Ben was born in Sheffield to a civil engineer father and schoolteacher mother. He spent his childhood moving between a succession of primary schools, and at the age of 11 he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. It was at Lord Williams’s School, a state secondary school in Thame, Oxfordshire, that he began to flourish and with the right structured support in place, his academic potential was unlocked. He was awarded a place at Oxford University and graduated in 2005 with a double first-class honours degree in Mathematics and Computer Science.
After graduating, Ben worked as a computer programmer and developed expertise across a range of computer technologies and financial systems including cybersecurity, online trading, settlement and clearing, secure custody, privacy, data protection, analytics, customers management and Big Data. He received patents for a number of innovative technologies he produced during his early career, including a software to automatically repair internet links to material that had been archived or moved - an industry first, which he developed while at IBM. He went on to develop high-frequency trading systems at hedge funds and banks such as GSA Capital, Peel Hunt and JP Morgan.
In 2012, Ben moved to Hong Kong to work for JP Morgan and first began experimenting with Bitcoin. From 2014 to 2019 Ben built BitMEX, a leading online derivatives platform that at its peak handled more than one trillion dollars in trading volume annually (roughly equivalent to the entire Canadian stock market).
During this period, Ben played a key role in inventing the perpetual swap, characterised as “possibly the most successful derivatives product in the history of capitalism” by Ryan Radloff, former CEO of CoinShares, the world’s first regulated bitcoin hedge fund. Bloomberg’s Izabella Kaminska said
“perpetual futures are one of the most important inventions to come out of crypto. They should inspire new thinking in dollar markets too.”2019
The Giving Pledge & Philanthropy
Ben began his philanthropic giving as soon as BitMEX reached profitability and became one of the youngest-ever signatories of The Giving Pledge in 2019, pledging to give away the majority of his wealth during his lifetime. Since stepping back from an executive role at the firm, philanthropy has become his main focus, and he is a major donor to a number of causes which reflect long held beliefs and values.
