Who is Arthur Hayes: analyst, owner of BitMEX, entrepreneur? How often do his predictions come true? Can I trust him?

Arthur Hayes is a popular entrepreneur in the cryptocurrency world (former director of the BitMEX exchange), an analyst, and just a frequently quoted person in the media.

In this article, we will answer the following questions:

1. Who is Arthur Hayes?
2. Biography
3. His career
4. Why did BitMEX become popular?
5. Analysis and predictions by Arthur Hayes
6. And most importantly, can you trust him? How often does he give correct predictions? (Spoiler alert – he admits that he rarely gives accurate predictions, no more than 25%)

Who is Arthur Hayes? Quick reply

Arthur Hayes is a very popular personality in the crypto world, legendary and controversial.

Who is he?

1. Co-founder and former CEO of BitMEX exchange (2014) 
2. Created "perpetual swap", the most popular crypto derivative
3. Former derivatives trader at Deutsche Bank and Citigroup (until 2013) 
4. Graduate of the Wharton School (Economics and Finance) 
5. One of the youngest African-American Crypto Billionaires

Important facts:

• In 2022, he received a suspended sentence and a fine of $10 million for violating the American Bank Secrecy Act (failed to control and prevent money laundering on BitMEX) 
• In March 2026, he was personally pardoned by Trump. 
• Manages the office Maelstrom invests in crypto projects and writes various predictions and opinions about the market 
• Joined the Board of Directors of the Stem Cell Company (Biohacking)

His main philosophy is:

"Fiat currencies are depreciating, so Bitcoin will grow no matter what."

Even though he rarely makes accurate forecasts (as he personally stated: "25% is the ceiling for correctly predicted forecasts"), his long-term ideas have a huge impact on the industry.

Biography

Arthur was born in 1985 in Detroit, Michigan, into a family of two full-time employees of General Motors.

Middle-class parents (as Arthur says, they lived not poor, but also not rich), who tried their best to survive in the unstable economic situation of the city.

From the very beginning, Arthur stood out among his peers. His mother, Barbara, saw it. She put in a lot of effort to get him into the Nichols School, New York, a private preparatory academy attended by the children of lawyers, CEOs, and other elites.

Although it was all new to him, Arthur didn't flinch. He started playing on the tennis team, ran cross for the national team, and graduated second in his class in 2004.

Even at school, he dreamed of the best higher education for himself. The Ivy League and the Wharton School of Business are a testing ground for the American elite. She taught him the rules of global finance.

But Arthur wasn't just learning how to "play the business game," he was looking for a way to change it.

Educational institution	Period	Comment
Nichols School (Buffalo, New York)	Class of 2004	Private preparatory school. He graduated second in his class, played tennis and ran. The family moved to Buffalo specifically so that he could study there.
HKUST Business School (Hong Kong)	2006	He studied at the Business school of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. It was part of his educational journey before entering Wharton.
Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania (Ivy League)	2008	Bachelor of Science (BS) in Economics and Finance. Graduated in 2008

Career

After graduation, he moved to Hong Kong. Arthur joined Deutsche Bank, trading exchange-traded investment funds (ETFs). He worked there from 2008 to 2011.

His position is a trader in equity derivatives.

He began to lead a luxurious life. Designer clothes, custom watches, expensive parties. He had a job, a great view from the window, status and respect.

Then in 2011 he joined Citigroup.

In May 2013, Citigroup announced a massive cost-cutting program, laying off 11,000 employees worldwide.

Arthur Hayes was fired as part of a planned staff reduction. There was no scandal, violations or disciplinary dismissal.

Arthur didn't get depressed. He was single, had no children, and had savings. In the same year, he discovered Bitcoin.

At that time, for the whole world, Bitcoin was "gray", "basement" and few people knew about it (plus hackers began using it already in those years).

For Arthur, it was a completely new, pure discovery - a system without intermediaries, without banks.

It reminded him of the markets he traded, but in a simplified way, faster, freer.

Date	Career
2008	Moving to Hong Kong, starting a career at Deutsche Bank
2008-2011	Working at Deutsche Bank as an ETF and derivatives trader
2011	Transfer to Citigroup for the position of Delta One trader in Hong Kong
2013 (May)	Citigroup announces reduction of 11,000 employees worldwide
2013 (June)	Hayes gets cut, gets a "pink leaf"
2013 (summer)	Finds articles about Bitcoin on Zero Hedge, begins to study cryptocurrency
2014	Founding of BitMEX with Ben Delo and Samuel Reed

Arthur saw an opportunity to essentially redo the way financial services work. Therefore, he decided that he could just fly into this market and try to create something of his own.

