BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes is facing another round of liquidity exit allegations after on-chain observers pointed out that his fund, Maelstrom, appeared to offload $1.92 million worth of CARDS tokens within days of Hayes publicly promoting the project.
The move, which is defined as using others as “exit liquidity” to exit a trade, comes roughly three weeks after blockchain investigator ZachXBT called out Hayes for similar actions involving four different tokens.
Why is Arthur Hayes criticized?
On June 23, Hayes posted on The official account of Maelstrom He shared a link to the project around the same time, according to a post from the fund’s X account.
Four days later, a cryptocurrency analytics account was created Solanaflor reported On the “It will likely be sold,” SolanaFloor added.
That was all Crypto Twitter needed to unleash a barrage of posts and criticism on social activist Arthur Hayes.
The token was trading near $0.23 at the time of SolanaFloor’s publication, a roughly 23% decline from where it was when Hayes endorsed it. It is currently trading around $0.24
Another analyst on the chain, Economicalalso flagged the sequence at
Ericanomic added that Hayes never publicly disclosed the wallet address, and the link was based on timing and token patterns.
What did ZachXBT call Hayes?
On June 6, Cryptopolitan reported this ZachXBT confronted Hayes During a similar cycle of endorsing tokens and then liquidating its holdings of those tokens. At that time, it included four tokens, HYPE, NEAR, ZEC, and WLD.
ZachXBT documented how Hayes exited all four positions within two weeks after publicly endorsing each.
Hayes had called HYPE, ZEC and NEAR the “Holy Trinity” on May 22, then proceeded to sell off his HYPE and NEAR holdings by June 4 and abandoned ZEC on June 5 after pointing out a vulnerability in his Orchard Pool.
It also closed its WLD position the next day, less than 24 hours after Worldcoin was framed as an IPO for SpaceX.
ZachXBT asked Hayes directly how much exit liquidity his followers absorbed. Hayes responded that he “sold to a willing seller at some price” and that he “happened to call it right this time” with regard to his business objectives.
ZachXBT’s history of reporting suspicious actions
ZachXBT has built a track record of reporting on this type of pitch-and-then-sell dynamic across cryptocurrencies.
for him investigations In RAVE, Over the past couple of months, all of the SIREN and LAB tokens have focused on the role insiders or notable figures play in generating retail buying interest and then selling to the demand they have created.
In a May 14 investigation at LAB, ZachXBT is notarized How insiders allegedly controlled more than 95% of the token supply while the project reached a fully diluted valuation of over $6 billion. He described this case as “everything wrong with the current definition of hash mining on major centralized exchanges.”
To date, Hayes has not responded publicly to the latest $CARDS allegations, and the relationship between the Maelstrom Fund wallet and Flowdesk transfers has not been independently confirmed beyond what SolanaFloor and similar sources have cited.
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