AI/Tech Equity Selloff Seen as a Strong Tailwind for Crypto, Analysts Say

The cryptocurrency industry is still finding its footing in the aftermath of the hack on Binance, the largest security incident in the digital assets' history. Even so, several prominent analysts remain bullish on the market's direction, pointing to an unexpected force they believe is propping up crypto: the selloff in U.S. technology and artificial intelligence equities.

The view places crypto and U.S. tech stocks on opposite ends of a potential capital rotation, a framing that has long featured in digital-asset market commentary, where analysts frequently debate how money moves between the two risk assets when conditions turn.

Arthur Cheong, CEO and CIO of Defiance Capital, an Asia-focused investment firm dedicated to digital assets, said he expects weakness in tech stocks to support crypto in the months ahead.

"Despite the Binance hack, I expect the recent US tech/AI equities underperformance to be a strong tailwind for crypto performance over the next 6 months," Cheong stated on social media.

Nasdaq Enters Correction Territory

As Cheong noted, tech and AI markets suffered a harsh selloff on Friday. The Nasdaq 100 fell 3.4% during the afternoon session, with companies like Intel dropping more than 29% during the day, outpacing the index's decline by a wide margin. The pullback drove the Nasdaq into correction territory, meaning the index had dropped by more than 10% from its last historic high.

Cheong believes that if the AI bubble bursts, some of this liquidity will exit the tech ecosystem and land back on crypto, as investors familiar with the digital assets market reposition and bet on the sector reaching higher relevance in the future. For readers tracking that argument, the observable markers are whether the Nasdaq's correction deepens or reverses, and whether future crypto inflows end up corroborating the rotation thesis.

"Many crypto-natives that off-ramped previously will on-ramp again to reallocate money into the asset class that we are much more familiar with instead of being exit liquidity for all these erratic fast money in tradfi world," he concluded.

Hayes Expects Government Money Printing to Favor Crypto

Cheong is not the only one who believes an eventual decline in the U.S. tech/AI sector might precede an exodus of liquidity toward digital assets. Arthur Hayes, co-founder of the now-defunct BitMEX exchange and CIO of Maelstrom, an investment fund focused on crypto opportunities, believes AI companies will become too big to fail, with the U.S. government stepping in to save the sector in the only way it knows: printing trillions out of nowhere. The "too big to fail" framing echoes the vocabulary of the 2008 financial crisis, when U.S. authorities intervened to rescue financial institutions they deemed systemically important.

"The point is they're going to keep printing money instead of letting the chips fall where they may," Hayes said in an interview with Bitcoin News on the sidelines of the 2026 Korea Blockchain Week.

The thesis is that this will drive additional liquidity toward crypto markets, which will absorb the excess liquidity generated by such a response. For now, both analysts' outlooks rest on conditions that remain unresolved — the direction of the equity correction, the trajectory of the AI sector, and any eventual policy response — making them positions to be tested by events rather than outcomes already underway.