He Quit FTX Before the Collapse. Now Brett Harrison Is All-In on Perps

If there is one clear breakout product in crypto this cycle, it's the decentralized perpetual futures exchange.

Not only is Hyperliquid having a moment, boasting more than $300 billion in monthly volumes, but Binance is hot on its heels with the launch of Aster. The growth was so fast, it seemed like nothing could break the craze — until liquidations and an auto-deleveraging cascade in mid-October raised new questions about market structure. Maybe the preference for perpetual futures as a trading tool is correct, but market plumbing could be improved.

That's the bet that Brett Harrison is making with Architect and AX, a newly launched perpetuals platform looking to bridge crypto and traditional finance. As Harrison explains in a new Coinage interview, leveraging new markets for larger traders could bring enhanced functionality for everyone.

"You see cases where digital asset markets are sort of re-discovering all of the same problems from traditional financial markets that have been solved methodically and carefully and through trial and error and regulation and law over the course of many, many decades," he said, highlighting the disastrous record $20 billion liquidation event that happened on October 10. "There's a huge pie to go after in terms of making more efficient market structure — in terms of bringing better products to market for institutions and eventually individuals — such that there can be many winners here."

The futures market, as Harrison explains, is quite large when you expand beyond just crypto. And unlike options, which have an expiration date, perpetual futures are, well, perpetual. Perpetual futures offer simplicity for traders to unlock leverage without having to worry about those expiry dates in the future or potential losses tied to an options contract expiring when it's worthless.

Unlike Hyperliquid and Aster, Architect is looking to grow a centralized exchange that can unlock the same tooling for traditional equity traders. But similar to its more crypto-centric competitors, Architect is allowing traders to use stablecoins for collateral. (Architect is backed by both Coinbase and USDC issuer Circle.) But as Harrison explains, the idea of bringing this type of functionality to traditional equities makes more sense than simply tokenizing them.

"Perpetuals have a complimentary, and in many cases, a better set of use cases than tokens for equities," he explained. "They enable higher leverage, they enable going long and short without having to worry about borrowing ... that's why we're bullish on perps over tokenized equities."

And as far as leveraging crypto's favorite new-found tool for traditional finance, things may not appear to be as competitive as they appear.

"Our goal is not to eat Hyperliquid, it's to provide something very different, which is an experience that is more like combining the best of CME and Coinbase into one exchange and really focusing on those asset classes that are very much underserved for these kinds of derivatives — including listing things that Hyperliquid has not listed and may never list," he said. "I think people will trade on both and that's totally fine."

Of course, Harrison has experiences that straddle crypto and traditional finance in ways not many share. He famously quit his post spearheading things at FTX.US before the collapse in 2022. And before that, he spent most of his career in traditional finance, including time at the quant firm Jane Street where he met Sam Bankman-Fried.

"Even though it ended poorly for FTX.US and I ultimately left because I couldn't stand working for Sam and that turned out to be the greatest-timed decision of my career," he said. "I will say I learned an unbelievably large amount about markets and about digital assets and running exchanges from that experience," Harrison said.

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