Former FTX.US President  Says More Can Be Done To Stop Next Disaster

Brett Harrison, who used to be president of FTX.US, says that the failure of the exchange where he used to work can teach us how to avoid the next crypto disaster.

In a new talk with Scott Melker, Harrison says that the fall of FTX has taught him that there needs to be more independent oversight.

“A couple of high-level learnings. Obviously, we’re going to ignore all of the fraud aspect, which was just terrible and shocking and it definitely raises questions about not how you prevent fraud, because criminals will always find a way, but more like what kinds of systems can you put in place to be able to have proper oversight. The people working on proof-of-reserve or proof-of-solvency protocols, I think that could be extremely helpful [and] having independent agencies looking over centralized entities in the crypto space.

DeFi (decentralized finance) has so much promise because it is a way of providing a truly transparent execution and custody that everyone can see and everyone can audit.

As long as we’re going to have a world where there are centralized actors and digital assets that basically form the function of brokers – they really are, they hold dollars on behalf of customers and they execute orders on behalf of customers – those basically should be regulated and audited and overseen by brokers and that should be a separate thing from DeFi. But I think that would be a huge help to regaining trust and confidence in the digital assets world.”

Harrison also says that he has learned how important it is to make decentralized products that give users more control over their own data.

“Some personal learnings are trying to build products and services that are sort of decentralized. I don’t necessarily mean that in the blockchain sense, I mean more in that the customer maintains as much control as possible over their own information.”