At that moment, he thought:

"I think we're on the verge of something really special."

Arthur Hayes and Bitcoin

In 2013, he slowly started trading Bitcoin.

Buy cheaper, sell more expensive (that was his motto).

But later that year, he discovered something interesting. Bitcoin was trading more expensive in China than in Hong Kong.

Arthur realized that this was an opportunity to make money. He bought coins cheaper in Hong Kong, transferred them to an exchange in China and sold them, simply pocketing the difference.

In China, he could sell Bitcoin at a 40% premium over the purchase price on the international market outside of China.

So he took a bus to Shenzhen and opened a bank account in China, opened accounts on exchanges all over China, and withdrew his money from Mt. Gox, earning 30%.

It was very easy money, and he thought:

"It's a great business. Let me just handle the arbitration between China and the rest of the world." And he started doing it for several months.

But then the madness began.

To withdraw this money, Arthur had to cross the border with a backpack full of cash. He did it every time.

As he says, these were legally declared amounts, but still he was scared.

As Arthur recalls, it was like a scene from the TV series "Narco", but only the legal, bank version. Arthur didn't want this kind of life, crossing borders with bags of money. He was watching the infrastructure, the weak links.

In October 2013, the crypto world cracked. Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange at that time, collapsed.

Hackers stole almost half a billion dollars, and 24,000 traders lost everything.

Arthur was not affected by this hack. He exited the market just in time. But he remembered the lesson forever.

Exchanges were not just risky, but even turned out to be very dangerous. It was then that Arthur began to think and work towards a reliable crypto exchange.

He knew how to create financial instruments. He understood Bitcoin. And now he knew what the traders wanted.: speed, access, and security.

He teamed up with two co-founders.: Ben Delo (a brilliant programmer from Oxford), and Sam Reed (an American engineer with a penchant for backend systems).

They started creating something new, something that no one had seen before in the world of cryptocurrencies.

In 2014, they launched the BitMEX exchange!

How does Arthur Hayes see BitMEX? Why did he make her popular?

BitMEX means –Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange". "Mercantile" is just a buzzword for a place where you can hedge certain risks.

The founders of the exchange simply allow people to hedge and speculate on the future value of Bitcoin, like at a sporting event.

BitMEX was not just a place to trade Bitcoin. It was a place to "play" with it, to accumulate it.

The exchange offered one very important thing that no other exchange dared to offer in those days: x100x leverage.

Initially, BitMEX was not a big crypto exchange at all. There were days when there were no deals. No one bought or sold Bitcoins.

The commissions barely covered the costs. In fact, co-founder Sam paid the bills with his personal credit card.

While Arthur and Ben stayed in Hong Kong, Sam returned to the United States. Business at that time was very modest and bad.

For a while, it seemed to them that BitMEX might never take off. But then everything changed. As we wrote earlier, BitMEX offered more than just cryptotrading. He offered something that most platforms didn't dare: x100x leverage.

That's what Arthur said in the 2025 interview:

"We went through this when we launched in November 2014, and probably for the next nine months we had long periods with zero transactions. Literally no one has been making transactions on our platform for days on end."

"We financed our project ourselves. It was a "bootstrap" (self-financing)."

"We moved from triple leverage, which was common on many exchanges at the time, to 100x leverage in a few months. We changed our margin model, and this really marked the beginning of our success in the fall of 2015. And we became known as an exchange with x100x leverage, and that's how we got our customer base, which only grew!"

Yes, the customer base did grow by leaps and bounds, but growth does not last forever:

Year	The position of the exchange in terms of trading volume
2014 - 2015 (launch)	The volumes were very small (sometimes zero), she was not even in the top 10
2016 - 2017	BitMEX becomes the world's No. 1 Bitcoin futures trader. During the bull rally of 2017, it was the main trading platform, significantly ahead of OKEx and Huobi.
2018 - 2019 (peak of dominance)	Takes the 1st place. During this period, BitMEX was almost synonymous with "crypto derivatives." The daily trading volume often exceeded $10 billion, which was a colossal figure for that time.
2020	Drop by 2-4 places. The emergence of Binance Futures and the growth of Bybit began to "bite off" market share.  A lawsuit from the CFTC in October 2020 had a negative impact, causing a massive outflow of funds.
2021 - 2022	Falling outside the top 5. The exchange has gained a foothold in the area of 7th-10th place. Binance, OKX and Bybit have captured the market, offering a wider selection of altcoins and a better infrastructure.
2023 - present	It is approximately in the top 20 global derivatives exchanges. Its share in the total global volume is less than 1-2%.

