Brett Harrison (ex-FTX US), X Hall of Flame – Cointelegraph Magazine

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.

“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.”

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.”

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…