Bitcoin has struggled this year as the artificial intelligence investment boom piles pressure on crypto (even as BlackRock issues a massive $9 trillion prediction).
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The bitcoin price crash from $126,000 per bitcoin to just over $60,000 has spooked traders, though some traders are already cheering what they see as confirmation of recovery.
Now, as Wall Street giants reveal they are quietly plotting a “big” crypto move, closely watched trader Arthur Hayes has predicted an AI "credit event" is about to crash the market and blow up the bitcoin price.
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“If we do get an AI credit event, it will be bigger than 2008 because the whole world is in this delusion that AI is the biggest technology ever … and the Fed can’t [out] print Moores Law,” said Hayes, speaking on the Bankless podcast, and referring to Intel cofounder Gordon Moore’s prediction that chips will continue to double in power every two years even as production costs fall.
Hayes, a cofounder of the bitcoin derivatives pioneer BitMex who now runs the Maelstrom family officer, pointed to AI capital expenditure being compared to the pre-industrial revolution railroad build out.
Technology companies have poured eye-popping amount of cash into the developement of artificial intelligence models and data centers in recent years, with the so-called hyperscalers—Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet—projected to spend a combined $725 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone.
“I don’t care how much money you throw at this thing, you can’t change the fact that chips get better every two years even if you pump $10 trillion into the economy, so what’s the response going to be by the financial authorities to save the banks? ‘We’ll just shovel fiat money in.’”
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Hayes predicted that if investors decide AI investment no longer meets its “cost of capital,” that money will go “straight” into bitcoin and crypto.
“The implosion of the AI bubble and the money printing that’s going to happen, especially in the United States … is going to dwarf sub-prime and it’s going to take us to a $1 million bitcoin price.”
“This is the ‘big print,’” Hayes said, adding: “If you time this well, you’ll never work again,” comparing its to Michael Burry’s famous bet against the U.S. housing market that became the basis of the movie, The Big Short.
Bitcoin, created in response to the government bail out of banks in 2008, has traded as both an inflation hedge and high-growth technology stock over the last 15 years.