When I was a teenager, mathematics saved my life. Diagnosed with Asperger’s, I had a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time – usually the truth, which rarely wins popularity contests. Only in maths class did I find that the pursuit of truth was not a vice but a superpower. In a world full of grey areas and half-truths, here was a subject where things were either right or wrong, and no one could accuse you of being rude for pointing it out. My resulting passion for maths took me to Oxford, where I studied mathematics and computer science, and from there into the world of finance.
It was while I was working for a major global bank in Hong Kong, writing the high-speed trading algorithms that enable online futures markets, that the idea arose to do the same for cryptocurrencies. In 2014, with my partners Arthur Hayes and Sam Reed, I created what became the world’s largest cryptocurrencies exchange and trading platform, BitMEX.
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