BitMEX was the first exchange where a person with only $10,000 could make a million dollar deal.

It was a financial adrenaline rush, and people couldn't get enough. Meme culture exploded.

Screenshots of monetary losses flooded Twitter (X). Entire communities formed around monitoring mass liquidations in real time.

It was finance that turned into a spectacular sport.

Arthur enjoyed the chaos. He once wrote that trading without leverage is like driving a Lamborghini in first gear.

 You know it's safer this way, but that's not why you bought it.

Thanks to this attitude, BitMEX took off. Arthur was not a typical CEO. He joked, posted obscenities on his blog, and mocked regulators.

He proudly called BitMEX an "underground club," and his followers loved him for it. He made it clear that they were not here to be friends with regulators. They are here to make money.

Between 2018 and 2020, BitMEX became the most powerful cryptocurrency exchange in the world in terms of trading volume. On some days, it handled more trades than the New York Stock Exchange.

She became famous for inventing perpetual swap, an innovative financial instrument that allowed traders to bet on cryptocurrency prices without actually owning an asset. This has become the gold standard for leverage trading.

BitMEX was registered in the Seychelles, away from American regulators. The exchange blocked American traders, prohibiting access to its platform from US IP addresses.

But the reality was more confusing. Thousands of Americans gained access to the platform through workarounds, and US regulators took notice of this.

Arthur came from traditional finance, but now he was playing a new game where supervision was blurred and the consequences seemed far away. BitMEX was untouchable, as Arthur thought.

In 2018, they rented the 45th floor of the Chung Kong Centre, the most expensive address in Hong Kong.

They installed a huge shark tank in the lobby. They had real sharks. It was a show of strength.:

"We are not just a part of the financial system. We're at the top of the food chain."

Arthur loved the attention. At a crypto conference in Manhattan, he appeared in an orange Lamborghini, posting a photo on Twitter (X) with a grin. It was never about modesty. It was about being loud.

But not everyone was impressed. In July 2019, Arthur got into a dispute with the famous anti-cryptocurrency economist Nouriel Roubini, also known as "Dr. Death."

During the live debate, called the "Taipei Fight," sparks flew from the very beginning.

Dr. Death didn't hold back. He accused BitMEX that people are losing money every second. The only ones who make a profit, he said, are Arthur and his team.

The Doctor remembered how Arthur had said:

"Try to sue me in the Seychelles..." Of course, this is impossible. So I can do anything.

When Hayes was later asked about registering in the Seychelles, he gave one of the most infamous answers of his career.:

"It's just more expensive to bribe American and European regulators," he said. In the Seychelles, he says, all you need is a couple of dollars or coconuts from a tree.

It was an audacious and reckless statement. For fans, Arthur was a pioneer who beat Wall Street at its own game.

He wasn't playing by their rules, and he didn't care who was watching him. But to critics and regulators, BitMEX was no longer just an upstart.

He has become a risk to the entire financial system. Rumors of money laundering, insider trading, and getting ahead of customers began to spread. Arthur shrugged it all off, but the pressure was building.

Arrest of Arthur Hayes

At 6 a.m. on October 1, 2020, co-founder Arthur and Sam were arrested by the FBI near their mansion in Boston.

A few hours later, prosecutors in New York announced what the crypto world had long feared: BitMEX was under attack.

Arthur, Sam and Ben were accused of failing to implement anti-money laundering and customer identification (KYC) systems on their platform.

The charges were technical: up to 5 years in prison for each count.

Officials quoted Arthur's infamous joke that it's cheaper to bribe regulators in the Seychelles - a coconut from a tree or a couple of bucks is enough.

The FBI made it clear that the price of Arthur's crimes would not be paid with tropical fruits. The crypto world has shuddered.

There were no third-party charges, just a lack of controls, but it turned out to be enough for Arthur and his team to go to prison.

The CFTC complaint focuses on the idea that Hayes and his other co-founders, through the BitMEX group of companies, operated an unregistered contract market and swap execution platform.

And also that they acted as futures commodity traders (FCM), and that they basically did all this without proper registration and licensing from the CFTC.

And one of the key aspects of the complaint is that they attracted and served US customers, which made them subject to US regulation, but they did not comply with American law.

The accusation shocked even experienced lawyers. Prosecutors almost never prosecute individual managers for non-compliance with regulatory requirements.

