishment" panel. "Whoever owns the customer relationship owns the economics," Wang said, citing tech analyst Ben Thompson's aggregation theory. Todd McDonald, co-founder of R3, said public blockchains give financial institutions access to clients beyond their existing networks, noting R3's May 2025 collaboration to connect institutions and their assets to Solana's public chain after building its business around its private Corda platform. "You need to really go to where the customers are and where they will be in the future," McDonald said. Justin Kugel, executive vice president of growth at World Liberty Financial, added that intermediaries remain in demand because many users do not want to manage assets themselves or assess every investment. "Maybe there's a reason why there are so many middlemen in TradFi," Kugel said.

The CONNECT program also featured discussion of stablecoins, including a panel addressing how tokenized money-market funds might supply yield, a topic Franklin Templeton addressed in outlining why it has no plans to issue its own stablecoin and instead wants its tokenized offerings to do the job.