18th February 2026 > > Arthur Hayes & staking ETFs.
- 10 minutes ago
- 3 min read
tl;dr
Arthur Hayes is always worth a read. The launch of ETH staking ETFs can only be a good thing.
Market Snap
Market Wrap
The dreaded sideways chop could be with us for many months. Long-term investors will be accumulating by taking coins off the weaker hands who lose patience and/or interest, only to re-enter again at higher levels later this year, early next year.
Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Arthur Hayes
I thoroughly recommend your monthly task list includes reading Arthur Hayes’ commentary:
Arthur addresses the confusion about why BTC has underperformed all other asset classes of late. His explanation is somewhat worrying for all of us:
“Bitcoin is the global fiat liquidity fire alarm. It is the most responsive freely traded asset to the fiat credit supply. The divergence recently between Bitcoin and the Nasdaq 100 Index (“Nasdaq”) sounds the alarm that a massive credit destruction event is nigh.”
The trigger for this credit destruction event is rooted in the rapid deployment of A.I. taking out many white-collar professional jobs, leading to wholesale defaults on property mortgages and auto loans. That should sound familiar – it’s the GFC all over again. This time round though the TBTF (“too big to fail”) financial institutions have a legislative/regulatory out which involves – yep, you guessed it – dirty fiat money printing because, as Arthur correctly highlights:
“Those within the Fed truly believe they are independent and above politics, even though the historical record is very clear that the Fed always delivers the monetary policy the president desires, eventually.”
I would disagree with the use of the adverb “truly” and replace it with the qualifier “pretend to …” but in all other respects Arthur is of course spot-on with that observation.
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Arthur’s conclusion will be familiar to most. The dirty fiat printing will benefit cryptos, as it always does. He identifies his two top altcoin picks, ZEC and HYPE. The CCC is not an advisory service, but I can say this. Investors in privacy coins, of which ZEC is a leading example, can probably expect much greater scrutiny from the taxman for obvious reasons. The tax code, particularly in the UK, is so overly-complex that with the best will in the world, it is virtually impossible not to make mistakes. The taxman can be brutal unless of course you are married to a leading politician (David Mills – remember him?) in which case a minor wrist slap is all that is coming your way.
As for HYPE, well it has long been a core component of the CC Treasury portfolio, for what it’s worth.
Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – ETH
BlackRock has launched its ETH staking ETF.
Labouring under the misunderstanding that this means that holders of the ETF will be receiving interest on that investment akin to bank interest on fiat deposits, this product will be more attractive to retail and institutional investors than without the staking element. It is true that staking rewards minus an 18% fee will accrue within the ETF, but those staking rewards accumulate from an inflation of the issuance of ETH which does not in itself increase the market cap of ETH, it merely suppresses the price of ETH. Still, if there are some who are too dumb to understand such basic economics, who am I to burst their bubble of ignorance.
The counterargument is that interest on bank deposits is compensation for the reduced purchasing power of fiat against commodities in the form of inflation created by government policy. That would make some sense except that this is expressly rejected by society’s acceptance that interest payments, dividend yields, capital gains, etc. are all subject to some form of tax. I would be the first to welcome the removal of all tax on so-called passive income, if only to reduce the cost of capital, thus increasing productivity. That is not going to happen.
Whatever, the new staking ETFs which will be applied to all PoS coins will make those cryptos more acceptable as investments for the TradFi world, and that can only be a good thing.