The post Arthur Hayes shifts focus from memecoins to DeFi appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

American entrepreneur Arthur Hayes has said he’s leaving the memecoin space and putting his money into high-yield decentralized finance protocols that actually pay. The BitMEX co-founder has spent the better part of the past years investing in memecoins like PEPE and MOTHER. In a recent interview with crypto investor Kyle Chasse, Hayes stated that digital assets are too risky for the kind of capital he wants to deploy. The entrepreneur revealed that he’s interested in projects that are going to pay investors as token holders for making them successful. Hayes advocates for DeFi protocols Hayes has previously advocated for DeFi protocols, including EtherFi, Ethena, and Hyperliquid, saying he believes they could soar as stablecoin adoption surges. He also believes they could rise as yield-seeking capital floods the sector. The former CEO of BitMEX revealed that his 2028 target is to achieve returns of over 100x. He also said he’s projecting a 34x move for EtherFi, 51x for Ethena, and up to 130x for Hyperliquid. Hayes cited real revenue, product-market fit, and a model that returns value to token holders instead of just VCs and insiders. “Investors have punished projects that either never made any money or made money and didn’t give it to tokenholders. We don’t want to touch it.” –Arthur Hayes, Co-Founder of BitMEX. The equity derivatives trader also maintained that he’s not abandoning Bitcoin, saying that the digital asset has been the single-best performing asset of the money-printing era. Hayes believes BTC could climb as high as $700,000 before the decade is out. The crypto investor argued that the real asymmetric upside for Bitcoin currently lies further down the curve in DeFi protocols. He believes they can capture the tens of trillions of dollars he expects to flow into stablecoins and on-chain markets. Hayes also urged Bitcoin holders…

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Filed under: News - @ September 14, 2025 11:22 am