Hayes has ample reason to feel Schadenfreude. At its height in 2019, BitMEX was worth billions, and it had a controlling market share in crypto-derivatives trading, moving $1 trillion worth. But that was the same year Bankman-Fried founded FTX, and his platform and others rapidly ate away at Hayes’s business. Eventually, FTX came to dominate BitMEX by orders of magnitude, as did Binance, which is now the undisputed leader.
The way Hayes seemed to skate his way through the most difficult challenges at Penn astonished some of his Black peers as much as it inspired them. “You don’t get to where you’re at as a Black professional not being confident in yourself, but he’s on another level,” says Anderson, who became president of the Black Wharton Undergraduate Association. “In Arthur’s world, there aren’t really obstacles. You just do the thing.
Hayes tested the limits of the city’s buttoned-up finance culture. “He always was kind of a larger-than-life type of guy, even as an intern, always kind of pushing the envelope,” says one of his roommates from that time, Andrew Goodwin. “You should see his yoga pants.” At work on one At one point in 2013, because of the strict controls China places on the movement of money, the price of bitcoin on the mainland soared relative to what it cost in Hong Kong. Hayes started buying bitcoin at the lower price, then selling it on a Chinese exchange, withdrawing the profits into mainland bank accounts he’d opened with a fake address. Then he’d take a bus from Hong Kong across the border to Shenzhen, withdraw the money, and return with it stuffed in his backpack.
The founders also decided to more aggressively market their platform to amateurs. As Hayes once put it in a presentation about, “There are people who offer similar types of products but are focusing on degenerate gamblers, a.k.a.
In May 2018, Hayes traveled to New York for the Consensus crypto conference and stole the show before even going inside: BitMEX parked three Lamborghinis outside the midtown venue. Hayes called it “a guerrilla-marketing tactic,” acknowledging it might have seemed “a little bit gauche.” The supercars were rented from a man who wouldn’t even let the BitMEX crew drive them, and they racked up something like $1,000 in parking tickets.
The circus act caught up to Hayes in the summer of 2019, when he took the stage for what was billed as the “” — a debate with Roubini, the noted economist and vocal critic of crypto. Roubini wore a suit, while Hayes dressed in skinny jeans with gaping holes at the knees. It took less than ten minutes for him to self-sabotage. Asked by the moderator why BitMEX was located in the Seychelles, Hayes said that companies need not “bow down and take an ass-fucking from the U.S.