The Original King of Crypto is Back

Arthur Hayes rubbed success in the government's face and got busted. With his sentence over and his fortune intact, he's trading and tweeting through what's left of a reeling industry.

- By Jen Wieczner

This story may sound familiar:

A brash young man with a blue-chip education spends a few years as a trader before starting a crypto exchange and quickly becoming a billionaire.

He’s on TV a lot, slays on Twitter, and emerges as the face of the insurgent industry—the kind of entrepreneurial rebel you can’t help but pay attention to, even if you aren’t a bitcoin person. The young man is the acknowledged crypto king. Then, maybe on account of hubris, he starts to make mistakes. Even though he lives abroad, U.S. law enforcement takes notice. An indictment drops. He negotiates the terms of his return to the States and surrenders to federal authorities, facing multiple felony counts. Neither he nor the crypto industry will ever be the same.

This is not just the arc of Sam Bankman-Fried. It’s also that of Arthur Hayes, who appeared on the crypto scene before SBF, got sidelined, and is now poised to return to it. The parallels are all the more remarkable because so much else in their lives is different. Where Bankman-Fried was a white kid from an elite echelon of society, Hayes was a Black kid from the Rust Belt. Where Bankman-Fried is a zhlub who looks like he logs 20 hours a day at a computer, Hayes is impossibly chiseled and handsome. Where Bankman-Fried was tagged for success his entire life, Hayes created his fortune almost as an act of will, surprising pretty much everyone but himself. In 2014, when Hayes was setting up the exchange known as Bitmex, there were no reverent venture capitalists salivating over his vibe or speculating that he would be history’s first trillionaire. He slept on a friend’s couch for months to save money during a period when the whole gambit looked like a failure.