Big banks have been violating the same rules for years. HSBC laundered almost a billion dollars for the Sinaloa cartel and conducted business with countries under sanctions such as Iran and Sudan. They paid a fine of $1.9 billion. No one went to jail.

Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse - the list goes on. The CEOs of the big banks wrote the checks and moved on.

Arthur didn't have that option. The government did not buy BitMEX's claim that Americans did not use the platform.

Of course, BitMEX blocked American IP addresses, but thousands of Americans used the bypass to gain access.

Prosecutors said the platform's money laundering and identification checks were a facade.

When the FBI came, Sam was caught off guard, but Arthur... Arthur disappeared-escaped.

He was on the run for 6 months. He slipped out of Hong Kong and disappeared. Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia. No one knew exactly where he was.

The rumors spread like wildfire. Some swore they had seen him on a beach in the Caribbean. Others claimed to be in Jakarta.

He became a ghost. No permanent address, no disposable phones, no one-way tickets.

As Arthur himself said in an interview, at that moment every knock on the door scared him. The man who once taunted regulators, who once called BitMEX an "underground club," was now on the run, never telling where he was and never staying in one place for long.

However, on April 6, 2021, Arthur surrendered to the US authorities in Hawaii. Six months after the charges were filed, the fugitive surrendered.

When Arthur landed at Honolulu International Airport, federal agents were waiting for him on the tarmac. Arthur, who had been a fugitive for 6 months, did not resist. He quietly surrendered, then handed over his passport and left with an escort.

In the following weeks, Arthur appeared in court and pleaded guilty to one count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act.

He agreed to pay a fine of $10 million. The judge spared him from prison, sentencing him instead to 6 months of house arrest and 2 years of probation.

For Arthur, the verdict marked a sharp transition from the loudest showman of cryptocurrencies to a man forced to remain silent.

Arthur's co-founders also pleaded guilty, paid heavy fines, and served probation.

Arthur had already resigned as CEO of BitMEX shortly after his indictment, and the exchange itself had dropped in trading volumes due to the courts.

The platform, which once handled more trades than the New York Stock Exchange, was no longer a crypto trading hub.

Competitors such as Binance and FTX (closed) have taken the lead. Even the famous sharks in the BitMEX office have disappeared.

Arthur was serving house arrest in a luxury condo in Miami Beach. His conditions were heavenly, so don't think he's some poor, unhappy person.

A terrace with views in all directions, a wide balcony overlooking the bay and yachts cutting through the water.

Sometimes he was allowed to go out for dinner or meet with members of the Miami crypto scene.

For some, his imprisonment even seemed like a luxury, and even enviable. But for Arthur, it was still a cage.

When his house arrest ended in January 2022, Arthur did not linger. He immediately left the United States and flew back to Asia, where he could move freely again.

In the end, Arthur reinvented himself. He became something of a crypto philosopher. He wrote extensive eccentric posts with titles like "Zuck Me Harder," "Apocalypse Ponzi," and "Double Happiness."

His blogs were manifestos, reflections on the future of money, markets and power.

Trump and Arthur Hayes

President Trump has pardoned three co-founders of the Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange, known as BitMEX. They pleaded guilty to a number of charges related to money laundering and failure to control the exchange.

Three pardoned:

• Arthur Hayes
• Benjamin Case
• Samuel Reed

Then, in March 2025, President Donald Trump granted a full pardon to Arthur and his BitMEX co-founders.

The pardon did not eliminate all the damage, but it erased the legal stain. Arthur has returned to the spotlight, speaking at conferences and on podcasts, boldly predicting that Bitcoin will reach $1 million by 2028.

Who does he work for now?

Arthur Hayes is now the Chief Investment Officer (CIO) of the Maelstrom family office. He also writes posts and forecasts in his blogs about the future of the entire crypto industry.

Post	Company	Main directions
Chief Investment Officer (CIO)	Maelstrom Fund	Family office investment management, including cryptocurrencies, venture capital investments, and strategic investments in crypto companies
Co-founder	BitMEX	He formally retired from operational management in 2020, but remains the co-founder and public face of the exchange.

Maelstrom is a family office (private investment vehicle) by Arthur Hayes.

1. Invests in public and private crypto companies around the world 
2. It focuses on projects with real cash flow (cash-flowing businesses), and not just on speculative tokens. 
3. Prepares a launch (private equity fund) for the acquisition and optimization of crypto companies 
4. The investment size is from $40 to $70 million.

