Arthur Hayes says AI's battle for marginal capital is stifling Bitcoin's rally

A continuing mystery in the current cycle: Why Bitcoin cannot maintain its gains even as central bank balance sheets expand

The usual script is that loose monetary policy will push excess funds into scarce assets. However, this phenomenon has not appeared in the crypto market. According to a June 2026 interview with Arthur Hayes that was resurfaced this week, the problem was clearly blamed on artificial intelligence. Hayes points out that artificial intelligence capital expenditures are now the main competitor for the same marginal amount of money that would otherwise have flowed into digital assets.

Hayes said investors are chasing artificial intelligence technology stocks and the supply chains behind them, resulting in a lack of speculative capital inflows in Bitcoin and the broader crypto ecosystem. Money that should have flowed into the crypto market during the monetary easing cycle has now flowed to semiconductor manufacturers, cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence start-ups. The newly rich emerging from the artificial intelligence boom are investing their earnings in hard assets such as real estate or diversifying into Nasdaq-listed stocks rather than Bitcoin. In a market where narrative and liquidity direction are crucial, artificial intelligence trading has become a more promising bet.

Liquidity Trap in the 24-hour Market

The most disturbing part of Hayes's view is what would happen if artificial intelligence stocks crashed. Because crypto markets are never closed and provide instant settlement, they will become the preferred source of emergency cash during stock market sell-offs. Traders facing margin calls will be forced to sell highly liquid digital assets first-not because fundamentals have changed, but because the infrastructure allows them to do so. Hayes predicts that Bitcoin and other tokens will plummet after the artificial intelligence bubble bursts before some degree of sorting will occur.

This mechanism of forced selling is not a theoretical assumption. It is similar to the situation in the past when the overall market was under pressure, when a wave of cross-asset liquidations swept the crypto market, often driving down prices far beyond the reasonable value implied by on-chain data. A hypothetical AI crash will accurately test how deep the entanglement between speculative technology and the crypto market is.

A new battlefield for speculative capital

The competition between crypto markets and artificial intelligence for marginal capital fits into a larger pattern. In the past cycle, the crypto market has competed with celebrity celebrities, commodities or real estate for the attention of retail and institutional traders. Today, the opponent is a wave of well-funded technology that promises to bring efficiency improvements to the entire industry. While some encryption projects are embracing the AI narrative-for example, the recent AI-themed BRC-20NFT topped the list in weekly sales, and storage networks such as Filecoin are positioning themselves to meet AI-driven data needs-these are only niche areas of convergence rather than widespread funding rotations.

Some projects that combine decentralized infrastructure with artificial intelligence computing, such as UXLINK's collaboration with Origins Network to develop scalable Web3 applications, are paving the way for the encryption market to absorb some of the artificial intelligence attention. However, the amount of money flowing into traditional AI stocks and private AI companies still far exceeds that of similar projects on the chain, making Bitcoin difficult until AI transactions cool down or crypto-native revenue products become attractive enough to regain marginal buyers.

Undecided issues

Hayes's argument leaves several unresolved questions. If the artificial intelligence cycle matures and the growth rate slows down, will marginal funds re-rotate back into the crypto market, or will they find another destination? The answer depends in part on whether the crypto market can maintain a credible revenue-generating ecosystem-which is what stablecoin lending, decentralized financial protocols, and tokenized real-world assets are trying to build. In addition, there is also the possibility that crypto markets and artificial intelligence will not always serve as substitutes for speculative capital, and they may become complementary, such as stablecoins and blockchain tracks for large-scale settlement of AI-related transactions.

For now, the signal from Hayes 'interview is clear: when hot money is chasing another paradigm, loose money alone is not enough. As long as AI capital expenditures dominate marginal liquidity, Bitcoin's traditional currency devaluation narrative is likely to remain silent, and any sell-off in technology stocks could drag the crypto market down before it has a chance to decouple.