Inverting the Perps Playbook with Brett Harrison from Architect
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I got a call from Sam Bankman Fried. Sam Bankman Fried. Sam Bankman Fried. FTX founder, Sam Bankman Fried. He was doing this crazy thing over in Hong Kong having to do with crypto. One of the things that excited me so much about my short experience at FTX UR is getting to see what it looks like when an entire industry from scratch is able to move as fast as possible and to take that ethos and bring that back to traditional finance. So instead of doing perpetuals on things like Bitcoin or Ether, we're doing perpetuals on precious metals on single stocks to get the same kind of exposure. And mos
What made you say yes to FTX in the first place, and what about architect after that?
I got a call from my, you know, former colleague, Sam Bankman Fried, who I had known from Jane Street. And he was doing this crazy thing over in Hong Kong having to do with crypto, and I had some experience with crypto having helped build a lot of the early systems, at Chain Street when they were starting their crypto arbitrage desk in 2017. But I had never kind of worked on the side, for example, of an exchange before and had a lot to learn. But I had been following the space and was really excited about it. And when the opportunity came knocking, I decided to to take the risk and go. And at
How difficult was it when you started architect, and what did you gain from the experience that you had when you were heading FTX?
So when I was running FTX US, we did two things on the regulatory side that were really exciting. So the first was that we built a broker dealer from scratch, the broker dealer license under the SEC and FINRA. Having stablecoins as a collateral option, we think, is going to be absolutely determinative to our success. That's one trend I think we'll just continue to see to be able to trade, And we built that with the with the goal in mind of being able to add stock trading and options trading to the FTX US, you know, crypto trading app. We were sort of, you know, ahead of to our ourselves there
The decision to be regulated right from the get go, does that come from the fact that you saw certain things with FTX? So I'm just curious about the form of in which you are launching or you have launched Architect. How how has that culminated?
Yeah. It's really both. But to really hone in on that second point, so Architect, you know, we have an exchange now called AX. And AX is the first centralized and regulated exchange
or
perpetual futures on noncrypto asset classes, on traditional asset classes. So instead of doing perpetuals on things like Bitcoin or Ether, we're doing perpetuals on foreign currencies for, like, the Indian rupee, the Brazilian real, the Mexican peso. We're doing perpetuals on precious metals, like gold, silver, platinum, palladium. We're doing perpetuals on single stocks, like Apple, Tesla. We have plans to do perpetuals on stock indexes, on commodities, on energy, on weather, on compute power. It was so critical for us to be regulated from the beginning and differentiate ourselves from the d
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