Arthur Hayes is the co-founder and CEO of BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange and trading platform.
Early life and education
Arthur Hayes was born in 1985 and raised in a middle-class household in Buffalo, New York. Hayes’ father worked in an auto assembly line, and his mother was a purchasing manager at General Motors. Hayes considered a career in real estate but decided to pursue finance instead. Hayes attended the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with a BS in Economics and Finance from the Wharton School of Business 2008.
Career
After graduating, Hayes moved to Hong Kong to start his investment banking career. Hayes spent three years at Deutsche Bank as an ETF market, where he led the role out of the X-trackers ETF product in Asia. Hayes was responsible for market making over 50 ETFs on the Singapore and Hong Kong stock exchanges. In the three years Hayes spent there, AUM grew from $0 to $1 billion.
In 2011, Hayes left Deutsche Bank and started working as an ETF and Delta One Trade for Citibank in Hong Kong. Hayes was responsible for managing Citibank’s ETF trading books. Hayes also engaged in equity index arbitrage mainly focused on Chinese equities. Hayes also traded Index Swaps, Index Forwards, and Custom Baskets.
In the spring of 2013, Hayes read the white paper by Satoshi Nakamoto and believed that Bitcoin was the future’s financial technology. After working at Citibank in 2013, Hayes began trading Bitcoin spot and derivatives. The arbitrage between the two was very financially rewarding, and Hayes used his profit to begin arbitraging between different spot exchanges.
From this experience, Hayes believed that there was a demand for a Bitcoin derivative exchange that was created after existing exchanges where fiat currency derivatives are traded. Eventually, Hayes also established himself as a broker who helped people buy and sell Bitcoins.
BitMEX
In January 2014, Hayes began to set up BitMEX, otherwise known as the Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange, as a platform for traders to trade Bitcoin derivatives. Hayes developed BitMEX with two partners: Ben Delo, a University of Oxford-educated computer scientist from the U.K. who developed high-frequency trading systems for JP Morgan Chase, and Samuel Reed, a U.S. programmer who specialized in designing fast web applications. Arthur Hayes is BitMEX’s CEO, while Samuel Reed as the CTO. BitMEX aims to be the best and most-advanced cryptocurrency derivatives exchange in the world.
After 11 months of development, they began BitMEX for traders to use. The same time that BitMEX signed a contract announcing a partnership with payment processing specialist Vogogo Inc. On July 15, 2015, BitMEX raised $25,000 in a funding round led by G and M Capone Trust, a research and technical data analysis provider, serving small groups of private investors in the futures industry.
On July 18, 2015, BitMEX raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round funding led by SOSV, a global venture capital firm providing multi-stage investment to develop and scale our founders’ big ideas for positive change, with another investor Chinaccelerator.
BitMEXhas $83 million in estimated revenue annually. BitMEX competes with Bitfinex, Kraken, and Bitstamp. BitMEX invested in Blockfolio on October 10, 2018.
In January 2019, BitMEX announced research revealing that the combined cost of all the tokens that the analyzed projects had allowed to their own teams went down to nearly $5 billion, from the original $24.2 billion at the point of each individual token’s issuance. In March 2019, Hayes foretold that Bitcoin (BTC) will get back to the $10,000 price point this year. BitMEX said that the 2018 crypto bear exchanges estimated for 54 percent of the losses, along with $1.5 billion worth of transfers to external addresses and other aspects that caused projects’ holdings down even further.
On May 20, 2019, BitMEX raised a total of $200 million in a single venture fund, BitMEX Insurance Fund. In June 2019, BitMEX published it has financed in Philippine Digital Asset Exchange (PDAX). The cryptocurrency exchange gives access to financial services that might be otherwise not available to those living in the Philippines. The exchange is licensed by the Philippines central bank Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). The investment will enable PDAX to build a marketplace for both digital assets; it is planning to offer to trade in tokenized commodities, debt securities, and real estate equities.
BitMEX and the mobile apps distributed under BMEX are entirely owned and administered by HDR Global Trading Limited, a Republic of Seychelles incorporated entity or its relevant authorized affiliates. BitMEXhas since expanded to be the most successful derivatives exchange for retail investors.