BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes bets on the money printer: “The bailout will come”

Arthur Hayes is a co-founder of the crypto exchange BitMEX, which turned perpetual swaps into a mass product, and today one of the most widely read market commentators in the industry. In 2022 he pleaded guilty in New York to violating US anti-money-laundering law; in March 2025 President Donald Trump pardoned him. Since then he has run the investment office Maelstrom as chief investment officer and publishes long essays at irregular intervals that derive price moves in bitcoin and altcoins from central bank monetary policy.

Why investors should know him: Hayes's theses move sentiment and headlines, and his latest essay, dated November 5, 2026, is explicitly bearish on bitcoin in the short term. Anyone wanting to put his writing in context needs to know where he comes from, how often his price targets have played out and which projects he earns from himself. If you want to act after reading him, the best route is a crypto exchange with a European licence rather than platforms that offer customers in Europe no protection.

Who is Arthur Hayes? From derivatives trader in Hong Kong to BitMEX founder

Hayes grew up in the US and graduated in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. He then moved to Hong Kong. According to reports by Bloomberg and Euromoney, he first traded equity derivatives and exchange-traded funds at Deutsche Bank there, later at Citigroup. In 2013 he lost his job at Citi and started arbitraging bitcoin between Hong Kong and mainland China.

How old is Arthur Hayes? The US Department of Justice gave his age as 36 when he was sentenced in May 2022. That makes him 40 or 41 in November 2026; the court documents cited in the press release do not give an exact date of birth.

In 2014 Hayes founded the BitMEX exchange together with mathematician Ben Delo and programmer Samuel Reed. It was operated by HDR Global Trading Limited, based in the Seychelles.

BitMEX and the perpetual swap: the product that shaped crypto trading

A perpetual swap is a futures contract with no expiry date. To keep its price from drifting permanently away from the spot price, buyers and sellers pay each other a financing fee at fixed intervals, the funding rate. BitMEX launched the product in 2016 and offered it with up to 100x leverage. By its own account, the exchange invented the perpetual swap in this form; today it is the most traded product in the crypto market.

The success had a downside. High leverage means even small price moves can wipe out a position entirely, a so-called liquidation. Anyone who wants to trade perpetuals today will long since find the contracts on decentralised exchanges too. Our comparison of perp DEXs gives an overview of fees, leverage limits and custody. The key difference from BitMEX in its early years: on a decentralised exchange, collateral sits in a smart contract rather than in a company's account.

Bank Secrecy Act: indictment, guilty plea and sentencing of the BitMEX founders

On October 1, 2020, prosecutors for the Southern District of New York indicted Hayes, Delo, Reed and early employee Gregory Dwyer. The charge was violating the Bank Secrecy Act and conspiring to do so. The Bank Secrecy Act is the central US anti-money-laundering law; it requires financial service providers to identify their customers and report suspicious activity. On the same day, the futures regulator CFTC filed a civil suit. Hayes stepped down as BitMEX chief executive in October 2020 and surrendered to the authorities in Hawaii in April 2021.

On February 24, 2022, Hayes and Delo pleaded guilty to wilfully failing to establish an anti-money-laundering programme at BitMEX. Each paid a fine of $10 million. On May 20, 2022, the court sentenced Hayes to two years' probation including six months of home detention. Delo received 30 months' probation, Reed 18 months, and Dwyer one year plus a $150,000 fine. The operating company HDR itself pleaded guilty in 2024 and was fined $100 million on January 15, 2025.

Pardon in March 2025: what Donald Trump's clemency covers

The US Department of Justice's list of clemency grants records five pardons in the BitMEX case under March 27, 2025: Hayes, Delo, Reed, Dwyer and the company HDR Global Trading itself. The move became public the following day. A president pardoning a company is regarded as unprecedented. Hayes thanked Trump on X.

A pardon is not an acquittal. It lifts the sentence and restores rights, but the 2022 guilty plea remains part of the court record. For reading his writing today, that means Hayes is legally rehabilitated, and his past as head of an exchange that failed to comply with US anti-money-laundering rules is documented. Both belong to the picture.

Maelstrom: Arthur Hayes's family office after BitMEX

Maelstrom is the investment office through which Hayes invests his own wealth. A family office manages the money of a single person or family and usually does not accept capital from outside investors. Maelstrom invests in early-stage crypto projects, says it awards grants to bitcoin developers and trades crypto assets on its own account.

Hayes regularly makes Maelstrom's positioning public. In early January 2026 he wrote that the office was entering the new year at “almost maximum risk” and heavily invested in altcoins, as CoinDesk reported. His current essay of November 5, 2026, by contrast, says Maelstrom is staying on the sidelines until conditions in the dollar market turn. The switch shows how quickly Hayes changes his stance, and he says so openly himself.

Liquidity thesis: why Hayes ties bitcoin to the money supply

The common thread in almost all of Hayes's writing is liquidity, the amount of money and credit available in the financial system. His core assumption: bitcoin is a store of value with a fixed supply of at most 21 million units. If the money supply in dollars, yen or euros grows because central banks buy bonds or commercial banks extend more credit, the price of scarce assets such as bitcoin rises. If it shrinks, the price falls.

