The Pomp Podcast - #863 How FTX Is Taking Over The Crypto Industry w/ Brett Harrison
Episode Date: March 14, 2022Brett Harrison is the President of FTX. In this conversation, we discuss FTX's product suite, crypto regulation, NFTs and how the Russia/Ukraine conflict is affecting the industry. ===================...==== Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp ======================= Imagine coinmarketcap - decentralized. 3X in valuation is 15 billion dollars from the current price. Cryptotoday.com starts at zero, at fair launch on 7th of March. No VC. No pre-sale. Team tokens locked. For the people, by the people. For decentralized crypto. Visit http://cryptotoday.com and read the whitepaper for the details.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening
to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off brett
harrison is the president of ftx one of the fastest growing and largest cryptocurrency
exchanges in the world in this conversation we talk about ftx's product suite regulation
nfts russia ukraine conflict and much more i really enjoyed this conversation with brett
and I hope that you enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though,
I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by BlockFi.
BlockFi provides financial products for crypto investors. Those products include the BlockFi
wallet, a US dollar loan collateralized by your crypto, and a no-fee trading product.
BlockFi also released the world's first crypto rewards credit card. It's a Visa credit card
that gives you crypto back as your rewards instead of cash back or airline miles. They
recently introduced RewardsFlex, so customers choose which crypto assets they receive from
their credit card rewards from the BlockFi Rewards credit card. For people in the U.S. who own or
are interested in owning crypto or stacking more sats, the BlockFi Rewards credit card provides
the easiest way to earn more crypto because you earn 1.5% back in crypto on every single purchase
and you have no annual fee. I'm an investor in the business and a very, very happy user.
The BlockFi Rewards credit card is the easiest way to earn crypto. For a limited time, when you
sign up using my link blockfi.com slash pomp cc you will get 75 back in crypto on your first swipe
use your everyday spending to diversify your crypto portfolio i've got the credit card i love
it and i think you will too head on over to blockfi.com slash pomp cc today next up is choice
it's time to stop paying capital gains taxes on your bitcoin and choice is here to help choice
is rebuilding the way bitcoiners approach retirement by making it possible to invest
in Bitcoin and 19 other digital assets inside your IRA. Right now, every time you make a trade,
you have to pay capital gains taxes that can be as high as 37%. Choice enables you to trade real
Bitcoin, other cryptos, and stocks without having to pay a dime in capital gains. The best part?
They just released an iOS app, so you can open an account in less than 10 minutes and take control
of your future from the palm of your hand. Join me and the 20,000 other Bitcoiners who have started
their tax-efficient stack and open your Choice account today. Search StackSats in the App Store
or visit choiceapp.io slash pomp. Again, search StackSats in the App Store or visit choiceapp.io
slash pomp. And one more thing, if you want to hold your private keys, Choice lets you do that
too. Start stacking tax-efficient Satoshis today and visit choiceapp.io slash pomp.
This episode is brought to you by CryptoToday.com.
Exchanges got decentralized, money got decentralized,
and the only bottleneck is the very sites listing them all.
CryptoToday.com is like decentralized coin market cap.
It's the first of its kind.
There's no bribes, no connections, or heavy fees are needed to get listed like on the centralized sites.
You can simply request on the blockchain and disperse the prize on-chain to the community
and get fact-checked by thousands of eager crypto users.
CryptoToday.com treats very differently.
There's no presale, no VC money,
and all of the team is locked up for at least one year.
All the centralized competitors have valuations
in the billions of dollars.
CryptoToday.com started out at $0
as the first decentralized token information site.
You can read the white paper at CryptoToday.com.
Again, go to CryptoToday.com to learn more.
All right, let's get in this episode.
I hope you guys enjoyed this one.
All right, let's get in this episode.
I hope you guys enjoyed this one.
Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments.
All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect
the opinions of Pomp Investments.
You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement
to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression
of his personal opinion.
This podcast is for informational purposes only.
One person who I think is going to have a lot of thoughts about both the recent events
around the world, regulation, and many of these financial assets is Brett Harrison,
who is the president of FTX. We've got Brett joining us now. Brett, how are you?
Hey, good. Thanks. How are you?
