Bored With Banking, This Former Citi Trader Went Full Crypto

In 2013, Arthur Hayes was biding his time as an equities trader for Citigroup Inc. in Hong Kong. His energy—he’s a fitness fanatic and an early riser—was better suited to another era in finance. Six years earlier, as a recent arrival in the former British colony, he’d gotten a taste of what the golden age in banking felt like when he worked in the “snake pit,” the equity derivatives sales desk, at Deutsche Bank AG’s office. The markets were on fire. Traders were taking helicopter trips to the casinos of Macau to celebrate their triumphs. Hayes loved the rush of the trading floor at full throttle along with the life that went with it, including nights at the Dragon-i club. At Citi, a few years after the financial crisis brought a new order to the industry, those madcap days seemed like ancient history. Indeed, he was about to lose his job in one of the periodic culls that big banks carried out after the crash. But Hayes wasn’t too distraught: He’d discovered Bitcoin.

Today, the 32-year-old is the co-founder and chief executive officer of BitMEX, a cryptocurrency exchange that operates out of Hong Kong. Unlike marketplaces that permit investors to buy Bitcoin and other virtual tokens on a cash basis, BitMEX serves up something more exotic—cryptoderivatives. Hayes offers futures contracts that let investors make leveraged bets of up to 100 to 1 on the direction of 11 digital currencies. As the value of Bitcoin multiplied 10 times in the 12 months ended Jan. 31, investors flooded BitMEX with orders worth more than $200 billion. Hayes’s firm raked in $83 million in revenue in 2017 and about $21 million during the first 30 days of January alone, according to data on the company’s website. It bills itself as the most liquid Bitcoin futures marketplace in the world.