FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange founded by Sam Bankman-Fried, said on Thursday its US-based customers will soon be able to access crypto derivatives and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Brett Harrison, the president of FTX US, said the United States branch of FTX.COM is also building a self-hosted wallet to support FTX NFTs and NFT gaming.
In addition, Harrison revealed that the popular derivatives exchange is seeking to offer tokenized stock trading to its US customers. The compliant offering is a clearing and settlement platform based on the blockchain and lets companies raise capital with security tokens. It also provides secondary market liquidity for tokens that are offered and sold as securities.
The move comes on the heels of FTX launching a non-fungible (NFT) marketplace exclusively for customers living in the United States. The platform enables users to mint, buy and sell NFTs — all traded cross-chain across the Ethereum and Solana blockchains.
FTX.US kicked off these plans earlier in October when acquired Ledger Holdings Inc., parent company of a CFTC-regulated digital currency futures and options exchange. Ledger was then rebranded as FTX US Derivatives, but both firms confirmed that that the acquisition and name change will have no effect on LedgerX’s daily operations.
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FTX not the only exchange branching into NFT
Thanks to its regulatory status, FTX US Derivatives will provide FTX.US’s institutional and retail investors with options and futures contracts on Bitcoin and Ethereum. Since its inception in 2017, LedgerX has cleared over 10 million crypto derivatives contracts alongside pioneering the mini contracts that enable granular trading.
FTX, which was recently valued at $25 billion after a $450 million funding round, isn’t the only crypto exchange to expand into the surging NFTs arena. Rival Binance launched its own NFT marketplace in collaboration with the likes of soccer players Michael Owen and Alphonso Davies. OKEx also added an NFT hub to its crypto spot and derivatives exchange, allowing users to mint, buy and sell their NFT assets within the platform’s native ecosystem.
FTX, which launched in 2019, raised in July $900 million in a Series B fundraise, which was the largest ever for a crypto exchange. Since then, the company says it has grown its user base by nearly 50 percent while its average trade volume increased 75 percent, now averaging $14 billion per day.
