Akshat Vaidya, co-founder and managing partner of Arthur Hayes’ family office and investment firm Maelstrom, laid out the firm’s investment approach in a recent interview. Maelstrom does not resemble a traditional conservative family office. Its strategy spans macro trading, crypto venture investing, DeFi, and infrastructure, which Vaidya described as a hybrid investment office. The objective is simple: generate returns.
How Vaidya entered crypto investing
Vaidya said he was trying to break into crypto in 2019 after working in traditional finance in private equity. At the time, dedicated investment roles in the sector were scarce, and he identified only a handful of opportunities, including Coinbase Ventures, Consensus Ventures, and BitMEX Ventures. He applied to all of them. BitMEX’s posting said it was open only to applicants in Hong Kong, but he submitted his résumé anyway because the number of real openings was so limited.
Asked about working with Arthur Hayes, Vaidya described the environment as high pressure. Hayes is known for demanding very high standards, and Vaidya said the same mindset carried into the buildout of Maelstrom: strong backing on one side, and clear consequences if execution falls short on the other.
Patient capital defined as a 100-year portfolio
Maelstrom invests across venture, private equity and credit, and public markets, a mix that some fund managers would see as too broad. Vaidya rejected that view. He said the firm is highly focused because its mandate is singular: making money. Venture is the biggest priority today, private equity has its own dedicated team, and the liquid portfolio is still in an earlier stage, leaving the firm’s main attention on venture and private equity.
On time horizon, Vaidya framed patient capital as a “100-year portfolio.” In his telling, the idea is not to invest only for one generation, but for the family line over a much longer span. Short-term themes may come and go, but the long-run goal is to outperform the market by a small margin each year and let compounding do the work.
Market size, founders, and liquidity come first
When Maelstrom reviews an investment, Vaidya said market size and team quality rank jointly at the top. A strong business in a small market may never produce outsized returns. Founders matter just as much. He said every time the firm backed a founder that felt questionable or behaved oddly, problems followed. By contrast, strong founders can remain valuable even if the current company fails, either by building something better later or by introducing the next opportunity.
Exit paths are another hard filter. Vaidya said every investment begins with the assumption that it must eventually be exited, and liquidity is central to that process. Even an excellent company has little value to an investor if there is no workable route to cash realization. For that reason, Maelstrom closely examines how a position could be exited and what cash may ultimately be returned.
Why DeFi remains a core theme
Even as capital in crypto has shifted in part toward consumer applications, AI, stablecoins, and RWA, Maelstrom is still active around infrastructure-linked opportunities. Vaidya argued that the distinction between infrastructure and applications matters less than people think. The firm is focused on genuine innovation, not on forcing deals into preset categories. Some of its best investments, he said, have come at the intersection of stablecoins and DeFi.
If he had to name a single theme with the strongest conviction, Vaidya said the answer has not changed: DeFi. In his view, Wall Street will move in that direction over the next five to ten years. He also acknowledged the risk profile. If the firm invests in ten DeFi projects, he expects nine may fail, but one successful outlier can deliver most of the overall returns.
The interview also touched on a more personal detail. Vaidya said that in 2009 he had seriously considered pursuing music as a lifelong career, long before he imagined becoming a co-founder of Arthur Hayes’ family office and a notable investor in crypto.