The former president of FTX US dishes the dirt on his falling out with former Jane Street colleague Sam Bankman-Fried and predicts the spot Bitcoin ETF will far outshine the record-breaking success of the Bitcoin Futures ETF.

Who is this guy anyway?

The ex-president of FTX US, Brett Harrison, tells Magazine that he didn’t say a single word to Sam Bankman-Fried during the two-month notice period after he resigned, which was only months before the whole exchange blew up. Even getting a message to SBF to say he was resigning in the first place was hard work.

“I had to talk to other people in the company to formally resign. I wrote one text to Sam and I got back a single heart emoji. That was the last I heard from him,” Harrison declares.

Harrison and Bankman-Fried had been colleagues years earlier at quantitative trading firm Jane Street, where Harrison saw his potential while teaching SBF in a course on programming for traders. But things went south real quick between them at FTX.

Harrison claims it was due to Bankman-Fried’s inflated ego and his reluctance to accept any feedback or advice.

“Sam hated criticism and, as a result, refused to communicate with me. It drove my decision to quit even further,” he says.

Yet, Harrison says he had no clue of the storm about to engulf the company with FTX declaring bankruptcy only a few months after he bailed from the U.S. arm of exchange.

1/ An announcement: I’m stepping down as President of @FTX_Official. Over the next few months I’ll be transferring my responsibilities and moving into an advisory role at the company.

— Brett Harrison (@BrettHarrison88) September 27, 2022

“The rest of us, especially in the U.S., were blindsighted. We were working with regulators, top lawyers, and to have the whole organization fail because of one person’s greed, will stay with us for the rest of our life.”

However, he feels justice was done in the recent fraud trial against his former boss.

“I do feel the result was absolutely just, and I’m glad that justice was served quickly; I think it was essential that Sam was held accountable for his actions,” he declares.

Meanwhile, Harrison wasted no time diving into a new project.

He co-founded Architect.xyz, a DeFi platform that focuses on bridging all the different opportunities in the digital asset space for both institutional and retail investors.

Harrison is a bit of a brainiac and has a computer science degree focused on artificial intelligence (AI) from Harvard University. So, who better to ask about the potential for AI to take over the world?

“I do not think AI is a threat to humanity,” he declares, pointing out that AI has been in development for much longer than people think:

“Lots of people are now seeing AI for the first time, they don’t appreciate the decades of progress that has gone into it.”

Harrison is more concerned about humans using AI to pull off scams and swipe identities more effortlessly.

“It truly is just linear algebra,” he says. “The idea that linear algebra is some existential threat to our survival just feels somewhat fanciful to people who have been practitioners in the field for a long time.”

Bloomberg is really loving AI for me these days.

Not a bad thing, but is this really an accurate or representative description of what my company is doing? pic.twitter.com/z5IHSvp0fq

— Brett Harrison (@BrettHarrison88) July 19, 2023

What led to Twitter Fame?

Harrison is a smart guy who drops interesting stuff on social media that people seem to dig.

But let’s not dance around the fact that the FTX connection is what blew up his follower numbers, with his count hitting its highest weekly peak when FTX took a nosedive in November 2022, when he gained 2,140 followers, according to data from Social Blade.

Back in January, his long rant about his departure from X got nearly 3 million eyeballs. He said he wasn’t canned from the FTX gig; it just wasn’t his dream job, and SBF was an “insecure, prideful manager.”

1/49 Many have asked questions about my time at FTX US and why I left when I did. As I indicated earlier this week, I’m happy to begin sharing my experiences and perspective publicly.

— Brett Harrison (@BrettHarrison88) January 14, 2023

Content people can expect

If you scroll through Harrison’s timeline over the years, you’ll notice his glam lifestyle has toned down considerably since the FTX days. 

Back then, he was often seen hanging out with celebs and former prime ministers.

Nowadays, it’s way more low-key. Besides throwing in some market talk, Harrison’s been sharing snippets about his family life lately. 

He’s even flexing about saving toys from the FTX US office that somehow dodged the whole bankruptcy drama.

What type of content does he like?

Harrison loves the blend of genius and goofiness on Crypto X — getting a daily fix of humor and high intellect.

