Bloomberg Interview: SBF Believes Regulation is Necessary for the Crypto Industry, FTX's NFT Trading Platform to Launch in as Soon as One Month

On Friday, September 17, Bloomberg News interviewed FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX.US President Brett Harrison, discussing regulatory issues in the crypto industry, stablecoins, NFTs, and the unexpected Solana outage last week.

About Regulatory Issues

In the past few weeks, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has become more outspoken in its efforts to regulate cryptocurrency exchanges. Despite facing public opposition, the SEC's actions seem to be more aggressive, stepping up to create more comprehensive guidelines for cryptocurrency exchanges. Brett Harrison strongly supports these regulatory actions and believes they are necessary, stating:

This is because operating in an environment where reasonable rules are established and allow for innovation will make everything much easier.

Last Friday, on the 17th, Coinbase canceled the launch of its lending product "Coinbase Lend" due to threats of SEC litigation. When Bloomberg asked Sam about the potential impact of stricter lending product regulations on cryptocurrency companies, he said:

If done well, these plans could be beneficial for consumers as they may provide higher asset returns.

Aside from issues with centralized exchanges, Brett Harrison also mentioned Lending Pools on DeFi platforms, expressing concerns about the diverse range of these pools making it difficult to choose. He stated:

Many lending pools are quite transparent and secure, but there are just too many of them. We want to ensure they are subject to more careful control. I agree that there should be guidelines established around them.

About Stablecoins

According to a report by Bloomberg, the U.S. Treasury Department and other federal agencies are considering whether the Financial Stability Oversight Council should conduct stricter reviews and enforcement of stablecoins. Sam commented:

Given the utility of stablecoins, it would be quite "tragic" if the U.S. were to completely ban stablecoins one day. Using stablecoins is very efficient for transferring funds and injecting funds into trading accounts.

Brett Harrison added that he believes stablecoins add a lot of value to the system, as they can easily interact with all aspects of the cryptocurrency industry. Excessive government intervention, he argued, would significantly reduce the efficiency of stablecoin usage.

About Solana

Last week, Solana experienced transaction verification issues, leading to a 17-hour block halt. On the 20th, the Solana Foundation released an incident report on their official website, explaining that the network congestion was due to a denial-of-service attack (DoS). A project named Grape Protocol launched an Initial DEX Offering (IDO) on Raydium, where bots initiated a large number of transactions exceeding Solana's capacity limit. These transactions resulted in memory overflow and caused many validation nodes to crash, ultimately slowing down and halting the network.

Regarding this network incident, Brett Harrison believes there is no need to worry even if a similar attack were to occur again, as the issue has been addressed. He added:

I think part of progress is stress-testing to see what happens and improve upon the issues. If you never do that, the industry may never expand to support large projects.

About NFTs

FTX currently offers its users the ability to mint and list NFTs, and plans to allow users to import NFT projects minted through other platforms. However, FTX's ambitions for the NFT trading market go beyond this. Brett Harrison stated:

Our NFT platform will be a competitor to OpenSea, and I believe we are quite close to it, with about a month away from being usable.