Arthur Hayes Sells $22.28M of ETH, ENA and UNI, Moves to Sidelines
Arthur Hayes says he dumped Maelstrom's entire directional book, about $22.28M led by 6,400 ETH, citing macro and geopolitical risk. Scammers fired 26 address poisoning transfers at his wallet as the sales went out.
"I dumped it all." That is Arthur Hayes on X, saying he has closed Maelstrom's entire directional book. Onchain trackers counted about $22 million in tokens leaving his wallets on Saturday morning. The BitMEX co-founder says he will sit on the sidelines until he sees an all clear signal.
His reasoning was macro and geopolitics, delivered blunt:
"I think we gotta go down to go up. It looks a bit dicey out there in macro and geopolitical land."
Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX
Trackers tallied $22.28M in sales, led by 6,400 ETH worth about $15.2M. Lookonchain's breakdown of the rest: 14 million ENA ($2.76M), 323,000 UNI ($2.24M), 1.89 million ETHFI ($1.23M), plus smaller amounts of AERO, PENDLE and ZAMA.
The ETH went out in tranches of 1,600, 3,200 and 1,600. The first 1,600 ETH hit a fresh deposit address that forwarded it to a Binance hot wallet two minutes later. Onchain Lens mapped the other routes: ENA to Binance, UNI and ZAMA to Wintermute, ETHFI to FalconX. Wintermute sent Hayes 2.426 million USDC (about $2.43M) back, likely proceeds from the UNI and ZAMA sales.
Address poisoning rode along
Scammers tried to piggyback on the flow. Blockscout logged 26 fake transfers labeled ETH between 05:58 and 07:32 UTC, using look-alike Cyrillic and Greek letters. They copied his real amounts and used destination addresses matching the first and last four characters of his actual counterparties. That is address poisoning: the attacker hopes a victim later copy-pastes a spoofed address from their transaction history.
Nothing suggests Hayes was fooled. Every real transfer reached its intended address.
He is not the only target. A 2014 Ethereum ICO buyer who moved 1,000 ETH toward Kraken on Oct. 23 also received zero-value look-alike transfers within an hour. Scam Sniffer data shows the trick can be costly: one victim lost $12.2 million in January, and months earlier a trader lost $50 million in USDT the same way.
The trade, and the reversal
The tape is soft. ETH trades near $2,370, down about 1% on the day, with ENA and UNI each down roughly 5%. BTC sits near $80,600 after its first daily close below the 50-day moving average since August. Six of the seven tokens Hayes sold are down over the past month.
The pivot is sharp. On October 15, Hayes urged traders to go long BTC and ETH and trade an eventual bailout. In an Oct. 16 interview, he said high-FDV tokens can't even pump on Binance anymore.
Whether he made money is unclear. Lookonchain valued the ETH at about $2,375 per coin, but his cost basis is not public. ENA looks cleaner: he bought 9.05 million ENA in early August for about $773,000, roughly $0.085 per token, and Lookonchain valued the ENA sale near $0.20, though that price is unconfirmed.
This is not his first macro-driven exit; see our earlier coverage of his exits from HYPE and NEAR over macro concerns. This time, by his own account, the whole directional book is flat. The next test is the Fed's October 28 decision. For traders, a well-known macro voice sitting out the market into that print is a signal worth tracking, not a verdict on direction.
