Arthur Hayes Dumping His Crypto Amid Market Volatility: Should You Too?

If the pulse of the crypto market can be measured by the whale flows, then Arthur Hayes’ latest moves are enough to rattle even hardened traders.

As crypto prices continued to bleed, the former BitMEX CEO executed a rapid-fire sell-off on November 16, tracked in real time by on-chain analytics firm Lookonchain.

He offloaded 260 ETH (~$820,000), 2.4 million ENA (~$651,000), 640,000 LDO (~$480,000), 1,630 AAVE (~$289,000), and 28,670 UNI (~209,000).

These weren’t isolated crypto market trades. Just hours before, Hayes appears to have sold 520 ETH (~$1.6 million), 2.62 million ENA (~$733,000), and 132,730 ETHFI (~$124,000).

His total dump ran into multi-million-dollar territory. This made the kind of statement that only a crypto market veteran’s wallet can.

Hayes is hardly alone in his cautious pivot. The broader altcoin market is in full capitulation mode.

Glassnode data now shows that only about 5% of the supply of major altcoins is in profit, with crypto prices sinking further into the gutter.

Bitcoin, meanwhile, stands as the last line of relative market stability, with its profitability only recently beginning to decline and its dominance in portfolio construction reaching levels not seen in years.

Crypto Market: Hayes, Carter, and the Forgotten Child

Nic Carter, Castle Island Ventures partner and market commentator, provides a harsh dose of perspective.

He pulls no punches, describing a crypto sector quietly sinking into irrelevance. Its negative drift, he argues, is not caused by dramatic blowups but by a pure lack of energy and attention.

AI and the Magnificent Seven have stolen the narrative, leaving crypto prices on the sidelines.

It has been forgotten by retail investors whose money and focus have migrated to quantum tech, datacenters, and rare earth stocks.

This isn’t about panic so much as exhaustion: a momentum crisis, not a morality play. For Carter, the old comfort zones of crypto market “four-year cycles” and fevered alt seasons have run their course. Now the game has changed. Survival depends on utility, not just rhetoric.

He’s blunt: if projects want to make money, they’ll have to earn it the hard way, by delivering value that commands attention again. It’s just another cold lesson in market gravity. As Carter states:

“2025 is unironically ‘worse’ because in 2022 bad things were happening but crypto was the center of the action and the star of the show. You could ascribe negative price action to catalysts that you knew we were going to work through. Now crypto is the forgotten child.”

Those words could not be better timed. Unlike 2022, when the crypto market could lay its woes squarely at the feet of overleveraged exchanges, regulatory drama, and headline-grabbing hackathons, 2025’s downturn stems from something more existential.

Crypto Market Must Deliver or Die: Utility Over Hype

The crisis of utility raised sharply by Carter and echoed by the increasingly grim Glassnode stats is the defining feature of the moment.

Crypto’s ability to “deliver” is no longer theoretical; it’s essential. Altcoin profit ratios highlight a historic divergence from Bitcoin.

It makes the old rally seasons and 4-year halving predictions look like relics. If you’re holding dust in the bottom 95% of altcoins, there’s little solace in cyclical storytelling.

Hayes isn’t dumping without reason. Price action, macro uncertainty, and regulation have all created an environment where only fundamentals matter.

The message is clear: flashy promises and new token launches have faded, leaving utility, revenue, and actual demand as the only metrics worth watching.

Should You Sell Your Crypto?

Hayes’s public maneuvering and the market numbness it signals are salt in the wound, but they also clarify the new rules.

If you’re chasing yield in 2025, look past the influencers and toward the old lessons in utility and demand.

Crypto may be the “forgotten child” for now, but it’s not dead. Mean-reversion may take time, but until genuine demand returns through actual utility, these dumps and capitulations will set the rhythm.

The crypto market may have been recast, but anyone reading the tape knows: there are seasons when being forgotten is just another setup for the next act.