1000x · Oct 14, 2026 · 49m · 39m saved
With Arthur Hayes, Co-founder of BitMEX and Founder of Maelstrom and the FLOP Network
BitMEX, the crypto exchange that invented the perpetual swap, shut down a few weeks before this interview with no customer funds ever lost and about 30,000 Bitcoin left in its insurance fund.
Arthur Hayes, co-founder of BitMEX and founder of Maelstrom and the FLOP Network, told Avi Felman on the 1000x podcast that he is now bearish on AI stocks. Most of the argument over AI spending is about how large the returns will be. Arthur thinks much of the money is lost already and expects governments to absorb the losses.
"I think we're wasting trillions of dollars of capital globally." — Arthur Hayes
Arthur started his trading career the day Lehman Brothers failed, built BitMEX to about 250 employees and designed the funding mechanism that exchanges still use to keep perpetual swaps in line with the spot price.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 49 minutes of audio, 10 minutes of reading.
Here are the 13 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
Arthur puts the odds at 75% that AI labs cannot pay for their committed compute without a government bailout
Building more data centers gets more expensive even as compute gets cheaper, in his view
He cited Replit's reported $3 of cost for every $1 of revenue
About 95% of AI users would stop if they paid the true cost, by his estimate
BitMEX's 100x leverage beat Chinese rivals offering 20x
The perpetual swap's 8-hour funding lookback became the industry standard, and rivals took until about 2020 to copy it
BitMEX closed with no customer funds ever lost and about 30,000 Bitcoin in its insurance fund
Arthur's FLOP Network ties a currency to AI compute, which he says could become bigger than Bitcoin
1. Lehman Failed on Day One
Arthur grew up in Buffalo, New York, where his parents worked for General Motors. A book he read in high school, about an American who moved to Tokyo to trade, led him to study Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania. A study-abroad term in Hong Kong turned into a Deutsche Bank sales-and-trading internship there, and he never worked in the US again.
Arthur Hayes started on a trading desk the Monday Lehman Brothers collapsed
"My first day on the trading desk was the day Lehman failed." — Arthur Hayes
He recalls the bank's head of trading telling the desk not to trade with a list of counterparties because "everything's blowing up." The money young bankers expected to make never arrived after that.
"The riches that we all thought we would make in banking evaporated with the change of the trajectory of financial services after the crisis." — Arthur Hayes
