Exclusive Interview with Maelstrom CIO Arthur Hayes | KBW2023

[Music] South Korea is a very interesting place for crypto I think that um it's a booming Market the people here obviously are very techsavvy one of the highest internet penetrations in the world fastest internet smartphone penetration is very high and you know a very homogeneous culture that latches onto something and then runs with it so I think crypto in South Korea is huge it's obviously impacted everything in this city you know because the city's so into like Financial trading and whatnot so I think crypto's booming in South Korea [Music] oh I don't know I mean I think it's if we have a good liquidity situation then most things go up the the thing is I call this the the bouncy ball Theory right you bounce a ball and you know the 2021 Peak a lot of things are not going to make it back up to where they were in 2021 so a lot of people who had this stuff in their portfolio they bought the top in November 2021 and they're like oh wait when is it getting back there it probably won't could it go up you know 10 20x from the current like 99 down price levels for sure but that's new capital in so I don't know if things are going to get back to where they were in 2021 but investors coming in now obviously have good uh technicals in terms of things are down a lot so if you do get some sort of improvement in the macro some of these smaller altcoins you could do very well do I have a specific favorite no I don't really you know I don't know a few things so I think we have the convergence of a global Central money printing exercise to essentially Safeguard the sovereign debt markets of the entire world so they're going to try to save the Government Bond markets which means put more money we have this AI thing right everybody thinks that AI is going to be super transformative for human culture I believe that there's also I think a good Synergy between crypto and AI I think they're a natural semiotic relationship where AI should be using cryptographic solutions to power an AI human econom e so we're going to get that narrative in 20 starting in 2024 and obviously we have the Bitcoin having which um usually pretends to a start in the bull market so number one thing that I always tell anyone is like focus on your clients right so the reason why we created the Perpetual swap was that we were focused on helping solve a problem of our our clients namely we want something easier to trade that's leverage right that was the impetus to creating the Perpetual swap I think a lot of Founders in in this space get too hung up on I need need to get the next round of EC funding I need to do my token sale blah blah blah and they neglect that okay I have this product I have to provide a use case for people to use my whatever it is if I want to survive you know two or more Cycles then I should be providing value for my clients and trying to increase the engagement with my solution so that's the number one lesson and you know we've at sometimes we forgot who our clients were and we've suffered and when you R discover like focusing on your clients and you can do well that's I think the number one thing everyone should focus on AI robotics right I think we have an Asian Workforce so things that are robot enabl that's going to be a bigger Trend as you know more our people are aging in the younger generation just have isn't having enough uh children and then nuclear right so I think um nuclear energy is something that is starting to gain at least in the west I think in you know OB South Korea is a big exporter of nuclear um reactor technology to build them for other people China as well I think the West is going to wake up and realize that this climate change thing if they you're serious but the only way to do it is nuclear and you know I there's a particular few uranium miners are starting to break out because everybody's realizing that nuclear is a future if we want to talk about clean energy