This entrepreneur wants to build the Goldman Sachs of Bitcoin

Arthur Hayes left Deutsche Bank and Citibank to establish BitMEX, a real-time Bitcoin-based trading platform, reports Tech in Asia

If you want to work in finance, then you’ve set your sights on institutions like Citibank or Deutsche Bank. Those are the kind of places where, once you’ve got a foot in the door, you’re not going to leave without a good reason.

That’s what makes the story of BitMEX co-founder and CEO Arthur Hayes interesting. After graduation from Wharton Business School in 2008, Hayes moved to Hong Kong to work in both Deutsche Bank and Citi. But he left the big banking world in mid-2013 to devote his time and energy into what he thinks will be the future of finance: Bitcoin. Specifically, Bitcoin financial products. 

 

It’s one thing to swap out some USD for the digital currency and use it to buy items online, but it’s quite another to use Bitcoin to play the stock market or enter derivatives. Building a platform to facilitate that type of transaction – and getting people to trust it – is no light undertaking. But Arthur, along with Samuel Reed and Ben Delo, decided they were the right team for the job.

BitMEX – or ‘Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange’ – was first devised by the three co-founders over some beers in early 2014. Within six months, Samuel – the company’s CTO, with a background in creating complex real-time web interfaces – had a beta off the ground. By the beginning of this year, the site was live.

Due to government regulations, BitMEX is not allowed to operate in the United States. That provides even further incentive to get it into Asia. The company began its Asia push in mid-2015 through the Chinaccelerator programme, an intensive start-up accelerator based in Shanghai.

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This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.