Arthur Hayes and Akshat Vaidya are looking to beat bitcoin and ether’s returns, but they are going to take their time doing it.

"Nothing scales like consumers, but we're not quite at the phase where there's enough infrastructure to support that,” Vaidya said.

Maelstrom is set up as Hayes' family office, using a pool of his crypto. Because there are no liquidity providers to answer to – as it's Hayes’ money – there’s no rush to deploy capital to earn management fees so the firm can be “patient.”

“We want to identify projects that are actually quality,” Hayes said. “It’s not a game of spray-and-pray because we don’t have outside LPs.”