Opinions on cryptocurrency investments are changing in less than 24 hours these days.
Arthur Hayes, co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX and chief investment officer at family office Maelstrom, said on Friday that the company had sold its entire stake in Worldcoin, the digital token linked to Sam Altman’s eye-scanning identity project, a day after he said he would continue to hold the token.
“I dumped $WLD. I’m out. See you at the clerb,” he wrote, along with a graph of falling SpaceX shares. WLD fell 10% in the last 24 hours, with much of the move coming after Hayes’ tweet.
A day earlier, Hayes had said that Maelstrom would keep Worldcoin. The company had just sold all of its Zcash, a privacy coin, blaming a flaw in its Orchard privacy group that it said undermined the reason for owning it, and Hayes said the company would buy it back higher if he turned out to be wrong. He would hold Worldcoin, he said then, while waiting for ‘Lord Elon’ – referring to Elon Musk – to raise the price.
The connection was made through artificial intelligence. SpaceX has increasingly pitched its listing as an AI and connectivity play rather than just a rocket company, so a strong debut promised to boost the broader AI and technology trade.
Worldcoin, an AI-themed token that trades 24 hours a day, was the fund’s quick way to capitalize on it, a liquid substitute for SpaceX shares that retailers can’t easily buy and aren’t yet trading.
SpaceX trades under the symbol SPCX but does not list on the Nasdaq until June 12, so the price Hayes reacted to is a pre-listing quote from the private markets for a company that is not yet publicly traded. Worldcoin is also Altman’s project, not Musk’s, and the two men run rival artificial intelligence companies.
Previous SpaceX stock quotes are down more than 50% in recent days on Hyperliquid, data shows, giving less reason for AI bettors to hold the proxy.
Hayes is a frequent voice moving the cryptocurrency market. Worldcoin was weathering a market-wide slowdown with a 70% surge over the past month, a gain that narrowed to 45% over the past week due to Saturday’s price drop.