I'm doing fantastic. Dude, I'm super excited to talk to you because I feel like FTX has been on
an absolute tear. And you've got a front row seat making not only a lot of the strategic decisions,
but also kind of being reactive as well to just what seems to be kind of an uncertain, chaotic,
like geopolitical environment, financial markets, etc. So there's all kinds of things we could talk
about. But maybe we could just talk about to start, like, how do you think about the FTX
kind of, I don't know, empire, if you will, there's the international business, the US business,
like, just talk me through, like, what does that look like from your vantage point?
Sure. So just taking a step back. So FTX was a is a cryptocurrency derivatives exchange,
primarily that was founded around three years ago. It was founded by Sam Bankman Freed. It's
become the second or third largest crypto exchange in the world by volume. And that's been primarily
through the derivatives, like for example, perpetual futures, quarterly futures that are
offered on the platform. But those products can't be offered in the US without certain licenses that
are required. So around a year to a year and a half ago, FTX US was founded as a way of establishing
a US regulated business that could obtain the licenses required to be able to offer a lot of
these products to U.S. citizens. So it started out as just a spot cryptocurrency exchange.
But in the end of 2021, FTX US, we acquired a company called LedgerX, which has given us a
CFTC regulated derivatives platform. So we're looking this year to be able to launch derivatives
in the U.S. We have a number of other initiatives as well. For example, being able to offer U.S.
stocks. We have an NFT marketplace. So we're growing as an empire, if you want to call it
that across a number of different verticals, trying to get licenses in each jurisdictions
where we can, growing in different businesses that are either in crypto or adjacent to crypto.
And there's a lot in store for the coming year or so.
Awesome. So when I think of what you guys have done, I think that there's this balance between
what I'll call speed and regulation, right? Obviously, speed is very important in an
ever-changing environment, one where it seems like every couple of months, there's this new
thing everyone's got to go learn about that previously wasn't important or no one knew about.
But also there's the balance with you want to remain in good standing in the various jurisdictions in which you operate, and that leads to sustainable, durable business over a long period of time.
So talk to me about how do you look at the U.S. regulatory environment?
Like obviously there are existing rules in the legacy financial system.
There's some new technology here.
Do you all have open dialogue with regulators?
Do you all think that you treat the U.S. differently than other regions?
And it's just like, how do you evaluate what you're doing in the U.S. from a regulatory standpoint?
You make a really great point, which is there's this important tradeoff between sprinting fast in terms of getting up new products, embracing new technologies, at the same time, being very careful about regulation.
Because we don't want to sprint too far and then hit a wall because we realize we've run afoul of some regulation that may not even exist yet, but might exist soon.
And so it's important for us to maintain that continuous dialogue with regulators so that we make sure that we're following the rules so that we can sprint fast and bring these businesses to life quickly and do it in a way that's endorsed by regulation.
So in the U.S. right now, it's one of the most well-defined regulatory environments in certain areas like securities, like in derivatives such as S&P 500 futures or Bitcoin futures.
It is not a well-defined area in terms of cryptocurrency spot trading.
For example, the spot Bitcoin to USD or whether you can list a certain token or not.
And to be honest, there are basically no jurisdictions around the world where this is spelled out clearly.
But the U.S. has one of the strictest and most well-defined regulatory regimes between all the different agencies.
That's what has enabled it to become the largest capital markets in the world.
But it also means that it is a slower market for people to bring new innovation without being concerned about these things.
So in the U.S. right now, the biggest concern is over where jurisdiction over spot cryptocurrency markets regulation is going to land, whether it's going to be the SEC, the CFTC, some combination of the two.
But the derivatives landscape actually does have quite a clear path.
For example, CME and ICE already list Bitcoin futures and options.
And they do so under the CFTC derivatives regime. And that's why we're excited to take something that we know exists, something that we know how to follow. We've got the licenses. We're working with the CFTC to be able to launch the products we want. And this is a way that we can operate completely within the U.S. regulatory envelope, but also bring these new innovative products to life for U.S. people.
How important are the derivatives? Obviously, we've seen some platforms outside the United States that exploded in popularity. There was what may be from the vantage point or viewpoint of regulators or even legacy financial folks, these pretty high leverage opportunities.
It feels like within the kind of framework of the United States regulatory environment, you all will be able to provide these products, but maybe with less leverage or kind of, you know, kind of tamp down, you know, type extremes to them.
How important is that to the U.S. market and kind of keeping the United States as the home of or at least a leader in the financialization of crypto?
