Maelstrom

Arthur Hayes and Akshat Vaidya co-founded Maelstrom. Its official biography dates Vaidya’s departure from BitMEX’s M&A team and co-founding of the firm to 2022. Hayes serves as CIO and Vaidya as managing partner.⁠[1]

In a public retrospective, Vaidya dated Maelstrom’s launch to the first quarter of 2023, with a focus on a long-term portfolio of crypto infrastructure investments.⁠[2]

Hayes and Vaidya told CoinDeskCoinDeskCoinDesk is a cryptocurrency media, events, index, and data company founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York. Its businesses include the CoinDesk news website, the annual crypto industry conference Consensus, and the CoinDesk Indices index business. In November 2023, the digital asset exchange Bullish acquired CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group, and CoinDesk has since operated as an independent subsidiary of Bullish.Open the full entry that investment capital then came from Hayes’s own crypto and fiat wealth, without outside limited partners. This allowed the team to deploy at its own pace while emphasizing infrastructure.⁠[3]

Maelstrom participated in Ethena’s $6 million seed round, led by Dragonfly. Ethena was developing a derivatives-hedged stablecoin and related savings products.⁠[4]

Maelstrom joined a pre-Series A round for distributed cloud-computing company Aethir at a $150 million valuation. Aethir targeted computing demand including gaming and AI; the round’s amount was undisclosed.⁠[5]

Maelstrom announced its Bitcoin Grant Program to support open-source Bitcoin development. It offered developers $50,000–$150,000 over twelve months, with recipients expected to contribute code, reviews or other technical work.⁠[6][7]

The first recipient was Bitcoin Core developer Rkrux. The subsequent annual report dated the start of that grant to October 2024.⁠[8][9]

Upexi established an advisory committee with Hayes as its first member. In the announcement, he said Maelstrom had backed Upexi several months earlier. The company was developing a SolanaSolanaSolana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) public blockchain designed for high throughput and low latency, with SOL as its native token; it was developed by Solana Labs and launched Mainnet Beta in March 2020. It is known for design choices such as its Proof of History clock and parallel execution, suffered several network-wide outages in its early years, and became one of the crypto industry’s focal points in events including the FTX collapse, U.S. SEC lawsuits, and the listing of Solana ETFs.Open the full entry treasury business.⁠[10]

Maelstrom led a financing of almost $7 million for Bio Protocol, alongside investors including Mechanism Capital, Animoca Brands and Atria. Bio Protocol uses decentralized financing and AI tools to support biotechnology research.⁠[11]

Citing Bloomberg, crypto.news reported that Maelstrom Equity Fund I was seeking at least $250 million to acquire or invest in mid-sized crypto infrastructure and service businesses. This was a fundraising target, not a completed raise.⁠[12]

Zcash Open Development Lab announced financing exceeding $25 million, with Maelstrom participating alongside Paradigm, a16z crypto, Coinbase Ventures and others. ZODL develops the Zcash protocol and a self-custodial privacy wallet.⁠[13]

The annual report recorded five developers funded since grants began operating in October 2024, with four still receiving support at the report date. Work included Bitcoin Core development and privacy-payment tools such as Payjoin and Silent Payments.⁠[9]

Maelstrom announced Tadge Dryja as the sixth recipient of its Bitcoin Grant Program.⁠[14][15]

Managed by Arthur Hayes’s family office, Maelstrom invests across venture capital, liquid assets, private equity and public markets. Its website emphasizes long-term decentralized infrastructure investing through early-stage equity, tokens, and private and public market positions.⁠[16][17]

The official team page lists Nick Andrianov as partner for Maelstrom Liquid, responsible for trading and hedging liquid positions, and Adam Schlegel as partner for Maelstrom Equity, responsible for launching and managing that business.⁠[1]

Maelstrom: Official website: https://maelstrom.fund/ (opens in a new window); X: https://x.com/MaelstromFund (opens in a new window); YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: https://www.youtube.com/@MaelstromFund (opens in a new window); LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: https://www.linkedin.com/company/maelstromfund/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16][18][19][20]