His recurring themes follow from this. He watches the balance sheet of the US Federal Reserve, commercial bank balance sheets and the dollar-yen exchange rate, because cheap yen loans finance speculation worldwide. An essay from August 2026 is titled “Yen-quake”, and at the Token2049 conference in September 2024 he already called the dollar-yen relationship the key to financial and crypto markets. In the essay “Safety First” of September 2026 he argued that insurers holding loans for AI data centres on their books would be rescued in an emergency, and that every rescue means newly created money.

For you as a reader, this logic is useful because it can be checked: data on the Fed's balance sheet and on bank lending are public. Whether they explain the bitcoin price in every period is disputed among economists. Critics counter that bitcoin can fall for months even when liquidity is rising, for example when large holders sell or inflows into exchange-traded funds dry up.

“D is for Dilution”: AI company IPOs as a risk for bitcoin

In the essay “D is for Dilution” of November 5, 2026, Hayes applies the liquidity thesis to the listings of large AI companies. Dilution means that when more and more shares enter free trading after an IPO, because lock-up periods for founders, employees and early investors expire, the company's value is spread across more shares.

His calculation in brief: at SpaceX, the number of freely tradable shares has risen by half since the IPO; at Anthropic, initial subscribers would, on his reading of the prospectus, have to reckon with 83 percent dilution by June 2027; OpenAI will follow. Falling share prices at these companies would scare off bondholders, spreads on AI loans would widen and banks would shrink their balance sheets. Dollar liquidity would then fall, and the crypto market would feel the shortfall too. Hayes stresses that he is not accusing the companies of deception; his concern is solely the balance of supply and demand for the shares.

In the short term, that is a bearish thesis for bitcoin. In the long term, Hayes sees the same development triggering a new flood of money, because central banks and governments would not allow a crisis in AI financing. In his words: “The bailout will come.” That would be “glorious” for bitcoin holders, but one has to be patient. He leaves open when the bailout will come. On Monday morning, November 9, 2026, one bitcoin cost around $74,000, or €66,300.

Price targets in review: $250,000 for bitcoin and $150 for HYPE

Anyone reading Hayes should know his hit rate. In April 2025 he wrote that bitcoin could reach $250,000 by the end of the year if the Fed returned to bond purchases; he later added $10,000 for ether. Neither happened. Bitcoin set its record high in October 2025 at around $126,000 and trades well below that today. Cointelegraph Magazine quoted Hayes in 2025 as saying that for price targets one should “pick round numbers that people like”.

He was similarly candid in the essay “$HYPE Man” of March 2026. In it he justified a price target of $150 by July for the token of the Hyperliquid exchange and admitted he had adjusted a valuation ratio until the target ended in a zero or a five. On November 9, 2026, HYPE cost around $74, roughly half his target. What lies behind the token is explained in our profile What is Hyperliquid?.

A Hayes price target is thus food for thought with assumptions you can check, not a guaranteed forecast. His strength lies in asking where the money for the next rally will come from. He rarely gets the timing right.

Conflicts of interest: Flop Network, Genlayer and his own positions

Hayes writes about markets in which he is himself invested, and he usually discloses this in his texts. In September 2026 he described himself as the founder of the AI and crypto project Flop Network, which aims to build a marketplace for computing power. In November, at the end of his essay, he recommended the upcoming token launch of Genlayer, a project Maelstrom advises. Each of his essays also opens with a note that the views are personal and not investment advice.

For context, this means that when Hayes praises a token in which he or Maelstrom holds a stake, he benefits from rising prices. That does not make his arguments wrong, but it calls for your own scrutiny. With every recommendation, ask yourself who is selling on the other side when many readers buy at the same time.

The end of BitMEX: the exchange closed on September 23, 2026

The exchange that made Hayes famous no longer exists. The board of HDR Global Trading decided on closure after a strategic review, and BitMEX ceased operations on September 23, 2026. The company did not cite financial difficulties or regulatory pressure as the reason. Hayes himself had handed over the leadership back in 2020.

Anyone who still held a balance at BitMEX had to withdraw it before the deadline; the exchange charges an account maintenance fee on remaining accounts. What applies to residual balances and the 2026 tax return is covered in our article on the BitMEX closure and tax.

Reading Arthur Hayes: the money supply counts for more than any price target

Hayes is useful as a source on the big lines of the market and unsuitable as a signal for the right entry point. If you want to translate his theses into your own decisions, take three steps:

1. Choose a licensed trading venue. Buy bitcoin and altcoins through an exchange authorised under the European MiCA regulation. The comparison of regulated crypto exchanges shows which providers qualify.
2. Use leverage only with a plan. Perpetual swaps, the product from the BitMEX era, can liquidate a position within minutes. Check fees, funding rate and leverage limits in the perp DEX comparison before you trade.
3. Track liquidity data yourself. The Fed balance sheet, bank lending and the dollar-yen rate are public. Tools for analysing price and market data are in the comparison of analytics platforms.

(As of November 9, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)