So people who have been primarily trading crypto, and that's one of their first real forays into trading some kind of financial asset, might not realize that in virtually all tradable assets, derivatives usually trade more than the underlying products.
So, for example, the S&P 500 future is one of the most liquid, most traded instruments in the world and trades more than the underlying stocks do.
Also for ETFs on the S&P 500, like SPY.
That's also true for crypto.
More than two or three times the volume trades in derivatives than in spot.
But unlike something like the S&P 500 futures, where equity futures generally trade around
like 40% to 50% of the global volume in the US, for crypto, less than 3% of the global
crypto derivatives volume trades in the US.
And that's because up till now, there haven't been any crypto native platforms in the US
offering these products.
So before we get into why that's the case, let's talk about why it matters.
Why do people trade derivatives more than the underlying products?
Well, for one, they are a great tool for hedging.
And they're a great tool for, for example, people who want to capture some kind of spread.
So maybe they don't want to necessarily bet that Bitcoin is going up.
What they do want to bet is that they can capture an interest rate, a natural interest
rate from holding Bitcoin and selling Bitcoin futures against that.
Also, futures tend to be a much more capital efficient vehicle for putting on a position.
So S&P 500 futures, you can get something like 50 to 100x leverage, which means you only have
to put up a very small amount of a total position as capital to be able to put on the particular
either directional bet or hedge that you'd like. And so that's why derivatives are so popular,
because it's such a capital efficient trade. In the US right now, though, there is no futures
exchange where you can post physical Bitcoin as a physical Bitcoin, but I mean actual Bitcoin as
opposed to US dollar cash equivalent. You can't post Bitcoin as collateral for a Bitcoin future
on the CME because the CME is not a Bitcoin exchange. And so what we think is going to be
key towards bringing this volume to the US and bringing all this volume onshore under the
regulatory envelope of the CFTC is going to be allowing for Bitcoin and Ether and Bitcoin and
their futures to all trade on the same exchange where you can cross collateralize between them.
Yeah, it's fascinating to start thinking about what the advantage is not only for traders,
but also for a platform and kind of the business, you know, growth opportunity that's there if you
guys are able to do this successfully and get users to understand the benefits of trading that
venue. Talk to me also, you guys have this kind of stock trading product that's coming out and
That stock trading product seems to be, at least when it first launched, synthetic-based
when it was launched internationally, but now is coming to the United States.
Is this competition for the New York Stock Exchange and ICE?
Is this more of a synthetic-type stock trading?
How does it work, and why are you guys looking at something that many people would say is
in the financial market but not necessarily crypto-related?
Sure.
So just to clarify and separate, so FTX.com, the international exchange, did launch a tokenized
stock product. And it was a very innovative product because it allowed people to trade,
if they're not in the US, stocks as if they were an instant settlement digital token 24-7,
almost as if they're like an American depository receipt. It's basically a derivative that is
exchangeable or fungible for the underlying share of that stock through a German broker-dealer.
In the US, we're looking to launch something different, which is just a vanilla US stock
trading platforms. So this is not tokenized stocks. It's actually not really blockchain
related at all. It's just a sort of place where you can go and buy and sell things like
Tesla and Apple. And some of the thinking here is that when people go to decide how they want
to invest their money, what they don't want to have to do is figure out where do they have to
park their savings and deposits in order to trade the things they want. So imagine you wake up today
and you want to trade Bitcoin. And so you buy Bitcoin. But now tomorrow you want to buy Tesla.
Well, it's sort of annoying to have to sell Tesla, get the cash, and then move cash from,
let's say, your FTX account to your Robinhood account, and then go trade stocks with Robinhood.
People want to trade everything in the same place, which is why even though Robinhood only has a few
coins available in their crypto offering, and you can't even deposit and withdraw crypto from the
platform, people trade crypto a lot there because they've already parked a lot of their money there
to be able to trade stocks. So our belief is that we have the technology to build an
integrated platform where people can use their money in whatever way they would like to be
able to invest. And by putting it all in one place, it creates that captive experience
where people want to invest in the one place being FTX. You want to trade NFTs, you want
to trade crypto, you want to trade stocks, you want to trade futures. You can do that
all from one place. So it's sort of like we're going kind of the opposite direction of Robinhood,
Where they started with stocks and moved into crypto, we started with crypto and then we're
moving into stocks.
