“We’re at the end of the beginning,” Hayes said in a new Coinage interview while delivering the formal eulogy for the usual four-year cycle. “The meat of the bull market is going to happen in mid 2026 to mid 2027.”

But Hayes' confidence isn’t built on traditional indicators. In fact, Hayes made it clear he doesn’t pay attention to them at all. “I don’t look at CPI numbers, unemployment numbers, any of that stuff,” he said. “All this talk about inflation and CPI and labor market productivity is all just gobbledygook that these academics can put in their paper to justify whatever the Fed was going to do anyways.”

What matters instead, in his view, is the structural reality of how the U.S. government funds itself — and how that forces the Fed’s hand.

“If the Treasury has to issue more and more debt, then the Fed has to find a way to make sure that the banking system and the financial system can allow that debt to be purchased in an affordable manner,” the former Citibank derivatives trader explained. “If no private sector individual or company or foreign country wants to buy this debt at a price that the U.S. government believes they can afford, then the Fed has to step up and buy it and that’s it.”

In Hayes’ eyes, the so-called Reserve Management Program recently announced by the Fed is just another version of quantitative easing — only with better branding.

“You can’t call it QE. There will never be another QE,” he said. “Even if you do the exact same thing, they’ll call it something different because the voter associates QE with money printing. Money printing means inflation."

And while headlines around inflation or unemployment may dominate political discourse, Hayes believes they’re largely irrelevant to the actual direction of markets. “The ultimate goal of every central bank and every finance ministry is: How do I fund the government and the politicians and their spending?”

And while the Fed's new stance and a new Fed chair replacing Powell in May next year might be a boost for Bitcoin, Hayes is not sure there will be much relief for altcoins. Hayes was blunt in assessing the damage still hanging over the market since the October liquidations.

“Most of these things are zeros. They were zeros before October 10th. They’re zeros after October 10th,” he said. “It’s just a bunch of liquid funds passing a hot potato between each other.” And with redemption requests stacking up for funds that underperformed during the downturn, Hayes thinks there’s still more pain ahead.

“I don’t think we’re through that yet,” he said. “A lot of funds who own this stuff… gotta sell it because their investors say, ‘I want my money back.’” But that doesn’t mean he’s bearish on the cycle. “It’s still a bull market in my mind,” he said. “The four-year cycle? I think that’s dead. We’re in an extended cycle.”

At Maelstrom, that means waiting for a better entry point — and focusing on what comes next.

“The new narrative in my mind is privacy,” Hayes said, highlighting Zcash as one of the best-performing privacy bets in recent months. “What is going to be the one or two projects that are going to stand out in the way that they apply this technology… and create something potentially valuable that’s going to, you know, return our fund like Ethena did for the last two years?”

Still, Hayes cautioned that even the best crypto projects won’t be immune to market structure. “Do I think their tokens are going to ratchet up quickly? Probably not,” he said.

That’s why his long-term view comes back to macro — not crypto sentiment or legislation. “I don’t care about regulations. They don’t matter,” Hayes said. “Bitcoin went from zero to however many trillions with adversarial state support from around the world.”

And that liquidity, in his view, is already on its way. Even if the Fed doesn't want to call it QE.

Monad co-founder Eunice Giarta explains what went into the big mainnet launch

By: Zack Guzman

November 25, 2025

Share this article

Watch on Youtube

10

10

0:00 / 10:33

1x

Despite a difficult market backdrop, Monad managed to attract $269M from more than 85,000 participants in the blockchain's launch Monday.

As Monad co-founder Eunice Giarta explained to Coinage in a new interview, things are about to get even more interesting for MON token holders.

“We’ve been working on Monad for over three and a half years… I can’t tell you how many times we were like, man, that’s just around the corner. Just around the corner. Maybe the next corner. But here we are," she said. “The mission has never changed. From the very beginning, we knew that EVM was the play, and performance at its core was also the play.”

What launched today is a new Layer-1 blockchain promising to be faster, more efficient, and fully EVM-compatible. But Giarta insists it’s not just another “faster tech” project. “I do think that we need faster tech, but it can't just be faster tech. It has to be everything else,” she explained. “It’s a combination of speed, decentralization, reliability, security — all of that bundled into one.”

That “bundle” includes a completely rebuilt infrastructure. “The entire tech stack was built entirely from scratch. So new technology, new execution layer, new consensus layer, new database even — but still adheres to the requirements of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. So, [the] best of both worlds.”

The debut marks a rare feat: a new Layer-1 launching directly with public access and a strategy aimed at long-term decentralization. “We were really excited about the proposition of being able to have Monad be distributed in the hands of so many,” Giarta said of the project’s public sale on Coinbase. Despite the shakiness in the market, Monad still managed to post a oversubscribed launch.

About 7.5% of the total MON token supply was offered via Coinbase, and as co-founder Keone Hon explained the goal was distribution over price appreciation. "We chose Coinbase (and their allocation algorithm, which is democratic and transparent) because of their unique ability to reach an audience that we think is important to engage and re-activate," Hon told The Block. The world is a big place and it's so important to break out of the bubble."

But the goals for Monad to do things differently don't stop there. For Giarta, the goal now becomes building on the launch momentum.

“Monad on day one, minute one is just v0. It’s just the start,” Giarta said. “All of the work that has been done up until now has just been like the pre-race. And we’re running a marathon. We just crossed the start line.”

