Hayes, blaming bitcoin’s slump on a liquidity crunch engineered by the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury, said bitcoin could surge back to over $200,000 before the end of the year if dollar liquidity conditions change, branding bitcoin “the free-market weathervane of global fiat liquidity.”

The cryptocurrency market extended a more than a month-long retreat in Thursday trading, just as stocks surrendered the gains they had logged earlier in the day.