All right.
Before we move to some of the non-FTX stuff I want to talk about, how big is FTX?
Obviously, we see the valuations that are out there.
I think the US-based valuation for the business was like $8 billion.
The international one keeps going up so fast, I can't even keep track.
I think it's now over $30 billion.
Users, revenue, what numbers can you share with me in terms of how to think about how
big this business is?
Sure. So I can say that we have on the order of millions of users, which is a good number,
but it's not nearly as high as, for example, Coinbase, which has something like 60 to 70
million users. But globally, if you count the international and the US exchanges together,
FTX is something like three to four X, the amount of volume is Coinbase. So fewer than 10th of the
users and more than three or four X, the actual volume. And that's because we have such a
tremendous focus on the institutional product at FTX, where we have some of the largest trading
firms in the world as customers, where they're trading hundreds of millions, if not billions
worth of crypto and crypto derivatives every day. And so that's somewhat of the difference between
us and let's say, and some of our more adjacent competitors in this space. I think another thing
to mention in terms of size is that we are something like a 200 to 250 person company.
So we're very small. And I think that is what has enabled us to grow so quickly is that we are
incredibly nimble. And when it comes to launching a new product or being able to innovate quickly or
take feedback from our users on Twitter, it's largely due in part that we are such a small
company and we're able to be so close to the ground and be able to organize over the most
important top priorities very quickly. Yeah. It's pretty incredible to think about having a business
that at 250 employees worth $30 to $40 billion across the two organizations. I don't know if
there's another business that's ever done something like that. So pretty incredible.
Talk to me about the role of crypto in some of the geopolitical conflict that we're watching
play out? Obviously, there's a lot of talk of Russia using Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies to evade
sanctions. We've seen Ukraine post all these addresses, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether, etc. for
donations. How do you just see the role of this technology and these assets playing into this
type of conflict, which hasn't happened in quite a while in Europe? Yeah, it's amazing because
we hit a real inflection point with crypto, I would say, over the last couple of years,
where crypto is no longer a fringe technology, it's ubiquitous. It has 100 million users across
the world. And so hitting this first real global geopolitical conflict in the age of crypto's
adoption is starting to show what a use case does crypto actually have for good or for bad.
So I'll tell you what things that we are seeing from where we sit as an exchange operator that's
dealt directly, for example, with the Ukrainian government, it is clear and provable that
cryptocurrency is being used as a sensorless, cross-border, instant settlement, low-fee way
of being able to fund efforts that people want to fund. So in this case, there's been more than
$50 million worth of crypto assets that are being donated directly to the Ukrainian government for
assistance on the ground or to NGOs, humanitarian aid organizations that are bringing
relief to people on the ground in the Ukraine, which is incredible. I mean, to think that this
is something that exists now, that never existed before, the entire global, you know, economy being
able to contribute directly to one side in a war, it's really amazing to see. And I think it's why
maybe we've seen a lot of pickup in crypto prices in the last week or so, because people, I think,
are starting to really understand that promise. I think we believe that crypto is an amazing tool
for global remittances and for these kinds of cross-border payments that are typically very
difficult to actually execute. On the opposite side, there's a lot of talk about, is crypto
being used for, for example, evading US sanctions? And we are in pretty direct contact with the
Treasury on this particular topic over, for example, what are the sanctions that we need
to uphold as an exchange? What do we need to be looking out for in terms of any sort of
cybersecurity threats from Russia or otherwise? And it's clear to them and clear to us that crypto
is not being used as a tool by and large for evading sanctions. And there's a couple of
different reasons behind that. But primarily, because of how traceable crypto is, we have a
public ledger where everyone can see all the transactions are happening. There are very
advanced, sophisticated tools being able to track the source of funds through crypto networks,
through blockchain networks, heuristically tagging geographic locations of wallet addresses,
known associative addresses for other kinds of illicit activity. And just the fact that in order
for any of this crypto to be able to be laundered through the system, you need an on and off ramp,
for example, from a Russian bank into a crypto exchange or from that crypto exchange back to
a US or Russian bank. And it's very easy for us to be able to block sanctioned institutions from
the exchange. As a result, being able to use cryptocurrencies for sanctions or money laundering
is very, very difficult. And so I think we're sort of seeing the promise in both directions.
