对话Arthur Hayes & NEAR联创：HYPE目标价格150刀，NEAR还有20倍空间？隐私是加密采用的前提。

• 核心观点：Arthur Hayes与Illia Polosukhin认为，加密市场正从投机进入基本面筛选阶段，宏观流动性（由战争与AI军备竞赛驱动）将外溢至Bitcoin及少数具有真实叙事和收入的资产，其中隐私（如Zcash）和链抽象（如NEAR）是下一阶段主线。
• 关键要素：
  1. Arthur Hayes认为，2月28日的战争事件（伊朗开火）是催化，美国、中国和欧洲为战时经济和AI资本开支印钱，流动性最终注入Bitcoin，推动价格上涨。
  2. Arthur Hayes强调，Zcash与Monero代表互联网私人货币需求，当大科技和政府能追踪一切时，基于密码学的金钱隐私将变得极其必要。
  3. Illia Polosukhin指出，隐私是加密大规模采用的前提，如日常支付、薪资、发票需要在链上保密；隐私意图（Intents）允许在Zcash与NEAR上匿名交易，产生正向现金流。
  4. Illia Polosukhin认为，未来AI将成为计算接口，区块链是执行层；NEAR已实现完全稀释，目标是通过收入增长和降低通胀在明年实现通缩。
  5. Arthur Hayes分析，Hyperliquid修对了代币经济模型（无VC销售、收入归还代币持有人），使其在周末成为唯一的价格发现地点，可能从中心化交易所捕获更多交易量。

Compiled & Translated by: Odaily TechFlow

Guests: Arthur Hayes, CIO of Maelstrom; Illia Polosukhin, Co-founder of NEAR

Hosts: Andy; Rob

Podcast Source: The Rollup

Original Title: Arthur Hayes & Illia Polosukhin: Privacy Is The Last 1000x (NEAR & ZEC)

Release Date: May 25, 2026

Key Takeaways

In this episode of The Rollup, Arthur Hayes and Illia Polosukhin discuss macro liquidity, privacy assets, NEAR Intents, AI and on-chain execution layers, and the investment theses for HYPE, NEAR, and ZEC. Arthur believes that war, the AI arms race, and supply chain restructuring are driving the US, China, and Europe to continue supporting their economies through debt and monetary expansion. This liquidity will eventually spill over into Bitcoin and a few crypto assets with genuine narratives and revenue. Illia emphasizes that for blockchain to enter everyday payments, payroll, invoices, and the AI agent economy, privacy is not optional but a prerequisite for mass adoption. Both agree that the crypto market is moving from indiscriminate speculation to a phase of fundamental screening, where privacy, sovereignty, real revenue, and token value capture will be the most important themes of the next cycle.

Key Insights Summary

Macro Liquidity and the AI Arms Race

• "AI has become part of national defense. Drones, AI intelligence, and battlefield decision-making are being integrated into warfare, and governments will print money to win wars."
• "Countries built their food and energy supply on a lot of assumptions, but when critical chokepoints like the Strait of Hormuz become unstable, holding US Treasuries doesn't help them feed their population."
• "These savings held in the form of US Treasuries ultimately need to be sold off to buy real goods and build redundant supply chains and energy corridors."
• "The beauty of Bitcoin is that if the fiat currency unit tomorrow is larger than it is today, its price goes up mathematically. That's pure math. But everything else is very much dependent on narrative."

L1 Blockchain Consolidation and Return to Fundamentals

• "Blockspace is already a very commoditized product, and supply far exceeds demand. The only problem was it was highly non-fungible. NEAR's bet on chain abstraction and intents is to make it fungible. Meaning every chain, every asset, every user can truly connect without thinking about which blockspace they are using."
• "The old logic is fading: we buy an asset because a bunch of retail investors will come in later and buy more. Now retail risk appetite is much lower. People care more about whether they can afford oil and food next year, rather than whether to speculate on a particular asset."
• "The market is shifting focus to which assets actually generate revenue, have real products and users."
• "For an L1 blockchain, fully diluted valuation is very important. Many projects have massive institutional unlock pressure hanging over them, whereas NEAR has a relatively clear upper airspace."

