Ex-FTX President Brett Harrison Raises $35M for New Futures Exchange Startup

Ex-FTX executive Brett Harrison raised $35 million for his perpetual futures exchange startup, The Information reported Tuesday (Dec. 23).

The new funding round values Architect Financial Technologies at $187 million, according to the report, which cited unnamed sources.

The exchange, AX, offers perpetual futures on assets like stocks and foreign currencies, the report said. Perpetual futures, a type of asset popularized by cryptocurrency exchanges such as FTX and Binance, are futures without an expiration date, offering investors leverage with no need to roll over contracts.

“We think the biggest and most important markets are derivatives of traditional asset classes,” Harrison said, per the report, adding AX does not offer crypto perpetuals. “This is such a large market that we think is ripe for disruption using the new structure.”

AX is regulated in Bermuda and open to non-U.S. institutional customers, the report said. It is not available in the U.S., as perpetual futures are not sanctioned by American regulators.

Harrison was president of FTX’s U.S. operations from May 2021 to September 2022, leaving the company two months before the parent operations’ high-profile collapse.

Unlike other executives associated with the exchange, he was never charged with any wrongdoing and criticized former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried on Twitter in 2023.

“I never could have guessed that underlying these kinds of issues—which I’d seen at other more mature firms in my career and believed not to be fatal to business success—was multibillion-dollar fraud,” Harrison wrote.

He also said his association with FTX made it difficult to initially find capital for his startup, with prospective investors calling it too much of a PR risk.

Meanwhile, a trio of FTX executives who had been charged in connection with Bankman-Fried’s activities agreed to final judgments from the Securities and Exchange Commission, without denying the regulator’s allegations.

The SEC said last week that it had obtained the final judgments against Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of FTX sister company Alameda Research; Zixiao (Gary) Wang, the former chief technology officer of FTX Trading; and Nishad Singh, the exchange’s former co-lead engineer. All three had testified against Bankman-Fried at trial.

The judgments include a 10-year officer-and-director bar for Ellison, and 8-year officer-and-director bars for Wang and Singh, along with 5-year conduct-based injunctions for Ellison, Wang and Singh.

The SEC alleged that while Bankman-Fried and FTX told investors the company was a safe crypto asset trading platform and Alameda had no special privileges, Ellison, Wang and Singh knew that Alameda had been exempted from risk mitigation measures and given an essentially unlimited “line of credit” funded by FTX’s customers.