Hayes exits HYPE and NEAR, $46M bear folds into the same trade — Monexus reads it as a rotation
On 4 June 2026 at 07:07 UTC, BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes exited his entire positions in the Hyperliquid token $HYPE and the Near Protocol token $NEAR, according to a Cointelegraph dispatch posted to the outlet's Telegram channel. Hayes cited rising energy prices, a coming wave of artificial-intelligence initial public offerings, and his expectation that the broader crypto market will top out before September 2026. The unwind landed on a 24-hour window in which the market was already digesting a $46 million short-squeeze casualty and a historic price flip against one of crypto's flagship Layer-1 assets.
Taken together, the signals point to a single thesis: the easy leverage in 2026's mid-year crypto rally is largely behind us, and the operators who drove the run are now positioning for the next rotation, not the next leg up. That reading is contested — momentum indicators remain stretched, the $HYPE flip of $SOL was barely 36 hours old, and at least one whale who lost a fortune betting against $HYPE has just flipped long. What is beyond dispute is that the most informed capital in the market is no longer adding risk on the same trades that worked in March.
Hayes closes the books
Arthur Hayes is not a marginal voice. As co-founder of BitMEX and the public face of the Maelstrom fund, his allocation calls move secondary positioning across the industry, and his macro essays are read as roadmaps by a generation of traders who came of age during the 2017-2021 derivatives boom. In a 4 June note, reproduced by Cointelegraph's Telegram feed, Hayes said he was selling his full $HYPE and $NEAR holdings. The three catalysts he named were specific: rising energy prices that compress mining and AI-inference margins, a pipeline of AI-related IPOs that will compete for the same risk-capital pool that has flowed into crypto, and his personal forecast that the crypto market will peak before September 2026.
The trades themselves are not isolated. $HYPE — the native token of the Hyperliquid perpetual-futures exchange — had just completed one of the more dramatic runs of the 2026 market. On 3 June at 18:03 UTC, Cointelegraph reported that $HYPE had flipped $SOL in price, an inversion that briefly made Hyperliquid's token the third-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation, before a partial retracement. Hayes had been one of the asset's most prominent public bulls. His exit, in other words, is a known operator leaving a known trade, not an anonymous flow.
The bear who couldn't stay short
The counter-narrative arrived in the same 24-hour window. A trader who had been short $HYPE since earlier in 2026 closed that short at a loss exceeding $46 million, according to a 3 June Cointelegraph report. The position had been a directional bet against the Hyperliquid protocol itself — a wager that the perpetual-DEX thesis had run too far — and the unwind marks one of the largest individual short-squeeze casualties in the perpetual-DEX era.
In a sharp reversal, the same wallet is now accumulating the same $HYPE, $ZEC and $NEAR positions that Hayes had been publicising as his favoured long thesis. The wallet's pivot is significant on two levels. First, when a counterparty that lost nine figures fighting a trend reverses into the trend, the message is that the trend has absorbed its most motivated opponent. Second, it is a reminder that momentum is, for the moment, in command — even as the operator who set the original example, Hayes himself, is choosing to take profits at the top. The two flows — original long taking profit, original short capitulating into long — describe the late stage of a move more clearly than any chart. They are the same move viewed from opposite sides of the tape.
Reading the tape in plain prose
What we are watching is a familiar late-cycle pattern. A small number of high-conviction operators establish a thesis — perpetual-DEX dominance, privacy-coin revival, AI-adjacent infrastructure — and run it until the marginal buyer is a leveraged momentum trader. At that point, the original operators begin distributing to the latecomers. The trade that worked in March stops working in June. The whales who arrived last hold the bag; the whales who arrived first take the exit liquidity. The pattern is so reliable that its absence would be more newsworthy than its presence.
This sequence repeats across every crypto cycle: the launch of a new primitive (perpetual DEXs in 2024-25, restaking in 2023, DeFi summer in 2020), the front-running of the institutional bid, the breathless press cycle, the inevitable unwind when liquidity tightens. The current cycle, however, is differentiated by two features. First, the operators are bigger and more public — BitMEX alumni, fund managers with their own podcast audiences, on-chain wallets tracked by analytics platforms and discussed in real time on Telegram. The information asymmetry that used to define early-cycle trades has narrowed; the operators signal their moves in real time, and the market reads them in real time. Second, the macro context is genuinely different: energy prices are rising into an AI-inference demand shock, and a wave of AI IPOs will compete for the same marginal dollar that has been flowing into crypto since the 2024 US election.
The structural story, then, is not a single thesis but a rotation. Capital that was allocated to crypto-native infrastructure — perps, restaking, Layer-1 tokens — is preparing to migrate into AI infrastructure plays, with crypto public companies and AI-adjacent tokens acting as the bridge. Hayes is making that migration explicitly. The $46 million short-loser is making it implicitly, by following Hayes into the same long positions rather than fading them. Both flows describe the same destination. The disagreement is only about timing: the original operator thinks the destination is next, the converted opponent thinks it is later.
What remains contested and what is at stake
The dominant read is that the top is in, or close. The counter-read is that momentum remains powerful: $HYPE has just absorbed a $46 million short without breaking, $ZEC and $NEAR are still trending, and the broader crypto market cap is sitting near cycle highs. A second leg is plausible, particularly if the AI IPO pipeline disappoints and capital rotates back into crypto rather than into AI.
What the public record does not specify is the scale of Hayes's exit, the timing of his next re-entry, or the identity of the wallet that took the $46 million short-squeeze loss. Cointelegraph's reporting identifies the wallet as a Hyperliquid bear who has now turned bullish, but does not name an individual or institution behind the address. Until on-chain forensics firm up attribution, the "whale" remains a category rather than a person. The same caveat applies to Hayes's stated catalysts: rising energy prices and a coming AI IPO wave are macro conditions, not trade triggers, and the gap between macro forecast and market timing is where most cycle-top calls die.
The stake is not abstract. If Hayes is right and the cycle peaks before September, the leveraged long tail of 2026's market will compress quickly — and the assets that have most rewarded momentum (smaller-cap Layer-1s, perpetual-DEX tokens, restaking derivatives) will be the first to derate. If he is wrong, the $46 million bear-turned-bull will be vindicated, the AI-IPO rotation will be a brief interruption rather than a regime change, and $HYPE's flip of $SOL will be remembered as a waypoint on a longer trend. Either way, the operators at the top of the leaderboard are no longer adding, and the marginal dollar is being told, by Telegram, where it is supposed to go next.
Desk note: where wire coverage framed this as a series of separate trading events, Monexus is reading it as a single rotation thesis — high-conviction operators exiting the trades that worked in the first half of 2026 and repositioning for the AI-IPO leg of the year.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/cointelegraph/1938472
- https://t.me/cointelegraph/1938104
- https://t.me/cointelegraph/1937988