It's a great tool for giving, for donating, for contributing. And it's also a very difficult tool
for being able to effectively money launder. And so I think that's giving us a lot of great
promise for what this technology has in store. I got another question for you. And then my
brother's got a couple of questions is when we start looking at there was a number of media
reports where whether it was governments, whether it was organizations, whether it was even
individuals in various communities asking crypto exchanges to not only enforce what I would call
the sanctioned rules. Right. So, hey, this person is on a sanctioned list or no fact list. Don't
actually support them, don't allow them to transact, but to literally kick all Russians,
regardless of whether they were accused of participating in something or not,
kick them off the platform. And it seems like across the industry, the crypto exchanges have
all held the position if we are legally required via sanctions or otherwise to not allow someone
to use our products, we will do so we will comply with that. But we're not going to unnecessarily
kick the average citizen in any country off of our platform. Talk to me a little bit as to like,
why is that the position that so many of these exchanges are taking? And is there something that
maybe is missing from the conversation publicly that people don't understand there?
Sure. No, it's a really good question. And it's definitely one of the biggest topics that's being
discussed right now in the public sphere, at least on social media is, you know, what responsibility
do exchanges have to take some of these actions kind of on their own? And from where we sit,
one thing that we think about is what would be the ramifications or the precedent that we would set
if we as a private company made such a key global public policy decision on our own without the
input of governmental agencies or law enforcement? So as I said, we talk directly with people from
the Treasury and get their guidance. And we've asked them, tell us what you would like us to do
as an exchange. What they want us to do is enforce OFAC sanctions. What they don't want us to do
is make sort of decisions on our own about, you know, for example, blocking all Russian citizens
just because people have called for it out there. And again, think about the precedent that was set
for future conflicts that maybe will be a little bit less, you know, cut and dry in terms of where,
you know, public support is, to be able to ask and exchange independent of government policy
to take such a large role in setting some sort of future course of action,
which could, for example, aggravate one nation or another. So for us, I think it's critical that
we're not trying to make these kinds of public policy decisions on our own. And instead, as an
industry, just get that guidance from, for example, the Treasury, who has said to us point
playing, but their priority right now is not blocking all Russian users. It's blocking large
Russian institutions, known oligarchs and accomplices of Vladimir Putin. It's making
sure that any of the new sanctions that are rolling out in real time every day that are
quite targeted in scope, that we are helping enforce, and we do so extremely effectively.
Got it. Joe, what questions you got? Hey, Brad, thanks for coming on. So my question would just
be around FTX other initiatives, right? So I know you guys have launched the NFT platform,
the marketplace, and I know you guys are getting into or opening a gaming division also. How do
you see these ancillary businesses, we'll call them, as like onboarding ramps for crypto in
general and then FTX specifically? Yeah, great question. So a little bit about our gaming
initiative. So we have our NFT marketplace right now, which is, you know, it's like a consumer
facing NFT marketplace similar to OpenSea. And on the platform, you can mint and you can buy and
sell Solana and Ethereum-based NFTs. And we think that it's a great on-ramp into crypto because
it's something that people really get. It's kind of hard to explain to the average person, okay,
well, Solana is a protocol token that's given as rewards for taking place in a proof-of-stake
network. This is already kind of strayed far from, I think, what is going to be easily understandable
by the general public. But the idea of, oh, here's a collectible, and it's yours, and you're the only
one in the world who can prove that you own it, it's sort of like baseball cards or collecting
art or being able to download music with some sort of perk, being able to engage in some fan
experience that only you get by buying this particular thing. That's something that's
relatable to people. And so as an on-ramp into crypto, we think it has a lot of potential.
But for NFTs in particular, one of the places we see the most promise for the technology is in gaming.
So gaming has hundreds of millions, if not a billion users around the world.
And it's a multi-billion dollar industry for in-game items, things like buying skins and power-ups and different items and expansion packs within the game.
And one of the main problems with the current technology involved in these games is that they're typically inside of the walled garden of the gaming economy.
So you see this already with some of the recent games that have come out where people are selling logins on eBay with items in them because there's this gray market that's developed around trying to monetize investments in games.
What NFTs would allow people to do, what crypto and blockchain technology in general allows
people to do is be able to take those items outside the game and be able to participate
in a organized, transparent, cryptographically secure marketplace for these kinds of things
and let people who want to benefit from the investments in the game actually do so.
