BitMEX co-founder and Bitcoin billionaire Arthur Hayes has taken a board seat and major stake in a stem cell firm following his March pardon from US President Donald Trump, which wiped clean his conviction for Bank Secrecy Act violations.
Hayes, who built BitMEX into one of the largest derivatives platforms before it fell under regulatory fire, has been a regular patient at the stem cell firm’s clinics in Mexico and Bangkok for over a year, he told Bloomberg.
“I want to live as long as possible, as healthy as possible,” Hayes said, noting that more countries are relaxing rules around stem cell use. The company, which is currently rebranding, was not named.
In March, Trump pardoned four former BitMEX executives, including Hayes, Benjamin Delo, Gregory Dwyer and Samuel Reed, who had pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations tied to weak Anti-Money Laundering controls at the exchange.
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Crypto titans chase longevity
Hayes’s bet on longevity comes as crypto titans increasingly funnel wealth into the sector.
In 2021, Vitalik Buterin contributed $25 million in Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens to the Future of Life Institute and over $350,000 to the SENS Research Foundation to “reimagine ageing.”
He has called life extension a cause worth fighting for, framing it as a way to end the generational loss caused by aging. “Just even the process of aging turning into something that just becomes reversible and it being a regular thing for people to live one and a half, two centuries and then go even further from there,” Buterin said.
Former Coinbase executive Balaji Srinivasan also co-founded Counsyl, a genomics startup focused on affordable genetic testing for reproductive health and disease screening. Furthermore, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong co-founded genetic startup NewLimit, which raised $130 million this year.
Cointelegraph reached out to Maelstrom for comment but had not received a response by publication.
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Hayes remains active in crypto
Hayes has also remained active in crypto’s financial frontier. His family office, Maelstrom, has backed digital asset treasury companies, publicly traded firms stockpiling tokens on their balance sheets.
Last year, Hayes’ Maelstrom fund also launched a Bitcoin grant program offering $50,000–$150,000 annually, with up to $250,000 per developer, to support open-source work to strengthen Bitcoin’s scalability, resilience, privacy and censorship resistance.
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