Arthur Hayes

Arthur Hayes graduated from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. His critical formative background was built on the extremely aggressive institutional trading floors of Deutsche Bank and Citigroup in Hong Kong, where he traded traditional equity derivatives. This intense institutional banking background gave him the exact financial blueprint required to bring Wall Street-style complex derivatives and massive leverage into the unregulated cryptocurrency ecosystem.

Arthur Hayes is an American entrepreneur, former banking trader, and the highly controversial co-founder and former CEO of BitMEX, one of the world's first and largest cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges. Hayes launched BitMEX in 2014 alongside Ben Delo and Samuel Reed, targeting the massive, untapped market for highly leveraged retail crypto trading. Under his aggressive leadership, BitMEX popularized the 'perpetual swap,' allowing traders to leverage their Bitcoin up to 100x without an expiration date. This innovation turned BitMEX into a multi-billion dollar juggernaut and made Hayes one of crypto's first billionaires. However, his refusal to implement strict anti-money laundering controls led to a massive federal indictment by the U.S. DOJ, resulting in his resignation, a guilty plea for violating the Bank Secrecy Act, and a highly publicized probation sentence.