BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes has once again thrown down the gauntlet at the crypto economy’s inner sanctum: stablecoins. In his new essay, he argues that if a synchronous drop in the prices of gold and Bitcoin occurs in the coming years, the issuer of the world’s largest stablecoin, Tether Limited, will find itself on the brink of bankruptcy. Hayes believes such a situation is capable of destroying the foundation of digital liquidity that supports the entire market.
According to his calculations, Tether holds the majority of its reserves in short-term US Treasury bonds and gold, with a smaller portion in Bitcoin and corporate assets. If both anchors—gold and BTC—collapse, the balance between USDT’s assets and liabilities would be breached, and its dollar parity would be lost. In such a scenario, Hayes writes, “Tether will become the digital Lehman Brothers.”
The community’s reaction is sharp: proponents call Hayes’s forecasts exaggerated, pointing out that the company survived stress tests during the 2022–2023 crises, maintaining parity and liquidity. However, analysts warn that USDT’s market share in stablecoin circulation exceeds 70%, and even a local failure would trigger a domino effect across everything from DeFi protocols to centralized exchanges.
Hayes, however, sees this not as an end, but as a cleansing. He speaks of the need for a “second generation of stablecoins”—decentralized, multi-reserve, and governed by AI audit. If his predictions come true, the market may indeed be reborn, but at the cost of one of the loudest financial collapses of the Web3 era.
Commentary by Vlad Kostiuk, FUTURUM Columnist: “Hayes, as I understand it, is talking less about Tether itself and more about the crypto economy’s dependence on centralized issuers. His ‘prophecy’ sounds like a warning: digital freedom cannot stand on a single balance sheet. What’s interesting is this: if Tether does collapse, it will leave behind not a vacuum, but space for a new architecture of decentralized assets, where stability will be a property of the system, not the result of a promise.”
Source: happycoin.club
