US policymakers could lift cryptocurrency prices by printing more money to support AI and finance government debt, according to Arthur Hayes, chief investment officer at Maelstrom fund.
AI companies need trillions of dollars to finance data centers even as the prices of their services fall, Hayes said at a fireside chat at CONNECT by Cointelegraph: Seoul Edition, on Tuesday during Korea Blockchain Week.
“They’ve not really given themselves a lot of options other than print money and make it less bad,” he said.
Hayes also discussed a possible shift in China from what he called an “austerity lite” policy to substantial monetary stimulus, which he said could revive demand for scarce assets.
Related: AI credit bubble could fuel Bitcoin ‘crack-up boom’ past $1M: Hayes
In Europe, he said he was monitoring financial stress in France, including credit-default swaps tied to BNP Paribas and French government bond spreads.
I think the money printing will essentially happen at some point, but that’s sort of a slow motion train wreck happening underneath the surface.”
Cointelegraph’s CONNECT event in Seoul featured panels on topics ranging from traditional finance’s shift onchain to stablecoins and corporate crypto treasuries.
Wall Street’s move onchain leaves room for middlemen
Banks and asset managers bring an existing customer base to blockchain markets, giving them an advantage over companies that must attract investors from scratch, according to Catrina Wang, general partner at Portal Ventures.
“Whoever owns the customer relationship owns the economics,” Wang said, drawing on tech analyst Ben Thompson’s aggregation theory.
For financial firms, serving existing clients is only part of the opportunity. R3 co-founder Todd McDonald said public blockchains also offer access to customers outside institutions’ own networks.
R3 built its business around private financial networks using its Corda platform, before announcing a collaboration in May 2025 to connect institutions and their assets to Solana’s public chain.
You need to really go to where the customers are and where they will be in the future.”
Once investors reach those markets, they still need to decide where to put their money and how much risk to take.
Justin Kugel, executive vice president of growth at World Liberty Financial, said those decisions are creating work for intermediaries, despite crypto’s original promise to eliminate middlemen.
“Maybe there’s a reason why there are so many middlemen in TradFi,” Kugel said.
Many users do not want to manage their assets themselves or assess every investment and prefer the sense of protection offered by centralized exchanges, Kugel said.
Stablecoins move money, but who supplies the yield?
Franklin Templeton has no plans to issue its own stablecoin and wants its tokenized money market funds to provide investment income alongside payment tokens, according to Chetan Karkhanis, senior vice president of digital asset client engagement at the firm.
“Let us be the yield layer,” Karkhanis said.
Franklin Templeton’s fund subscriptions and redemptions generally still require fiat currency, Karkhanis said. Some conversions involving stablecoins are already available, but he said those options need to become more widely available across the industry.
Franklin Templeton announced a partnership with MoonPay in June that allows eligible institutional investors to move between supported stablecoins and its tokenized money market funds through onchain transactions.
Haonan Li, co-founder and CEO of stablecoin foreign-exchange platform Codex, said demand for stablecoin payments is growing along trade routes connecting Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa with Asia, where buyers send money to pay for manufactured goods moving in the opposite direction.
“The manufactured goods flow from east to west and funds flow from west to east,” Li said.
Related: SEC allows Franklin Templeton funds to invest in onchain money fund
Crypto treasuries face a liquidity test
Companies considering crypto treasury strategies need cash they can commit over a longer period without disrupting day-to-day operations, said Ilya Podoynitsyn, co-founder and CEO of FinHarbor, a partner of CONNECT.
“If you don’t have that excess liquidity for doing that, you need to think very carefully before entering the market,” Podoynitsyn said.
He warned against copying another company’s strategy without accounting for differences in balance sheets, liquidity requirements and risk tolerance. Even experienced finance teams may lack expertise in onchain liquidity and transaction approvals, he said.
The panel also considered whether a listed treasury company with spare cash should buy more crypto or repurchase shares trading below net asset value.
Michael Camarda, chief development officer at Ethereum treasury company SharpLink, said buying back shares and purchasing additional Ether were two ways to increase ETH holdings per share.
Using cash to repurchase shares spreads existing Ether holdings across fewer shares, while buying more Ether increases the company’s holdings.
SharpLink’s institutional investors focused on ETH holdings per share, making buybacks better suited to them, while retail investors were drawn to announcements of large Ether purchases, Camarda said.
“They love headlines. They love numbers,” Camarda said of retail investors.
SharpLink had bought both Ether and its own shares to appeal to the two groups of investors, Camarda said.
Magazine: Bitcoin treasury firms can outperform BTC… but is the risk worth taking?