‘Trump or Harris, it doesn’t matter’ – DL News

Arthur Hayes’ first job was on a Deutsche Bank trading floor in Hong Kong. The day he started, in September 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. He was 22.

The days of high-adrenaline trading and million-dollar bonuses came crashing to an end.

Risk-hungry young traders like Hayes were wiped out amid an onslaught of regulation, compliance departments, and staid office cultures.

Then he found crypto.

“When I read the Bitcoin white paper it really resonated with me in terms of my true philosophy — like the corrupt banking system and how bullshit it is,” he told DL News.

Fast forward a decade — a whirlwind that included co-founding the BitMEX crypto exchange and reaching billionaire status, as well as a guilty plea in the US and probation time — and the crypto industry is starting to look a lot like the banking industry he left behind.

‘It still has that energy of a really diverse group of people all around the world’

—  Arthur Hayes

Finance giants including BlackRock and Franklin Templeton now offer retail investors cheap and safe ways to invest in crypto.

Fidelity wants to put Bitcoin into American pensions.

Hayes says it’s still the same old industry.

“It still has that energy of a really diverse group of people all around the world who come either from a financial perspective or a tech perspective. And they want something different,” Hayes said from his office in Singapore last week.

“They want something with uncapped upside, obviously super volatile, and you can wash out pretty quick if you’re not diligent. But at least there’s an ability to generate, either extreme usage of your products, or extreme wealth.”

Hayes has the credibility of a crypto OG.

He’s also become one of the most prolific and widely followed market commentators, on crypto and beyond.

Hayes chatted with DL News — before Monday’s market crash — about the election, the finance industry’s embrace of crypto, and where he sees Bitcoin’s price.

On the election

AH: They think Trump says the right things and so he’s going to make it happen faster. [Donald] Trump or [Kamala] Harris, it doesn’t matter.

DLN: Why?

AH: Yes, crypto donates a lot of money. But I don’t think you’ve donated enough to outpace a JPMorgan, a Morgan Stanley, a Citibank, a Goldman Sachs.

And if you think about who is staffed and all of these agencies, it’s all people who came from these banks.

So while it’d be great if Trump got elected and he did all these things, I think he might run into the same problem he ran into his first term.

You can say all these nice things and try all these policies, but if the entire government organisation is opposed to them, then nothing gets done.

On Bitcoin and monetary policy

AH: Both the Trump…