Former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes has surrendered to US authorities and is expected to be released on $10 million bail pending trial.
His surrender is added to the surrender of another BitMEX co-founder Benjamin Delo last month, who was released on a $20 million bail pending trial.
Arthur Hayes, along with Benjamin Delo and Samuel Reed, set up a crypto-derivatives exchange, but was accused of violating the Bank Secrecy Act last October. The indictment was filed by the Commodity Trade Commission and the US Department of Justice.
Under the Bank Secrecy Act financial institutions are required to provide transaction data in excess of the $10.000 limit. The purpose of this measure is to avoid money laundering through the banking system.
Hayes’s attorneys argue that their client should not have been charged.
“Arthur Hayes is a self-made businessman who is wrongly accused of crimes he did not commit. Mr. Hayes appeared in court voluntarily and is going to defend himself against baseless allegations.”
Hayes, who previously worked at Citigroup, founded BitMEX in 2014. The exchange gained popularity due to its high levels of leverage and margin trading. With the appearance of legal problems, the volume of transactions in the exchange fell dramatically.
Ever since US authorities began raising concerns about the company’s alignment with the requirements of the KYC program, BitMEX has enhanced its program and warned its customers that it will cancel their accounts, if they do not confirm their identities. However, all this came rather late, when the legal prosecution of the aforementioned began.