So not just put money in, but be able to take money out.
Now, we don't expect all users to be able to want to participate this way.
Many just want to play the game for fun and be able to just enjoy the game in their free or
freemium way that they are now. But for those hardcore users who are sinking a lot of money
and time into the game, the idea of being able to integrate with blockchain technology to be able to
have more of an investment sense, we think is going to be extremely valuable and going to be
a large industry. And so where FTX plays a role in here is that we can provide the backend technology
for games, where if some game studio doesn't necessarily want to go out and become experts
in how to integrate with Solana and Polygon, or be able to hold custodial wallets, or be able to
mint NFTs, but they do know how to make a game, which is something that we don't know how to do,
then we can leverage each other's best technology and comparative advantages by them white labeling
our technology inside our game. And so that's something we're in discussion with a number of
game studios on through this new gaming initiative. Yeah. So my second question off of that would
just be, obviously, as you said, there's a gray market developing, right? Where some people are
interested in this and some people maybe still don't either get the value or just don't want it
in general. But you guys are having those conversations with game developers and game
studios. How have those gone? Like, are more people interested than you thought? Is it kind
of a wait and see approach or are people like aggressively starting to allocate money and
intellectual capital towards this? It's a little bit of all of the above. I think what we find is
The interest is enormous. We're talking with dozens of different game studios, all who want to figure out some way of integrating with blockchain technology, whether it's they're building new games, which from scratch have the premise of being blockchain based, or they want to figure out a way to retrofit old games where maybe you can already buy skins in this game, but they would like to turn that into NFT technology.
So we're having all those conversations. But on the wait and see side, though, game studios really want to make sure they get this right. Remember, a game might have hundreds of millions of users. That's more than, let's say, crypto exchanges have right now. They're rightfully skeptical about how is this going to play out? How are they going to make sure that this is going to integrate well and be perfect and not result in alienating users?
And so there's this long strategic conversation that's happening over how do they want to actually integrate this technology? And do they want to do it? How fast do they want to move? Which blockchain do they actually want to integrate with? Which parts of their game do they actually want to turn into blockchain based? How do they make sure it doesn't sound like this is turning into, you know, play to earn and turning the game into work instead of fun for a lot of these different studios. So it's a little bit of a combination of all the above.
Gotcha. John, what do you got? Yeah, Brett, nice to meet you. Can you just talk about how you guys
came up with the fee structure for FTX? I know that's really big for a lot of institutional and
retail investors, but you guys seem to have very, very low fees compared to other exchanges. Can
you just talk about how you got to that point? Sure. So a lot of the ways that FTX was created
and modeled was based on the way that partly exchanges work in the traditional equity space,
for example, where there's this maker-taker model. And the idea is you want to be able to
incentivize people to provide liquidity on the platform to people who want to take liquidity
from the platform. Because providing generally is harder. You have to commit capital to putting
orders on the book and keeping them there in all market conditions, whether it's lower high
volatility, things are generally moving up and down, whether there's periods of thinned out or
larger amounts of liquidity being taken on the exchange. And so we wanted to make sure that
if the liquidity providers are going to come and commit their capital to FTX,
they're going to be compensated for doing so in the form of maker rebates.
And so that's the first part of this, which is that there's this maker-taker on the exchange.
The second is that we want to encourage people to trade more and provide more liquidity again
for these large institutions that are trading hundreds of millions worth of crypto every
single day. And so we created these speed tiers where the more you trade, the more you go up the
volume scale, the more that you benefit on the exchange for doing so. This is not too dissimilar
what's on other exchanges, but it's somewhat unique compared to, for example, on traditional
equities where the maker-taker is mostly fixed unless you're part of certain market maker
programs. And so we naturally evolved the fees over time. One thing that's special about FTX is
that we don't have private fee deals. So it's not like there's some institution out there that's got
some bespoke deal because of their relationship with FTX. All of our fee tiers are completely
public. And so if, for example, we ever want to make sure that some particularly high volume
participants can be rewarded more for their volume, then we'll create new fee tiers that
everyone can potentially benefit from if they have the same volume levels. We don't do something
But that's special with that one exchange. And so that's been our the ethos behind how we've built up the features over time is sort of naturally trying to incentivize our largest institutions to stay with us.
