The LSE Directory / Trading influencers
Arthur Hayes is an American derivatives trader and entrepreneur who co-founded the cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX in 2014, where he designed the perpetual swap contract and its funding-rate mechanism, the payment system between longs and shorts that keeps a never-expiring futures contract tethered to spot price and that underlies nearly all crypto funding-rate arbitrage and basis-trade strategies used today. A former equity derivatives trader at Deutsche Bank and Citigroup with an economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Hayes built a large public following for long-form essays, published via his newsletter and X account, that explain crypto derivatives mechanics, basis trades, and macro liquidity cycles in trader-friendly terms, making him one of the most widely read voices teaching how funding rates and perpetual swaps actually work. He is now co-founder and chief investment officer of the family investment office Maelstrom, and has written publicly about his own crypto holdings and trading views, though any returns or net-worth figures tied to him are self-reported claims rather than audited facts. Hayes pleaded guilty in 2022 to a Bank Secrecy Act violation over BitMEX's anti-money-laundering controls and received a pardon from President Trump in 2025.
