Arthur Hayes Sold HYPE and NEAR, Mert Mumtaz Says That’s Missing the Point | Markets Outlook

Mert Mumtaz argues that the primary driver of current crypto market weakness is capital rotating out of crypto and into anticipated IPOs from companies like SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. He dismisses quantum computing concerns and Michael Saylor's activity as meaningful causes, describing Saylor as more of a red herring and a figure people enjoy trolling on Twitter than a genuine force behind Bitcoin price movements.

On Arthur Hayes selling his full positions in HYPE and NEAR, Mumtaz says this is consistent with Hayes's established trading-oriented behavior and that investors should not feel misled. He frames people who buy assets based on Hayes's public recommendations as participants in a player-versus-player trading game where Hayes has a structural edge over them by design. Mumtaz also explicitly tells listeners not to simply follow his own recommendations, saying they should only act if his theses fit their own mental model.

Mumtaz's stated investment approach is to identify clearly undervalued assets with solvable problems and hold them over a minimum two-to-three-year horizon rather than swing trading. He is currently buying Zcash, NEAR, Solana, Hyperliquid, and Bitcoin, noting he bought Solana at eight dollars, Zcash at eighteen dollars, and Hyperliquid at three to four times below current prices just a few months ago.

He identifies privacy as the obvious returning theme in crypto as of mid-2025, calling it the last frontier, and says it is already playing out. He argues Bitcoin's transparency is a liability in the AI age because pseudo-anonymous identities can be linked and a single identity leak recursively exposes an exponential network of connected parties. Privacy also enables fungibility in a monetary asset like Zcash, meaning two coins always share the same history and can be swapped, which Bitcoin cannot guarantee. Mumtaz adds that combining a privacy-focused monetary asset with NEAR enables cross-chain privacy for payments and other on-chain activity, and that quantum proofing is an additional long-term benefit.

Mumtaz sees Solana as by far the most usable platform for founders building neobanks, stablecoin rails, payroll systems, lending markets, and tokenized stock trading, pointing to teams including Pump.fun, Axiom, Phantom, Magic Eden, Jito, Jupiter, and Kamino as examples of projects doing billions in revenue that started on Solana. He views Hyperliquid as fundamentally an exchange-type product and a competitor to Binance and Robinhood rather than to Solana, noting that the Hypercore blockchain hosts little activity while the bulk of work runs through HLP3, core perp markets, and trade.xyz. He says both are undervalued long-term but are different things and should not be conflated.

Mumtaz warns that Crypto Twitter sentiment is contagious and causes investors to compress their time horizons and hold beliefs they would not hold if prices were flat. He says crypto investors tend to react to present price indicators rather than future cash flows the way traditional equity investors do. His broader view is that geopolitical instability, fiat currency instability, and increasing digitization make internet-native stores of value obviously attractive over time, and that there will be multiple stores of value on the internet rather than Bitcoin alone. He also says the Clarity Act is about to pass and he is fairly confident it will, representing a major catalyst for the space.