Arthur Hayes' speech at Consensus Miami 2026 revolved around the question of whether cryptocurrencies need regulation. His core argument was that the primary driver of Bitcoin's price was not a country's regulatory policies or political stance, but rather the expansion of global fiat currency liquidity. He reviewed the monetary policies of the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations and their impact on Bitcoin's price performance, arguing that liquidity factors such as quantitative easing, pandemic stimulus, fiscal spending, short-term debt issuance, and reverse repurchase agreements were crucial factors driving Bitcoin's rise. Hayes also mentioned that the Trump camp's shift in attitude towards cryptocurrencies stemmed from their experience with debanking, litigation, and asset freezes within the traditional financial system, leading them to recognize Bitcoin's value as a non-state-controlled asset. He concluded by emphasizing that if the crypto industry wants to participate in politics, it shouldn't focus solely on banks, asset management institutions, and ETFs, but rather on supporting open-source developers to ensure Bitcoin and crypto technology continue to maintain their real value outside the system. The guest's remarks do not represent Wu Shuo's views and do not constitute any investment advice. Please strictly abide by local laws and regulations. Audio transcription and translation were done by GPT and may contain errors. Cryptocurrency is a global movement and should not be defined by a single country or passport identity. Arthur Hayes: There will be a lot of discussion today about regulation, the combination of TradeFi and Crypto, and even something like "giving birth to a child." I want to talk about why we need to stick to what we're really doing here. This is actually a question that I've been somewhat concerned about. In many interviews, they ask me whether we need this or that regulation, especially in the context of what's been happening in the US recently. So I thought I'd give a short presentation. Why Crypto Doesn't Actually Need Any Regulation, and Price Performance Is Evidence. First, there's an assumption in all this discussion about nation-states and Crypto. I know Balaji talks about this often, about his Network State. But there's one point I completely disagree with: that we seem to need some kind of nation-state to support or lead Crypto. Crypto is a global movement that anyone can join. What passport you hold, where you are, doesn't matter. That's what annoys me a bit. I live in Asia, but in many interviews, they always ask me what's specifically happening in the US, this bill or that bill. I haven't actually read many of those, and they seem to expect me to use those as the basis for the discussion. But we'll still talk about what's happening in the US and why these things don't determine whether Bitcoin's price goes up or down. Arthur Hayes: So why are we all here? We want the number to go up, we want to make money. That's why most people come to this conference. They spend thousands of dollars listening to what others are saying, walking between booths, listening to different companies and builder do what. We want the price to go up. But many people forget why Bitcoin's price has grown from zero to its current multi-trillion dollar market capitalization. I'm trying to simplify things; anyone who knows me and has read many of my speeches knows I talk about how to value Bitcoin. I break it down into two parts. First is the technology, namely the blockchain itself. It truly works. We produce a block every ten minutes, haven't experienced a 51% attack, and haven't seen double-spending. The technology is effective and has been running for almost 15 years. We can take this for granted until one day it no longer is. Second, and this is something I'm very concerned about, is fiat currency liquidity. I believe that if you're going to discuss Bitcoin's price, fair value, or future price, what really matters is: how many fiat currency units are there today, how many will be there in the future, and how fast fiat currency is being created. The more money the US and the world print, the higher Bitcoin's value relative to fiat currency will be. What truly drives Bitcoin's price is this liquidity component, not political factors. Bitcoin was born after the 2008 financial crisis as a direct response to bank bailouts and quantitative easing. Arthur Hayes: To illustrate this, I'd like to look back at three US presidents from 2008 to 2026: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump. I'll talk very broadly about liquidity-related issues during their terms and show that Bitcoin's price is actually unrelated to their political party or platform; what truly matters is liquidity. Let's start with the Bitcoin genesis block in 2009. I've written many times that I believe Bitcoin was a direct response to the 2008 global financial crisis. For those who remember, I joined Deutsche Bank as a recent graduate in 2008, and my first day on the trading desk was the very day Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. I sat there while the trading supervisors ran around discussing which banks we should trade with, which we shouldn't, and who might go bankrupt. It was a very interesting experience. Just the summer before, everyone was talking about how big their bonuses would be; six months later, most of those people were laid off. What was happening in the US at the time was clear. The crisis started with the US subprime mortgage crisis and the banking system, and then spread into a massive problem. At that time, they had two choices: either let these banks fail, destroying credit and creating a more honest financial system; or bail them out. Obama, Paulson, and others around them decided to bail out the banking system. This was the beginning of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and quantitative easing. Essentially, the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury broke a promise to the world: the dollars you hold were supposed to represent something, were supposed to be strong, but now we're going to use trillions of dollars to bail out the banking system. The genesis block of Bitcoin was mined in 2009. Bitcoin essentially started from zero, and by 2017, it had risen to nearly $15,000 or $16,000. Next came Donald Trump's first term. From 2017 to 2021, the biggest events during Trump's term were COVID-19 and his decision to lock down the economy. To appease the public while everyone stayed home, he printed the most money of any US president since Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal in the 1930s. He made helicopter money. This concept was originally proposed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, which essentially meant giving money directly to everyone. I don't care if you're rich or poor, I give you a few thousand dollars, and you can use it however you want. What happened? People started buying things, they started speculating. This was also the period when Robinhood and home-based transactions emerged, and Bitcoin and Crypto truly took off. Bitcoin rose by approximately 4000% from 2017 to 2021. The fiscal stimulus during the Biden administration and the Russian asset freeze reinforced the narrative of Bitcoin as an off-system asset. Next came Biden, a Democratic president. Yes, people may not remember, Biden went on to issue another round of stimulus checks. Because giving away free money to the public is popular worldwide, especially in the United States. His