“One of the things I love about Crypto Twitter  is the perfect mix of highly intellectual cerebral, either Market structure or political commentary, and degenerate memes.”

However, when we asked about the accounts he’s into, he’s not that forthcoming. 

After doing some light digging, it turns out he’s following 2,100 accounts, and guess who’s in the mix? None other than Bankman-Fried’s pal Tiffany Fong.

it was an honor for me as well, I truly admire both your talent and your meme game

— Brett Harrison (@BrettHarrison88) September 27, 2022

Bitcoin predictions?

Harrison used to avoid making predictions, saying he’d never have predicted the events that happened to him. But that was when things were going too smoothly, and that’s all changed. 

At the beginning of 2021 I would have assigned a low probability to almost every major thing that’s happened in my life this year: that I’d leave tradfi after 11 years, that Sam would end up hiring me, that I’d help build a crypto exchange, that I’d open a twitter account…

— Brett Harrison (@BrettHarrison88) December 31, 2021

Harrison declares there is a very “high probability” that a spot Bitcoin ETF will get approved in the first quarter of 2024.

As for price predictions? Harrison isn’t tossing out any six-figure numbers right away.

“In Q1 assuming there is an ETF that’s approved. I think something in the $50,000 to $55,000 range feels pretty probable,” he states.

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He doesn’t see Bitcoin hitting six figures until “toward the end of 2024 or early 2025 at the earliest.”

He points to the first day of Bitcoin Futures ETF as just a little hint of how optimistic he is about the spot Bitcoin ETF:

“If you remember the day when a Bitcoin Futures ETF was listed the inflows were some of the highest ever seen in the history of ETFs. I think we’re going to see even more records broken for a spot Bitcoin ETF.”

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Ciaran Lyons

Ciaran Lyons is an Australian crypto journalist. He’s also a standup comedian and has been a radio and TV presenter on Triple J, SBS and The Project.

Several former FTX executives have teamed up to help build a new cryptocurrency exchange in Dubai with a specific focus on what FTX failed to do — secure customer funds.

Ex-FTX lawyer Can Sun is leading the way with Trek Labs, a Dubai-based startup that received a license to offer cryptocurrency services in the region in late October. Backpack Exchange is the name under which Trek Labs will offer those services.

Sun will receive support from ex-FTX employee, Armani Ferrante, who serves as CEO of Trek’s holding company in the British Virgin Islands, according to a Nov. 11 report by the Wall Street Journal. Ferrante also runs Backpack, a cryptocurrency wallet which is integrated in Backpack Exchange.

Sun’s former legal deputy at FTX, Claire Zhang, who is also Ferrante’s wife, is also on Trek’s executive team. However, once Trek raises an investment round, Zhang plans to transition out of the company as she has been working without pay to “help bootstrap the exchange,” WSJ said.

Sun and Ferrante iterated they wanted to use the lessons learned from FTX’s failure to protect customer funds. Backpack’s technology offers a self-custody solution which integrates a multiparty computation (MPC) technique to ensure funds remain secure. MPC typically involves several parties approving a transaction before funds are moved.

With things heating up, please be aware of phishing attacks on the rise.

Backpack will NEVER ask you for your private keys.

The only valid website URLs are in our bio. Assume anything else is a scam.

Stay safe.

— Backpack (@xNFT_Backpack) November 11, 2023

It will also enable Backpack customers to verify funds whenever they want, Sun told WSJ:

“In a post-FTX world, you need trust and transparency to create a true alternative to the other players.”

Backpack Exchange is currently in beta and a wider launch will come later this month, the firm said.

Sun was a witness at Bankman-Fried’s recent fraud trial where he revealed that the former FTX CEO turned to him seeking a legal justification as to why FTX’s funds were at Alameda Research. Bankman-Fried was convicted on all seven fraud-related charges.

Related: How long could Sam Bankman-Fried go to jail for? Crypto lawyers weigh in

Sun said he quit as FTX’s general counsel the day after Bankman-Fried told him about the use of customer money.

“This went against everything that I stood for and was represented to me by Sam.”

Bankman-Fried’s former empire commingled billions of dollars of customer funds through Alameda Research for investment purposes. About $9 billion in customer funds went missing.

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