The next leg of that marathon includes onboarding new types of use cases and shipping new technical features. “There’s a lot of improvements that we’re looking forward to… thinking about privatized transactions, for example. And… one of the more recent technical additions was the just-in-time compiler.”

From day one, Giarta said it was critical to make sure users could immediately do something meaningful on-chain. “Sometimes you only have one impression to get it right. One of the things we were hopeful to ensure was that all of the things that you can do on-chain now, on any other chain, you'd be able to do on day one as well.”

Still, her biggest goal for 2026 is growing beyond just crypto-native audiences. “We keep talking about onboarding the next million, next billion, whatever it may be… I would like for us to see that transition point actually happen,” she said. “Where I think that might be is within more institutional adoption… some combination of RWAs or other types of on-chain mechanisms. That’s where I see the future going.”

And looking back on the hardest parts of building through multiple market cycles, Giarta emphasized the focus that kept the team going. “We’ve been able to just focus on the tech and tackling the hard problem… doing things differently and doing things well.”

Now that Monad is live, she says the real work begins. But for Giarta, the proudest part is sticking to the original vision. “We’re bridging that gap of performance, technology, and usability for blockchain,” she said. “So the design space there is now open. And I’m really excited to see what’s to come.

More specifically, some of Wall Street's most powerful billionaires have begun embracing crypto after historically rejecting it, or outright calling it a scam or a fraud. Two weeks ago, BlackRock's Larry Fink was promoting Bitcoin at a conference in Saudi Arabia, where he was flanked by JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who had flipped his stance to admit crypto, stablecoins, and blockchains were all very real.

"Crypto is real," Dimon said, "blockchains, stablecoins ... smart contracts are real all that stuff is real, it will be used by all of us."

Next to them both, was billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who spoke on the same stage about the threat of New York electing Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani.

"Having a socialist mayor, I think would be catastrophic for New York," Ackman said. "He's correct ... that affordability is the number one issue for many people in New York City. He's correct on the issue but he's incorrect on the solution."

For anyone watching Bitcoin cling to support around $100,000, the mood might feel like déjà vu. But Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan insists: that sideways price action isn’t a sign of weakness — it’s a gift.

My own view is that Bitcoin tripping along sideways here around $100K is a gift,” Hougan told Coinage in a new interview. “I think it's an opportunity to stack SATs. I think it's an opportunity to build positions.”

That optimistic stance might sound out of step with the current tone on crypto Twitter, where sentiment has plunged into what Hougan calls “extreme levels of bearishness, extreme levels of even depression.” But among institutions, it’s a different story. “There's relative excitement and no panic at all,” Hougan noted. “They're still buying.”

If institutions are calmly accumulating while retail capitulates, what might flip the script for everyone else? Certainly news of an end to the longest government shutdown in history seems like a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel. As part of that, Hougan believes a sentiment bottom is near.

“I think we will cycle through this bearish market,” he said, and that eventually, “the institutional demand and end-of-year window dressing will push Bitcoin back to new all time highs.” While he doesn’t think Bitcoin will hit his early year prediction of crossing $200,000 this year, he does expect “we’re going to bottom out from a sentiment perspective and accelerate into the end of the year.”

Much of that depends on whether the market finally clears out the debris from October’s unexpected deleveraging. Hougan sees two main paths: “Either a major body surfaces so people can get that out of their system, or the passage of time — let’s say four weeks with no major hacks or no major other issues — will help us sort of clear that out of the system.”

If crypto can avoid further landmines, Hougan sees a few upside catalysts ready to step in: “Progress on the Clarity Act in Congress or rising expectations that we're going to have progress on the Clarity Act is an upside surprise that's coming to the market.” Rate cut expectations, he adds, could also be bullish tailwinds — especially if markets start to anticipate looser Fed policy under a second Trump administration.

“I think the Trump administration wants lower rates,” Hougan said. “They've politicized the Fed. They want to install a new Fed chair that's going to be more dovish than Powell is.”

That pivot to lower rates could set the stage for risk assets like Bitcoin to rip, especially as sentiment rebounds. “The market aggressively punishes bad news and ignores good news. And that's a classic bear market,” Hougan explained. “Eventually we'll get to the point where the market is sort of numb to bad news… and maybe we start to run away from this $100K number.”

In the meantime, institutions aren’t waiting around. Bitwise recently launched the first spot Solana ETF with staking enabled, and Hougan says the demand has been overwhelming: “It’s the fastest growing new ETF launch of 2025 across all ETFs… [and] number one by trading volume.”

That early success is a clear sign, Hougan argues, that institutional appetite for high-quality crypto assets is still “pent up and needs to be released.” And he believes that more regulation will unlock the next generation of winners. “I wouldn't be surprised to see 2 or 3 more new assets emerge in 2026 reflective of this new environment,” he said, predicting they’ll “bubble up into the top 20 or 30” and likely get their own ETPs.

As for the four-year cycle? Hougan’s over it. “I think the four year cycle is dead,” he said bluntly. With halving events now less significant and fewer blow-up risks like Mt. Gox or FTX, he believes Bitcoin is transitioning into a more “institutional phase" where fundamentals, not hype, drive the narrative. “We're in for a slower churn upwards,” he said. “That's like its own 5- to 10-year cycle.”