signature money-printing legislation, the Green New Deal, along with various tax credits and government subsidies, was used to build solar power plants and other types of renewable energy. In terms of demonstrating what Bitcoin means as a currency not controlled by a state, I think a landmark moment during Biden's term occurred in 2022. At that time, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the U.S. Treasury decided to freeze Russian-held U.S. Treasury bonds, essentially "taking away" Russian money. Something similar happened in Europe. Therefore, anyone holding dollars or U.S. Treasury bonds is reminded that you can hold these assets because the U.S. Treasury and the banking system allow you to. But assets like Bitcoin and gold, which exist outside the system, are bearer assets that you truly own; no one can take them away from you. We also saw that after February 2022, the prices of Bitcoin and gold began to rise. A landmark moment in money printing during Biden's term was "Bad Girl Yellen," namely US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, former Federal Reserve Chair. She decided that the market needed a boost. Although Trump and Biden's Covid stimulus checks had created significant inflation, the market still fell as the Fed raised interest rates. But the problem is that an economy that relies on stock market gains and on the US Treasury to finance itself still needs more money printing. So she decided to change the way the US government issues debt, issuing more short-term debt instead of long-term debt. This injected about $2.5 trillion into the economy through the so-called reverse repurchase program, which also boosted Bitcoin's price. Of course, as the asset size grows larger, it becomes more difficult to push prices up significantly. Bitcoin has risen by about 200% in the past four years. Arthur Hayes: I think people may be overlooking one thing, which is how Trump and his team's discourse surrounding Bitcoin has changed. It's actually quite significant. Back in 2017, before Covid, Trump's best attitude towards Bitcoin was only ambiguous; at worst, he was even somewhat hostile towards Bitcoin. But fast forward to his 2024 campaign, and you'll see a dramatic shift in the pro-crypto rhetoric he and his campaign released. What happened during that time? Clearly, whether you liked him or not, or whether you thought these things were right, he and his family were targeted by the banking system. They were de-banked, faced numerous lawsuits, and had their assets frozen. Subsequently, it became extremely difficult for them to continue operating within the TradFi banking system they were once so familiar with. This isn't just something I made up. If you've heard his sons talk about what happened during that period in the media, they say, "We realized the value of Bitcoin: it's an asset that exists outside of state control. When we could no longer use those banks, when those banks with whom we had decades of relationships, from which we borrowed billions of dollars, cut us off, de-banked us, the only option left was Crypto." This is why they believe in Crypto, and precisely because of the value that Bitcoin offers outside the regulatory system. Without this value, what's the point of the coin? It's just another asset; you can buy an ETF, it goes up, it goes down, but it doesn't have any real use. So, if you think about why Trump turned positive about Crypto, at least verbally, during the campaign, it's precisely because it's not subject to regulation. And some of you want to put it under regulation through acts like the Clarity Act and other things. In the last 18 months of this presidency, Bitcoin's price has fallen by about 28%. I made these slides a few days ago, and Bitcoin has obviously since returned to around $82,000. What we see here is that when liquidity is weak—that is, when not much money is being printed relative to many other problems happening in the financial system—even if a president signs the first bills to bring some regulatory clarity to crypto and talks about signing more, the price of Bitcoin still performs poorly, or even falls. Bitcoin doesn't need regulation to prove its value; the key is whether fiat currency continues to be created. Arthur Hayes: So this actually refutes a theme and argument: that if we have more regulation, if we have more TradFi involved, the price of Bitcoin will rise. First, Bitcoin doesn't care about the existence of these regulations, nor does it care whether these banks are involved. It only cares about one thing: tell me how much money is being printed. If more money is printed, the price will rise; if not, the price will fall. That's why I say crypto doesn't need regulation. It's not that regulation is good or bad, but rather that it's largely irrelevant to the value proposition we're discussing here today. In the past 15 years, the US has only passed one cryptocurrency-related bill, yet Bitcoin's price performance during that time is among the best in human history. This completely contradicts the notion that "we need more banks, more asset management companies." If they come in and offer Bitcoin derivatives investments to clients, that's certainly great. But ultimately, clients want this asset because it exists outside the system, because it's genuinely useful. Here's a chart I often talk about. The white line is the Federal Reserve's balance sheet, and the yellow line is Bitcoin. Clearly, this isn't a perfectly one-to-one correspondence. But you can see that as the Federal Reserve's balance sheet swelled to approximately $7 trillion, the price of Bitcoin also surged. If you look at how much credit China created, or how much liquidity the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank released, I could provide similar charts. The theme is the same: we're discussing central banks and treasuries printing money, and the price of Bitcoin reacting positively to this monetary inflation. So when people want to discuss the future price of Bitcoin, I always go back to these charts because that's what really matters. That's what you need to focus on. Whether a specific bill in a particular country passes or not is irrelevant. If not enough liquidity is created, the price of Bitcoin will be under pressure. Finally, I believe that if people are truly going to engage in political activity within the crypto sphere, those who most need support are open-source developers. Maelstrom supports Bitcoin Core developers; we've funded four developers to allow them to continue working on the protocol. Obviously, there's an election in the US in a few months, and I'm sure many politicians will be at these kinds of meetings trying to tell us why we should donate money to their campaigns and how they'll support Crypto. I think we need to get them truly committed. Supporting Crypto means supporting open-source developers, allowing anyone to participate in the technology and create something of value. Because if we're just sitting here discussing how many ETFs or asset management companies can hold these assets, we're not creating any real value for people who actually want to use these things. Otherwise, when we wake up in 10 years, we might find that we've only created another derivative on bank balance sheets, and the price of Bitcoin hasn't really gone anywhere. So, if you're going to get involved in politics, I'd say go support open-source developers. Let's create some new products and services that truly make this valuable. Thank you very much.
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