Brett, when you start to think about kind of moving forward, one of the key things I know you guys have been focused on is finding the absolute best talent.
Talk to me about what that's looked like. Where have you found folks? Are they coming from traditional finance, coming from traditional technology?
Are they coming right out of school? Just where are you finding the best people to help you build a lot of this stuff?
Yeah, it's a mix of all of the above.
I would say that one thing that makes us a little bit different is because we're such
a small company and we have such large initiatives that we're trying to push forth, it's really
important to us to find people who are very independent and very entrepreneurial in spirit
and really are people who want to work on the ground and get things done.
So one thing we don't have as a company is managers of managers of managers of managers,
right?
It needs to be like every person is contributing individually to their effort.
So like myself, for example, I'm the president of FTX, but I'm also doing programming as
well myself.
So everyone needs to be an individual contributor to some extent.
So because of that, we tend to lean towards people who have industry experience in whatever
it is that their role they're applying for so that they can hit the ground running from
day one.
But we have found some people who have been directly out of school.
part of those have been through internal referrals of people who are already here
who know those people and can vouch for their their skills for their acumen for their intelligence
and so you know that's that's a that's a big part of how we end up with people is a lot of it comes
through internal referral but in general trying to find people who are experienced coming in so
that could be experienced in crypto it could be experienced in software development another
software development company if that's their job with the company and we're continuing to hire and
trying to do so very deliberately so that we get those, you know, those 10 X's into the company.
Absolutely. Last question I have for you, then we'll let you go, is you all have been the pioneer
in a lot of marketing initiatives. So you went ahead, you did what is now known as FTX Arena
here in Miami. My brother, John, is supporting economic development in Miami by going to as
many heat games as possible. And you guys have done a whole bunch of other things. What's the
next kind of frontier that you all are pushing into? Maybe it's the luxury goods market. I saw
that you all hired a woman who is very well known in that industry, or is there something else that
you're like, hey, this is the next area we're going to focus on where we think that there's
a lot of opportunity? Yeah, really good question. I think we started in sports because sports has
such universal appeal. There's very few ways to reach a mass audience of 10 or 100 million people
than doing something large in the sports area, like putting your name on a stadium or, you know,
putting the patches on the MLB umpires uniforms or purchasing a Super Bowl ad time. So all of
these things have been very valuable for us for establishing the FTX brand in a very quick
and penetrating way. Now for the next, what's next, you know, I think that we probably are
slowing a little bit down on some of the new sports partnerships, but looking to see if there's
other adjacent areas in the entertainment industry, for example. Fashion is another one where we can
find large brands or large celebrities, talent that we can partner with to continue to spread
the good word about FTX's brands and what makes us special as a company and continuing a lot of
the initiatives around not just growing our business, but also around a lot of the philanthropic
giving back initiatives that we have as a company that also tends to align with a lot of our
partners. Yeah. It's, uh, uh, it's pretty incredible. It's a, dare I say, uh, kind of
first principles thinking, right. Or original thinking in terms of where to go and, uh, and
why that could be valuable. So, uh, kudos to you guys. Where can we send people to find you on the
internet or, uh, find out more about FTX using the products? Sure. Um, well I'm primarily on
Twitter, Brett underscore FTX US. Um, but we also have our two sites for two exchanges, FTX.us,
ftx.com we also have a few different mobile apps the ftx app formerly blockfolio as well as the
ftx us and ftx pro applications as well we got to uh for everyone who's watching right now come on
we got to get brett's uh followers up there we got to get them to at least like you know like
50 000 have them catch uh catch joe eventually maybe
i just put uh i just put his twitter account in uh in the chat so anyone who uh who's not
following brett go uh go follow him he's great follow lots of uh awesome work going on at ftx so
listen man thank you so much for taking the time to uh to join us i think a lot of people learned
uh quite a bit about what you all are doing and we'll definitely have to bring you back as you
guys continue progressing yeah anytime thanks so much guys all right later buddy thanks so much
for listening to today's episode i really hope you guys enjoyed this one make sure you're subscribed
on apple spotify or your favorite podcast player and if you're looking to try to transition to get
a new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to palmscryptocourse.com.
We've developed a curriculum with the top teams across the industry. It's a three-week intensive
training program with over 50 events packed into that three-week time period. Go to
palmscryptocourse.com to learn more, and I'll meet you guys for the next episode.
