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Sam Bankman-Fried: FTX & Project Serum – The World's First Decentralized Derivatives Exchange

Episode Summary

Sam Bankman-Fried is the CEO of FTX and Alameda Research, and co-founder of Project Serum. We hear all about his journey from Alameda, to FTX, and to his latest venture, Serum.

Episode Notes

Alameda Research is a quant trading fund founded in 2017. Today it manages over $100 million in digital assets and trades $600 million to $1.5 billion per day across thousands of products: all major coins and altcoins, as well as their derivatives. Whilst running this fund, the team thought there was space for a robust crypto derivatives exchange build for traders which solves some of the issues they saw in derivatives trading. FTX is the crypto derivatives trading platform which came out of Alameda. In just under two years of existence, it has grown to become one of the top trading platforms for crypto, trading over $1B per day in derivatives.

The FTX team are also working on Project Serum. It’s an ambitious project to create a fully decentralized and permissionless DEX and DeFi ecosystem with trustless cross-chain trading. Serum is being built on Solana to allow a centralized orderbook. This offers a much higher speed and throughput than Ethereum. The goal is to create a robust DEX ecosystem which can compete with centralized exchanges on speed, all while being fully interoperable with Ethereum.

Today our guest is Sam Bankman-Fried, he is the CEO of FTX and Alameda Research, and co-founder of Project Serum. We hear all about his journey from Alameda, to FTX, and to his latest venture, Serum.

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This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/363