Zcash and Privacy Assets are Underestimated

• "There is nothing more normal than having private money on the internet. Zcash and Monero represent exactly that demand."
• "When Big Tech, governments, and AI can increasingly track everything about our lives, cryptographically proven financial privacy becomes incredibly important."
• "If you hold Zcash but don't hold it in a shielded form, why are you even holding it?"
• "Zcash and NEAR form the core of my privacy investment thesis: in a world of AI, Big Tech, and Big Government coexisting, privacy will be re-recognized by the market, and Maelstrom will profit from it."
• "I think NEAR has 20x potential in the next year, while Zcash might be around 5x."

NEAR Intents, Private Transactions, and Mass Adoption

• "If we want blockchain to truly enter daily life, it cannot happen without privacy. Privacy is actually a prerequisite for crypto mass adoption."
• "If I pay at a coffee shop, I don't want the shop to know how much money I have, nor do I want the whole world to know I just spent money there."
• "Privacy intents aim to solve not just holding a private asset, but enabling transfers, trades, payments, yields, and more operations to be done confidentially across all assets."
• "Payroll, invoices, and many use cases once thought suitable for crypto are actually very difficult to happen in a fully transparent on-chain environment."

AI Agents and On-Chain Execution Layer

• "In the future, we will use computing through AI, and blockchain will become the way everything gets executed."
• "AI also needs privacy. You don't want a lab to harvest your data to train better models and then sell the service back to you through subscription fees."
• "AI is the new computing interface, and intents are the commercial layer behind it."
• "When we started in 2017, our core thesis was that AI would become the way we build software and interact with computing."

Hyperliquid and the Decentralized Finance Dream

• "What's one of the killer apps in crypto? Exchanges. Who are the richest people in crypto? Exchange owners."
• "The most important thing about Hyperliquid isn't that perpetuals or decentralized exchanges are new, but that it got the tokenomics right."
• "No VC sales, only team allocation, and almost all revenue goes back to token holders. This is very rare in a project of this scale."

AI Labor Displacement and Political Risk

• "The impact of AI on labor is highly dependent on where you live. High-income white-collar workers on the US coasts will be protected, while workers in overseas back-office processing centers will lose their jobs immediately, yet few will care."
• "I think the displacement has already begun, but it's just as uneven. The only opportunity is to stay at the forefront. We've always said you need to leverage these technologies to enhance your own abilities, learn faster, and apply faster."
• "What might really stop the music isn't necessarily a big IPO, but politics. People will ask: AI companies are getting incredibly rich using all of humanity's knowledge and interactions, what do we get?"
• "If a massive progressive tax is imposed on AI profits, it's not that these companies can't make money, but would you still be willing to pay 100x revenue for a company that might be taxed 50% on AI? Of course not."

Arthur's Macro Investment Thesis

Host Rob: Arthur, you were cautious for a while, warning everyone to be careful, and then you turned full bull. What happened in between? What changed?

Arthur Hayes: 

Early this year, I wrote an article suggesting that Bitcoin was front-running a credit event caused by AI deflation. My view was that monetary authorities wouldn't print enough money until they saw a financial crisis. The whole argument was that the Nasdaq had been flat since Bitcoin hit its all-time high, but Bitcoin followed the US investment-grade bond ETF (IGB) all the way down from ~$126,000 to just over $60,000. I saw that as a credit event.

Then, on February 28th, the US fired on Iran, igniting the war situation and making the market realize this would become a liquidity-positive event. First, AI is already part of national defense. Drones, AI-driven drones, and AI intelligence systems are participating in war operations on all sides. Governments print money to win wars, and AI is part of war, so both the US and Chinese governments will backstop AI capital expenditure.

We are already seeing bank loans and equity investments flowing into chip manufacturers. At least in the US, companies like Intel are getting support, and similar announcements have been made in quantum computing, like $1 billion towards IBM-related projects. This is all part of the same theme.

On the other side, many countries made a lot of assumptions about their food and energy supply, thinking they could get it through contested waters like the Strait of Hormuz. But now it's becoming difficult, and they will start thinking: why am I holding these US Treasuries? If I need to feed my population or if I'm on an isolated island without aviation fuel, holding US Treasuries doesn't help, especially if my ships can't get through the strait.

