Self-Made with a Multi-Billion Dollar Trading Platform, BitMEX(ft. Arthur Hayes, CEO of BitMEX)

In a candid conversation, Co-Founder and CEO of BitMEX Arthur Hayes defends why BitMEX is set up in Seychelles, the promise of blockchain for everyone, why ICOs are not a problem, and why his industry is not a “scam.”

This self-proclaimed “economist-history nerd” and former Deutsche Bank banker, who joined then lost his job at Citi as head trader of Asian ETFs, says that BitMEX as a crypto exchange actually protects investors by limiting the loss to only the amount put into the market. This is different, he says, than the traditional regulated system where investors can lose their entire net worth.

But why crypto?

Hayes says it’s history in the making. Cryptocurrency is permissionless — and that means everyone can use it. It may not be better, but “at least you have a choice.”

It’s a glimpse into why people are “opting out” who created an industry with a market cap of $350 billion. For a man who lost his job at Citibank in 2013, what he and his co-founders built at BitMEX since then has turned this out-of-work banker into a self-made crypto-preneur heading up the biggest crypto margin-trading platform in the world.