Forecasts by Arthur Hayes

We have collected all the forecasts of Arthur Hayes and made them into a convenient table.

Hayes' Chronological forecasts:

Forecast date	Coin	Forecast content	Result
November 2023	Macro-liquidity / Bitcoin	"Bad Gurl": Yellen's Treasury Bills Issue will Draw Liquidity out of RRP, the market will grow	That's right – RRP decreased, BTC increased by 77%
March 2024	Bitcoin	"Yellen or Talkin": expiration of BTFP will cause a crisis, opened a short position	Incorrect – loss, the market did not react
April 2024	Bitcoin	"Heatwave": the tax season in the USA will delay liquidity, the price will fall	Correct – correction during the specified period
May 2024	Bitcoin	"Mayday": BTC will be in the range of 60,000$-70000 until August	Incorrect – in August, the price fell below $50,000
June–July 2024	Macro market	The Bank of Japan will not raise the rate	Incorrect – the rate was raised on July 31.
August 2024	Macro-liquidity	The impact of bond issuance and expectations of a Fed rate cut	Incorrect – admitted a mistake in the timing
September 2024	Bitcoin	"Boom Times Delayed": Fed Rate Cut will Cause Risky Assets to Fall	Incorrect – the market grew after the rate cut
September 6, 2024	Bitcoin	Short-term: "it will fall below 50,000 $", opened a short	Incorrect – minimum of 52,500$
January 2025	Весь рынок	The peak of the crypto market in March 2025	Incorrect – the peak occurred on January 20, 2025
March 2025	Bitcoin	First, $110,000, then a correction to $76,500	Incorrect – the order is broken, the April fall is earlier
2025 (repeatedly)	Bitcoin	$200,000-$250000 by the end of 2025	It didn't come true
2025	Zcash (ZEC)	$10,000	Incorrect (the price is significantly lower)
End of 2025	Bitcoin	$200,000 by March 2026 due to "hidden QE"	It didn't come true (BTC ~70,000$)
March 2026	Bitcoin	Confirmation of the target of $250,000 by the end of 2026, but with a caveat: wait for QE	Awaiting confirmation
March 2026	Bitcoin	500,000-750000$ by the end of 2026 (with aggressive QE)	Awaiting confirmation
March 2026	Bitcoin	$3.4 million by 2028	Awaiting confirmation
March 2026	Ethereum (ETH)	$10,000 by the end of 2026-beginning of 2027	Awaiting confirmation
March 2026	Hyperliquid (HYPE)	$150 by August 2026	Awaiting confirmation
Долгосрочный	Bitcoin	$1 million until 2030	Awaiting confirmation

In total, we get:

• Total completed forecasts (with a known outcome): 13
• Correct forecasts: 2
• Incorrect predictions : 11

Percentage of incorrect forecasts ~ 84.6%

This is even less than the 25% that Arthur himself talks about.

Yes, the price of such forecasts is essentially zero!

Should we trust Arthur Hayes' forecasts?

As we have already said, the percentage of unfulfilled forecasts is ~ 84.6%!

Of course, it's up to you to trust Arthur or not!

And to be honest, the forecasts for Bitcoin are not only different, but also very cosmic. Then 1,000,000$, then 3,800$ until 2028-2030!?

But it seems to us that this analyst is not the most reliable. Although he is more honest, unlike Tom Lee, who gives forecasts by the dozens, and very often does not guess, and also changes his forecasts on the go (before the forecast deadline).

Also, Tom Lee, unlike Arthur, does not believe that he rarely guesses and does not talk about the real picture of his predictions (to be honest, Tom Lee is even worse)!

Given the "brusqueness, audacity" in Arthur's past, his impulsiveness, he is not the best analyst.

Creating a crypto exchange, being an employee, and trading on a Stock exchange is not the same as trading on a cryptocurrency exchange, since cryptocurrency trading is much more dangerous and much more volatile – it is not predictable!

Therefore, making predictions on cryptocurrency (and often guessing) is not something that everyone can do! And to be honest, almost all analysts have a very small percentage of guessing!

Conclusion

Arthur Hayes is not an unambiguous figure. He honestly says that he guesses no more than 25%. However, the reality is much lower!

He is a popular figure due to his outrageous image, impudence and other such behavior while working as CEO on the BitMEX exchange.

As we have already said, it's up to you to trust him or not.

But in fact, the arrest revealed his true identity!

Disclaimer: All information provided in this article should not be taken as financial advice. The article was created for educational purposes. Never invest more than you can lose, and seek advice only from your personal financial advisor.