Arthur Hayes, co-founder and former CEO of crypto derivatives trading platform BitMEX, is forecasting a massive rally for Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH), asserting that it could run up 1,556% from its current price of $1,875 and hit $31,063. 

What Happened: In a blog post on Thursday, Hayes wrote that the price of Ethereum stands to benefit immensely from artificial intelligence (AI) technology. 

Hayes said he envisions AI applications establishing decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to carry out smart contracts. He added that Ethereum is the most suitable foundation for this scenario, given its extensive adoption as a decentralized virtual machine.

According to Hayes, tokens issued by the AI DAOs will trade on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) primarily built on top of Ethereum.

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“A DEX is naturally suited to support trading any type of equity, debt, utility, participation, etc. token issued by an AI-powered DAO. DAOs will fundraise and issue tokens on-chain. A plethora of new DAO tokens will trade on DEXs,” he wrote. 

“As DAOs capture more economic value than companies, DEXs will trade more than traditional CEXs. I believe the largest driver of on-chain activity will be an explosion of trading volume on DEXs hosted on Ethereum,” Hayes said, adding that Ethereum could reach a five-figure price about half a decade from now.

“Given the market is forward-looking, I want to guestimate the percentage that will be reached 5 years into the future. I am not concerned about getting this number exactly right. I want to be directionally correct and profit as the narrative shifts from 'won’t happen' to 'might happen,'” he explained.  

At the time of writing, ETH was trading at $1,874.33, down by 1% in the last week. 

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