FTX CEO Says Firm Is Making Its Own Stablecoin

Crypto exchange FTX could soon have its own stablecoin.

In an interview published Thursday (Oct. 27) by the French Web3-focused publication The Big Whale, FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried said the company is likely to create its own stablecoin, without providing further details.

“Yes, it is very likely,” he said, in comments reprinted by multiple outlets Thursday. “We know how to create a stablecoin. We’re just thinking about the best partner to do it with. What I can tell you is that you’ll be hearing from us soon.”

FTX was not immediately available for comment Thursday.

Asked if his company was considering buying the stock and crypto trading firm Robinhood — something that’s been rumored since this summer — Bankman-Fried said FTX was not interested in making that move.

“There are two ways for a company to grow: either it buys companies or it continues to grow internally,” he said.

“The most important thing is to continue to grow, to attract users, whichever way you do it. We could buy a company like Robinhood, but that’s not what we’re looking at right now. Our challenge is to continue to grow organically.”

Related: FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried Suggests Crypto Firms Limit Bug Bounties

Last week, Bankman-Fried drafted a set of proposed standards to deal with hacks against his industry that he says have become too frequent and too large.

Losses from crypto hacks amounted to $1.9 billion during the first seven months of this year, according to blockchain data platform Chainalysis. That’s a 60% increase from the $1.2 billion in hacks reported during the same period in 2021.

“Hacks are extremely destructive to the digital asset ecosystem,” Bankman-Fried wrote in a document posted on the FTX website.

To deal with hackers, the CEO suggests a “5-5 standard” in which hackers who alert companies to a bug keep a bug bounty that’s no more than the smaller of 5% of what they took or $5 million — and only after the hacked company’s customers are made whole by the company’s reserves plus assets returned by the hacker.

“I think that creating a standard that could drastically reduce the impact of security breaches would be immensely important for the industry,” Bankman-Fried wrote.

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