A Familiar Sequence of Hype and Exit
ZachXBT leveled the charge in a series of posts on June 6, arguing that Hayes had repeatedly published bullish calls, drawn buyers in, and then sold quietly. The term “exit liquidity” describes later buyers whose purchases let a larger holder offload a position without crashing the price. He noted:
“Promote WLD position you claim to be super bullish on multiple times with targets significantly higher than current price. Exit WLD position shortly after.”
In a separate message, he asked how much exit liquidity had been created from Hayes’ followers “over the past couple days,” linking the WLD episode to earlier moves in NEAR, the HYPE token and zcash. Each call, he suggested, followed the same arc of promotion and rapid exit rather than a one-off trade gone wrong.
Hayes had set up his WLD position only days earlier, telling followers on June 4 that he intended to hold WLD through a high-profile listing, framing it as a wager on artificial intelligence (AI) listing momentum. He then reversed course, posting “Dumped WLD. I’m out” alongside a chart and disclosing the sale after it was completed.
Worldcoin, the iris-scanning identity project co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, issues the WLD token and is at the center of the aforementioned dispute.
Four Exits In About Two Weeks
The WLD exit was the latest in a fast sequence as Hayes dumped his entire ZEC bag (the ticker for the privacy coin zcash) yesterday after a vulnerability in the project’s Orchard shielded pool was disclosed. The flaw sent the token down nearly 50% before it finally rebounded a bit, gaining about 5% of its value back.
Earlier, a Hayes-linked wallet sold the HYPE token near $54 after he had publicly called for $150, then paid a higher price to climb back in. Taken together, ZachXBT noted that the trades were part of a repeatable playbook rather than a string of isolated calls.
When a trader with Hayes’ following posts a bullish thesis, retail buyers often enter within minutes. However, supporters counter that Hayes routinely lays out his reasoning in long essays and that disclosing trades, even after the fact, is more transparency than most anonymous traders offer. Promoting a token one holds is not by itself illegal, and neither Hayes’ disclosures nor ZachXBT’s posts amount to proof of wrongdoing.
That said, privacy coins such as zcash and identity plays such as Worldcoin are especially sensitive to sentiment swings, because their floats and liquidity are thinner than those of bitcoin or ether.
