Crypto guru Arthur Hayes spoke just recently at TOKEN2049 in Singapore. He gave a great talk on the supposed impact of the Fed’s rate cut cycle (it happened the other day) on some sectors of the crypto economy.
For this, we researched his long speech (already posted on Youtube) to share his main points and conclusions. First of all we were interested in the NFT sector, but Hayes ignored the jpegs, but took a very detailed look at the «crypto RWA». If we leave aside the long chain of his macroeconomic reasoning and go straight to the conclusions, he believes that an interest rate cut will cause T-bills yields to fall and, as a result, capital outflows from the RWA sector.
According to him, the Fed’s shift to a softer economic policy will make [synthetic] cryptoassets more popular, which will have a positive impact on capital inflows and consequently lead to an increase in the blockchain value of Ethena [and a rise in the TVL of other DeFi-like projects].
The central conclusion that can be drawn from the expert’s reasoning: risky assets will continue to gain popularity, which is likely to make memcoins and altcoins the main beneficiary of such a Fed policy over the long haul (as strange as such targeting by the regulator may sound, it has definitely bet on memes).
DeFi and the NFT market will theoretically also get a positive boost from the influx of such «hot investments». 2025 can probably be called «the year of the speculator» in advance, which will positively impact all of the above assets. On the contrary, real assets, in particular the closely related RWA tokenization technology, are likely to suffer moderately from the reversal of central bank policies.
