Arthur Hayes, born in America is one of the most prominent personalities in the cryptocurrency world, he started BitMex the crypto exchange company in 2014, just a few years before the industry saw an unprecedented boom and changed many lives forever, Arthur was one of them.
Before Arthur founded BitMex, he worked as the market-maker for Deutsche Bank and Citibank’s Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) businesses. He had quite a successful career in investment banking before he started his own business in the crypto world.
The story of Arthur is no less than a fairy tale born in a middle-class family with a degree in economics from Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He went on to own a business worth of billions of dollars.
So, what led to this transition? In this story, we’ll trace back the steps of Arthur and see how this guy went from having a regular job to own business worth of billions of dollars.
Background in Finance trading.
In 2007 Arthur left his home in Pennsylvania and went to HongKong for his internship at Deutsche Bank, he learned a lot about the financial market and trading there, He came back home next year and signed up for Deutsche Bank’s graduate program for which he had to go to London. Arthur later got the job in the same bank in HongKong, but coincidently the week Hayes joined the bank as a full-time employer the bank suffered a massive loss, and the bank started cutting pays of employees and started downsizing, 22-year-old was only earning half of what he had expected. Arthur stuck around for a while just for the survival reason.
In early 2013, Hayes quit his job at Deutsche Bank and jumped to CitiBank, but things didn’t improve for him, he encountered the same situation that he saw at his previous gig.
Introduction To Bitcoin
Arthur’s new job didn’t last long as Citibank let him go only a few months after he joined, this turned out be a blessing in disguise for him. Hayes stumbled upon an article on the web about bitcoin, and eventually changed his life forever.
New to the crypto world, Hayes started slow and studied the market and its ups and downs even though the bitcoin market was not mainstream yet, and Hayes saw a huge potential there.
Arthur learned a harsh lesson pretty soon when he was not able to cash out his bitcoins from Mt. Gox; the online exchange company had been hacked many times and eventually shut down after it had lost around 450 million dollars.
Arthur noticed an inconsistency that exchanges in mainland China were trading 20 to 40 percent more than on HongKong based exchange Bitfinex; it was also worlds biggest crypto exchange at that time. Hayes used this to his advantage as he started buying bitcoin from Botfinex and selling it Chinese market and keeping the difference. He soon included his friends from previous jobs into this ploy.
Making It Big
Based on the strategy that Arthur and his friends were using to earn a healthy profit, Arthur wanted to take a step further and wanted to build a platform so others could do it too.
In January 2014, Arthur and his friend Ben Delo; an Oxford graduate computer scientist, who specialized in making superfast web applications. Next 11 months, Arthur and Ben designed and tested BitMex, and in October of that year, they launched the platform for trades with high hopes.
Initially, Bitmex struggled a lot and were finding it hard to get the company going; the initial year was tough for Hayes, but he didn’t give up and kept fighting. In October 2015 he made a drastic change that would change the course of BitMex and his life forever, Hayers decided to raise leverage limit from 3x to 100x that did the trick for the company and trades start pouring on the platform.
Unprecedented Growth
As the cryptocurrency industry saw a boom like never before, making bitcoin mainstream, it helped the BitMex enormously. In just two years exchange saw trades worth of US 800 billion dollars and to go with that the company also broke the record of 8 billion dollars in trading volume in a single day.
No exchange saw that amount of growth in that amount of time, which made Arthur Hayer and Ben Dolo billionaires.
Future of BitMex
In an interview to TechAsia.com CEO and founder Arthur Hayes said , “Our goal is to become the largest exchange platform in the world for all assets, not just in crypto. ” this statement depicts the intention of the CEO that he is not just ready to slow down yet. The story of Arthur Hayes is a story of inspiration to many young businessmen.