So they need to build redundant supply for all critical materials, especially food and energy; they need to invest in new trade relationships; they need to build new pipelines so oil can bypass the Persian Gulf, flowing from places like the UAE. All of this means that savings in the form of US Treasuries need to be sold and converted into real goods.

And the US won't allow this selling to crash the market. It will print money to fill the hole and ensure the market doesn't spiral out of control. So, I believe February 28th was the catalytic event for the market. The US, China, and Europe will all print money to fund a war economy and AI capex, and that money will ultimately flow into Bitcoin, which is why Bitcoin is performing so well.

Heavy Bets on NEAR, ZEC, and HYPE

Arthur Hayes: 

Now we're also seeing a small basket of coins starting to rise. Several that I hold, like NEAR, HYPE, and Zcash, have performed very well since February 28th. That's my general logic.

I didn't trade much in Q1. I did some trading after the war started, but essentially, we had already accumulated these assets at very good prices much earlier. Now the market is beginning to validate why we bought them 6 to 12 months ago.

Host Andy: The whole crypto twitter is discussing whether this trade has become consensus, while we here have already been heavily positioned. We've been watching the macro, reading your pieces on CoinDesk. The market was shaky at first, then suddenly NEAR, HYPE, ZEC started moving up, so it's all coming together in this consolidation phase.

L1 Blockchain Consolidation Has Begun

Host Andy: Illia, I want to hear your thoughts on market consolidation. This isn't your first 'bear market,' we've seen phases like this before, but this time feels especially real because the market itself is evolving.

Institutional allocators have entered, the macro environment is very unstable, forcing people to look at this industry in an 'adapt for the institutional era or get left behind' kind of way. On top of that, the industry overall is getting more mature and sophisticated; you need products, revenue, real users, and a truly sustainable, strong tokenomic pathway.

From a founder's perspective, what's really happened in the market over the last 6 to 8 months? Why the rapid change? And how is NEAR navigating this phase?

Illia Polosukhin: 

I think several threads are converging. First, the L1/L2 thesis. I remember giving a talk back in 2019 saying we'd go through a big explosion first, then a consolidation phase, and eventually only a few projects would survive. We're now approaching that phase.

Blockspace is already a very commoditized product, and supply far exceeds demand. The only problem was it was highly non-fungible. NEAR's bet on chain abstraction and intents is to make it fungible. Meaning every chain, every asset, every user can truly connect without thinking about which specific blockspace they are using.

The second thread is the return to fundamentals. You've been talking about this for over a year, maybe longer. And now it's happening. Whether it's the market or the institutional investors actually analyzing – I don't mean BlackRock and Fidelity, but funds and professional allocators – they are shifting.

The old logic is fading: we buy an asset because a bunch of retail investors will come in later and buy more. Now retail risk appetite is much lower. As Arthur said, people care more about whether they can afford oil and food next year, rather than whether to speculate on a particular asset.

So the market starts asking: Which assets actually generate revenue? Which assets provide a product we are using? If I stake it, do I get new capabilities? For HYPE, staking gives lower fees and more market access. ZEC has a different rationale but provides privacy capability. NEAR is similar; it provides cross-chain, intent, and compute-related capabilities.

These are the new capabilities market participants want. So these assets become focal points, unlike tokens that you can hold but it's hard to articulate what value they represent until the fee switch is flipped. I think these two threads are converging and forming the broader crypto market environment we see.

Why Arthur Likes Zcash

Host Rob: The industry is in a bit of a restructuring state. The Bankless guys seem to have parted ways; David Hoffman sold all his ETH, Merch abandoned Solana to go all-in on Zcash. Arthur, why is Zcash and privacy so important to you? Is this the core ethos of the crypto industry? And what role do NEAR intents play here?

Arthur Hayes: 

The heat around Zcash now is new, but I remember before its mainnet launch in 2016, it was the hottest thing in the market. I was at BitMEX back then, and we listed the first Zcash price derivative. That market was insane; the price on Poloniex went to like $3,000. If you remember that exchange, there was even a price of 7 Bitcoin for 1 Zcash.

It was a wild day. Then the supply inflated rapidly due to block rewards, and the price crashed. But Zcash did have some issues back then. Like the trusted setup; you had to trust Zooko, Eli, and the other participants that they didn't