After months of complete silence from one of the biggest proponents of cryptocurrencies and arguably one of the most influential people in the industry, Arthur Hayes is back.
The former CEO of BitMEX shared his thoughts on some pressing and trending matters – the state of the “crypto capital markets” following the fiasco with GameStop and everything that happened in relation.
Following the case against BitMEX, spearheaded by the United States Commodity and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), Arthur Hayes, the former CEO of the company behind BitMEX, went away. His last tweet was back in September 2020.
Today, Hayes shared a long post outlining his views on the GameStop stock fiasco, as well as sharing his thoughts on the alternative to the existing financial system. Titled Walkaway, the blog is a deeper dive into Hayes’ thoughts and his own experience on the matter.
As CryptoPotato reported back then, one of the main pressure points for the community was the fact that Robinhood, upon receiving a massive number of buying orders, halted the GME stock, disallowing users to purchase any more of it, leaving them only with the option to sell. Many people asserted that this was done under pressure of Wall Street, essentially alleging that the broker disallowed buying to ‘bail out’ underwater hedge fund short positions.
Hayes weighed in. He said that in order for Robinhood to continue servicing trades back on that day, they had to pay $4 billion to clearing houses to sustain the volumes. Instead, RH took another way around: to stop trading “or severely curtail trading in the stocks that are causing PAIN to various masters of the universe.” He also outlines that this is information from the CEO of Robinhood given in his Elon Musk Clubhouse interview.
He also outlined that the “game” is stacked in a way where institutional players are favored in all circumstances and that this is nothing new – no rules have changed on Wall Street, retail investors just didn’t know the rules.
Opt-out. That’s what Hayes provides as an alternative. And not to sound empty-worded, he gives an alternative he calls “the other game.”
That system started on Jan 3, 2009 with the Bitcoin genesis block. Today that game is called the Crypto Capital Markets. Erected upon the bedrock of open source, this new Crypto Capital Markets game promises an open, permission-less way to move data / value around society. The playing field is cyberspace, and anyone with an internet-enabled device can play.
The crypto mogul also discloses the risks, yet, he also says that “if your goal is to speculate your way out of COVID lockdown-induced boredom, or to augment your declining real wages, crypto can and does generate such outcomes.”
He also makes a few points about the community. In crypto, there are experts and thought leaders, though their reputation comes from independently verifiable statements about what they do. This, he compares to traditional finance where reputation can oftentimes be attached to the fact that your “surname contains the right vowels, or you happened to be highly credentialed.”
Respect follows results, not the other way around. It always helps to possess social capital, but if you ship shit code, the world will know because it is peer-reviewed. If you want to charge management fees for performance, we can query your wallet balances on the blockchain and determine if you are just a beta bro or an omnipotent omega operator.
Featured image courtesy of Fortune