Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and currently CIO of the fund Maelstrom, argued in his essay “Same Same But Different” that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s expansion of the long-term bond buyback program is effectively injecting USD liquidity, and Bitcoin will be the first to benefit.
His framework outlines two scenarios:
- Aggressive scenario: if the 10-year bond yield surpasses 5%, the Treasury could move toward de facto yield-curve control.
- More likely scenario: bond buybacks on an increasingly larger scale, combined with disbursing about 1,000 billion USD currently held in the Treasury General Account.
Hayes’s conclusion: Bitcoin has entered a new bull market, though volatility will be significantly higher. He also revealed that Maelstrom is in “maximum risk” mode, with positions primarily in BTC, ETH, ENA, and ETHFI.
It is important to clarify what this is and what it is not. This is the opinion of a fund manager who openly holds long positions in the very assets he is praising, meaning there is a direct conflict of interest. It is a macro-based investment thesis, not an objective forecast.
As for the data, the picture he relies on is real: the Treasury did announce an expansion of buybacks, and according to Fed data cited by The Defiant, the 30-year yield closed Friday at 5.27% and the 10-year yield at 4.74%, both higher than midweek levels following the announcement. Looking at the same picture, Ray Dalio frames it as a warning of a debt crisis and advises holding gold and Bitcoin. Two people, two attitudes, but a shared realization: Washington is actively supporting the debt market, and the resulting flow of liquidity could spill over into risk assets.
For regular readers, the key takeaway is not Hayes’s enthusiasm but the way to verify it: monitor the actual scale of buybacks and the weekly fluctuations in the Treasury General Account. If that liquidity flow truly arrives, it will appear in the data before it appears in words.