Welcome to part 1 of this series on crypto derivatives trading. I’m joined by Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX, one of the fastest-growing crypto derivatives exchanges. FTX launched in April of 2019, and at the time of this recording, does around $100 million dollars in daily volume.

Sam is also CEO of Alameda Research, a quantitative trading firm that provides liquidity to crypto markets worldwide. Alameda manages over $100 million in digital assets and trades $600 million to $1.5 billion dollars per day across thousands of products. They are responsible for approximately 5% of all (legitimate) crypto exchange volume.

This conversation is broken up into 7 chapters:

- Chapter 1: Quantitative trading - Chapter 2: The relationship between Alameda Research and FTX - Chapter 3: The current state of crypto derivatives trading - Chapter 4: The similarities and differences between leveraged volume and spot market volume - Chapter 5: The current state of FTX - Chapter 6: Growth hacking and brand differentiation in the crypto derivatives exchange space - Chapter 7: The future

In this episode, we cover chapters 1 through 3. Next week, we'll close the conversation by covering chapters 4 through 7. In this episode we discuss:

• How FTX got started 
• The opportunities in cryptoland versus traditional finance
• How quantitative trading works
• How the infrastructure for crypto investing has evolved over the past few years
• Blind spots to avoid when creating trading bots
• Why there are so few players in the derivatives and options platform space
• Rules, regulations, and norms for liquidity providers
• Why FTX wants more liquidity providers on their platform
• The 4 components (which Wall Street has) that are missing from crypto derivatives trading
• The difference between a future and an ETF
• How FTX handles outlier detection

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