WLD plunges as Hayes dumps token a day after saying he would keep holding it

Arthur Hayes, co-founder of crypto exchange BitMEX and chief investment officer of family office Maelstrom, said on Friday the firm had sold its entire stake in Worldcoin, the digital token tied to Sam Altman's eye-scanning identity project, a day after he said it would keep holding the token. WLD dropped about 10% in the past 24 hours, part of a broader crypto market decline, with a notable leg down after Hayes announced his exit. Crypto investment opinions are changing in less than 24 hours these days, which is a polite way of saying the thesis expired before the next news cycle.

"Dumped $WLD. I'm out. See y'all at the clerb," he wrote, alongside a chart of SpaceX stock sliding. "This chart is going in the wrong direction. Dumped $WLD. I'm out. See y'all at the clerb," he added in the embedded post. A chunk of the WLD move came after the tweet landed.

A day earlier Hayes had said Maelstrom was keeping Worldcoin. The firm had just sold all of its Zcash, a privacy coin, blaming a flaw in its Orchard privacy pool that he said undercut the reason to own it, and Hayes said the firm would rebuy it higher if he turned out to be wrong. Worldcoin it would keep, he said then, while waiting for 'Lord Elon' — referring to Elon Musk — to lift the price. The connection ran through artificial intelligence.

SpaceX has increasingly pitched its listing as an AI and connectivity play rather than just a rocket company, so a strong debut promised to lift the broader AI and tech trade. Worldcoin, an AI-themed token that trades around the clock, was the fund's fast way to ride that, a liquid stand-in for SpaceX shares that retail cannot easily buy and that are not yet trading.

SpaceX trades under the ticker SPCX but does not list on the Nasdaq until June 12, so the price Hayes reacted to is a pre-listing quote from private markets for a company that is not yet public. Worldcoin is also Altman's project, not Musk's, and the two men run rival artificial intelligence firms — a detail that does not seem to have slowed the trade thesis, only accelerated its exit.

Pre-listings for SpaceX stock are down more than 50% in the past few days on Hyperliquid, data shows, giving less of a reason for AI bettors to be holding the proxy. Hayes is a frequent, market-moving voice in crypto, which is the polite explanation for why one tweet moved a chart that was already sliding.

Worldcoin was bucking a market-wide downturn with a 70% rise over the past month, a gain that has trimmed down to 45% over the past week on Saturday's price drop. The token is down roughly 20% from its recent local high as the proxy trade unwinds faster than a pre-listing private market ticker in a risk-off week.