Arthur Hayes dumps HYPE and NEAR before the AI IPOs

Arthur Hayes sold his entire Hyperliquid and Near positions on June 4-5, 2026, posting "time to take profit" and pointing to a wave of giant IPOs he expects to drain capital out of crypto. On-chain trackers including Onchain Lens tied the HYPE leg to 247,334 tokens worth about $18 million, per blockchain.news; the size of the NEAR sale was not disclosed. HYPE retreated from an all-time high near $75 toward $67, and NEAR fell about 17%, with NEAR futures open interest dropping over 21% to roughly $543 million, according to Blockonomi. Hayes, the BitMEX co-founder who now runs the Maelstrom fund, framed the move on macro timing, not on anything broken in either protocol.

Read it for what it is. One well-known trader closing two positions is a positioning call rather than a judgment on the chains underneath them. The on-chain prints are real and the open-interest drop is real, yet the reason Hayes gave lives entirely outside crypto. Every figure below is stamped to June 5, 2026, and none of it is advice to buy or sell.

What did Hayes sell?

Two positions, both in full. Hayes closed his entire Hyperliquid (HYPE) holding and his entire Near Protocol (NEAR) holding over June 4 and 5, 2026, per AMBCrypto. On-chain analytics traced the HYPE side to a single batch of 247,334 tokens, worth about $18 million at the time, a figure blockchain.news attributed to Onchain Lens. The NEAR leg was confirmed as a complete exit, but the dollar size of that sale has not been disclosed.

The selling did not stop there. The same week, Hayes also closed his whole Zcash (ZEC) position after a critical bug surfaced in the network's Orchard shielded pool, telling followers "the Holy Trinity is dead," per FXStreet. whale.day covered that vulnerability separately in "A critical Zcash bug could have minted fake ZEC." For HYPE and NEAR the trigger was different: there was no bug, no exploit, no protocol failure. He took profit and moved on.

He is not stepping out of crypto entirely. Hayes is keeping his Worldcoin (WLD) position, which FXStreet reports he treats as a high-beta proxy for the upcoming SpaceX IPO. That makes this a rebalance with a clear tilt rather than a full exit. He is cutting tokens he sees as exposed to a liquidity squeeze and holding the one he thinks rides the same IPO wave the other way.

Why he says he sold

The reason Hayes gave is a bet about where money goes next, and it is not a crypto story. On June 4 he posted on X: "I think highs in markets will happen between now and September. Time to take profit." His thesis, per AMBCrypto, is that a run of huge initial public offerings is about to soak up risk capital. SpaceX is the headline name, alongside AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI. When deals that size come to market, they pull cash from across the risk spectrum, and Hayes expects crypto to be one of the places it leaves.

Two more concerns sit on top of that. Blockonomi reports he cited rising energy costs and broader macro timing as reasons to lighten up now rather than later. Put together, the case is less "these tokens are bad" and more "the tide that lifted them is about to go out." That is a liquidity argument. It says nothing specific about Hyperliquid's order books or Near's network.

The case looks different next to the run-up. HYPE was still up about 166% year-to-date when Hayes sold, per Blockonomi, so this is profit-taking after a large move rather than a panic exit at a loss. Not everyone shared his enthusiasm at the top. Markus Thielen of 10xResearch had warned that near the $75 top HYPE looked stretched at roughly 25 times its anticipated fee income, a valuation read that flagged the token as rich well before this week. Hayes selling near an all-time high fits that caution more than it contradicts it.

What the on-chain data shows

The prints are real, and they line up across the data. On the HYPE side, the move off the highs was sharp: The Coin Republic logged a 24-hour slide from about $75.50 to $66.70, while Coinpedia put the drop closer to 17%, with the token retesting support around $58 to $60. The spread between those readings is mostly a question of which window you measure, but the direction is not in dispute. HYPE came off a record high as the Hayes wallet movements hit the tape and reignited fears of broader whale profit-taking.

NEAR tells a cleaner story in the derivatives data. The token fell about 17%, and the more telling number sits underneath it: NEAR futures open interest dropped over 21% to roughly $543 million, per Blockonomi. Open interest is the total value of futures contracts still live in the market. When price falls and open interest falls with it, traders are closing positions rather than opening new shorts. That reads as an unwind by people who were already long, not a fresh pile of bets against the token. The distinction matters, because a drop driven by exits behaves differently from one driven by new sellers piling in.

There is also a feedback element worth naming. Coinpedia noted that the wallet movements linked to Hayes were themselves the spark that revived whale-profit-taking fears across the board. One large, public exit can move sentiment faster than its own dollar size would suggest, because other holders watch a name like Hayes and adjust. Part of this week's move is the sale. Part of it is everyone else reacting to the sale.

What it does and doesn't signal

Start with what it does not mean. One trader closing two positions is a positioning decision rather than a referendum on either protocol. Hayes did not cite a flaw in Hyperliquid or a problem with Near. He cited macro timing and a coming IPO wave, which are bets about the whole risk market rather than calls on these two chains. Anyone reading his exit as "HYPE is broken" or "NEAR is finished" is stretching a liquidity call into a fundamentals call it was never making.

The franchise underneath HYPE is also a lot bigger than one wallet. whale.day has covered Hyperliquid's rise, including that the venue now clears about half of on-chain perpetuals by chain on a given day, and that the first US spot Hyperliquid ETF, Bitwise's BHYP, is live. Blockonomi notes Hyperliquid captured a record share of global perp volume, around 6.63%, in May. An $18 million exit is a real sale, but it is one position change set against a venue doing billions in daily volume and pulling in its own wave of US ETFs. The token can fall on the sale while the business it tracks keeps growing.

What the data does signal is worth holding onto, though. The open-interest collapse in NEAR is a genuine read on trader behavior: leverage came off, positions closed, and the market got lighter, not heavier with new shorts. And the speed of the HYPE move shows how much sentiment now keys off a handful of public wallets. Those are facts about positioning and reflexivity. They are not a forecast, and a token coming off an all-time high after a 166% year says nothing certain about where it goes next.

What we're watching

Whether the IPO thesis actually plays out the way Hayes is betting. If SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI come to market and pull capital out of risk assets through September, his timing looks early and right. If those deals slip or land without draining crypto, the liquidity case weakens and this reads as a single trader's call that did not generalize. That is the variable that decides whether this week was the start of something or one wallet's exit.

On-chain, the cleaner tell is whether other large holders follow or whether the selling stays concentrated in the Hayes wallets. NEAR's open interest rebuilding would say the unwind was a one-off; staying depressed would say leverage is staying away. For HYPE, the question is whether the token's drop tracks anything in Hyperliquid's actual volume and ETF flows, or stays purely a price move while the venue's share of on-chain perps holds. The sale is settled. What it meant is not.