Ethereum gained nearly 70% in Q3 after two losing quarters, giving Hayes’ year-end call a stronger backdrop than in the first half of 2026. Arthur Hayes, the former CEO of BitMEX, told an interviewer at KBW 2026 in Seoul that he expects to see Ethereum hit $10,000 by the end of the year. That’s more than three times the current price near $2,700, with ETH still trading about 46% below its all-time high.
The $10K Case for Ethereum
In a clip CoinDesk posted on X from the KBW2026 event, Hayes gave a direct answer when asked for his Ethereum price prediction:
“$10,000 by the end of the year.”
He added that he likes ETH because he can put a large amount of money into it without expecting a sudden 75% loss from an exploit. Hayes also addressed why Ethereum has lagged other networks at different points of the cycle, putting it all down to narratives. He pointed to Solana capturing the meme coin narrative and rising quickly, while Ethereum had become slower as competing blockchains took some of the activity. “Obviously, Ethereum pioneered this whole decentralized computer thing and then was the victim of its own success, was slow and whatever,” he said. “And there were other challengers that picked up the slack.”
Still, he argued that Ethereum remains the most secure layer one because it has the largest market capitalization.
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Hayes’s own ETH trades have not always been well-timed. In August, he sold 2,365 ETH at about $1,821, a loss of $241,000, after buying 7,213 ETH at an average of $1,923. And that was not the first time. In July, he sold 5,900 units for nearly $10 million after buying them days earlier for $10.58 million, incurring a loss of more than $600,000. At the time of writing, the cryptocurrency was down 1% over 24 hours and nearly 3% in the last seven days, but was still up more than 11% across two weeks and 9% higher than where it was a month ago.
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The investor’s $10,000 forecast requires ETH to gain roughly 3.7 times its current price, and that gap is notable because the token is still about 46% below its $4,946 all-time high. ETF Flows Keep Ethereum in Focus
Ethereum’s quarterly record looks different from its short-term pullback.
Coinglass data shows it gained just under 70% in the third quarter of 2026 after falling 29.26% in Q1 and 25.28% in Q2. Meanwhile, spot ETF activity added another source of buying, with Ethereum ETFs recording $892 million in net inflows during September, with only one trading day left in the month. However, the streak of daily inflows that started on September 18 ended yesterday with a $2.8 million outflow, while the previous week brought $689.9 million of net inflows. The activity has lifted cumulative inflows to $13.95 billion.
