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

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.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Sam’s background and how he became involved in crypto trading
• Why and how FTX was created
• How FTX works and why the big focus on derivatives
• The cross-over between FTX and Alameda
• What Serum is and how it fits in the long term vision of FTX
• Sam’s view on where products on DeFi are falling short and how it can be fixed
• What are the trade-offs on Serum?
• The off chain Serum order book
• How cross-chain swaps work
• The boundaries of the Serum ecosystem in relation to Solana
• What is the governance mechanism on Serum
• Sam’s view on the AMM argument
• Where Sam thinks the DeFi ecosystem is heading and what is needed for it to gain legitimacy in the traditional finance world

Episode links:

• FTX
• Alameda Research
• Project Serum
• Epicenter episode 312 with Anatoly Yakovenko, Co-founder and CEO of Solana
• SushiSwap Twitter thread
• FTX on Twitter
• Sam on Twitter

Sponsors:

• Algorand: Learn how to start building on Algorand – Free webinar on November 17th - https://algorand.com/epicenter

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