Arthur Hayes, the Former CEO of Crypto Exchange BitMEX, Has Been Granted a Pardon by Trump

Arthur Hayes, the former CEO of crypto exchange BitMEX, has been granted a pardon by U.S. President Donald Trump, according to a Friday report from CNBC.

President Donald Trump has granted pardons to Arthur Hayes, the former CEO of crypto exchange BitMEX, and his two co-founders, Samuel Reed and Benjamin Delo, reported CNBC on Friday, citing two people familiar with the matter.

The pardons were part of a last-minute flurry of clemency grants by Trump before he leaves office next week.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) brought charges against BitMEX, its three co-founders, and its first employee, Gregory Dwyer, accusing them of violating the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). Prosecutors alleged BitMEX advertised itself as a place where customers could use its platform virtually anonymously, without providing any required know-your-customer (KYC) information.

The four individuals eventually pleaded guilty and were sentenced to fines and probationary sentences. The exchange itself also pleaded guilty to violating the BSA last year.

After a two-year investigation, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) also announced in 2021 that it had ordered BitMEX to pay $100 million for violating the Commodity Exchange Act and other CFTC regulations.

Attorneys representing Hayes, Delo and Reed did not immediately return requests for comment.

The reported pardons come just a day after Trump granted a pardon to Trevor Milton, the former CEO of Nikola Motors who was previously convicted of fraud in 2022.

In January, Trump made good on long-standing promises to pardon Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, who was 11 years into a draconian sentence of double life in prison plus 40 years, with no possibility of parole. Since Ulbricht’s pardon, former FTX CEO and convicted fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried has been angling for his own pardon, attempting to curry favor with the Trump administration and appearing on Tucker Carlson in an unauthorized jailhouse interview that landed him in solitary confinement.

Former Binance CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, who pleaded guilty to the same charge as Hayes and served four months of prison last year — making him not only the richest person to ever go to the U.S. and the only person to ever serve jail time for violating the BSA— has denied reports that he, too, is seeking a pardon from President Trump.

But, Zhao admitted in a recent X post that “no felon would mind a pardon, especially being the one in U.S. history who was sentenced to prison for a single BSA charge.”