Arthur Hayes projected Zcash would outperform NEAR despite Zcash's 5x upside versus NEAR's 20x.
• Arthur Hayes said Zcash is the “first place” investors will go in a privacy-focused crypto cycle, even as he projects larger upside for NEAR.
• Hayes suggested sending protected Zcash via NEAR intents into USDT on Tron for "in an anonymous fashion" spending.
BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes laid out the structure of his "privacy thesis" trade, with Zcash (ZEC) and Near (NEAR) as the two assets he sees benefiting from an upcoming reckoning over surveillance in what he termed "this AI, big tech, big government universe that we live in."
On Monday’s The Rollup podcast, Hayes made Zcash the larger position, even though he gave it the smaller multiple, a risk-weighted construction he made explicit on the call.
See what 10M+ investors are talking about. Get the Stocktwits Daily Rip for what retail is watching right now, free to your inbox
"I think Near has a 20x potential, where you know Zcash might have a 5x potential over the next year, something like that," Hayes said, "so you scale the capital that you allocate according to the risk." He added that, "I didn't scale the near position as large as Zcash, but I think NEAR has a 20x potential ... that's why I think these two assets form the core of my privacy thesis on how we at Maelstrom are going to profit from the realization that privacy matters."
Hayes: Zcash As The Obvious First Stop
Hayes saw Zcash as the default for anyone operating within a privacy narrative, citing both its inherent position and its chart. The token is “not a lot off its all-time high, just like everything else in crypto,” he said on the call. "Obviously, Zcash, the first place you're going to go," he said. The cleaner of the two trades is why it carries more of the capital, even though the implied upside is lower, explained Hayes.
At the time of writing, ZEC’s price was trading at $610, down over 7% in the last 24 hours. On Stocktwits, ZCash was one of the top trending tickers. Retail sentiment around ZEC remained in the ‘bullish’ zone, while chatter dipped to ‘high’ from ‘extremely high’ levels over the past day.
The case for NEAR is on execution rails, Hayes explained. Hayes spoke about a flow that he has run himself. "From Shielded Zcash using near intents, now I'm into, you know, USDT on Tron (TRX), and I've sent it to whoever I'm going to send it to in an anonymous fashion, that's huge."