(Bloomberg) -- Arthur Hayes, head of one of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency exchanges, says traders may lose their midday breaks and even their weekends as traditional assets absorb some characteristics of digital ones.

Digital finance is going to end up affecting everything from traditional equities, bond and currency trading, to the way payments are processed and recorded, Hayes, the chief executive of BitMex, said in remarks at the Milken Institute Asia Summit in Singapore. Hayes, who co-founded the exchange, noted that most markets currently open and close, remain shut on weekends, and some even have lunch breaks. Cryptocurrencies trade 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“Some of the practices in our market are going to be mimicked in traditional trading,” Hayes said. “All these things are going to seep into the traditional way stocks, bonds and FX are traded.”

Hayes, who worked at Deutsche Bank AG and Citigroup Inc. before founding BitMEX, said that records of transactions changing hands may only exist in a digital form.

“All these things about being somewhere and trading something and physically reconciling records is all going to go out the window,” he said. “Once you get away from that and understand that everything will be digital in the next 10 years, you realize” that Bitcoin isn’t such a strange idea.

The discussion didn’t address the investigation into BitMEX by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which Bloomberg reported in July. Nor did it get into recent ouflows from the exchange, or staffing issues such as the exit of Chief Operating Officer Angelina Kwan after she’d been at the company less than a year.

Hayes did say crypto is “definitely not” a threat to sovereign currencies, and actually would make things “better for governments because they can track things better in their native currencies, which they can’t do with physical cash.”

Facebook has been confronted with push back from politicians and regulators in the U.S. to France to Germany on its plan to launch a centeralized coin by the first half of next year.

He also touted the effects that crypto derivatives, BitMEX’s specialty, have had in price discovery, creation of fair and efficient markets, and helping keep prices in sync across major exchanges.

Bitcoin will be at $20,000 in a year, and at $100,000 in three years, Hayes predicted, in line with comments he has made previously. The largest cryptocurrency was little changed at $10,258 at 7 a.m. in Hong Kong, and has been hovering around the $10,000 level for weeks.

And, when asked whether he thinks it will ever be revealed who Satoshi Nakamoto is, Hayes said no. “I think they’re already dead,” he said.

Hayes also said that hiring good people in a big priority for BitMEX, though he said people need to be able to deal with the unstructured nature of things both inside and outside the company.

“We’re definitely understaffed. We’re hiring in every single department,” he said.

(Updates Bitcoin price in 10th paragraph.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Joanna Ossinger in Singapore at jossinger@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Christopher Anstey at canstey@bloomberg.net, Dave Liedtka, Olga Kharif

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