American Sam Bankman-Fried is currently considered the shooting star among crypto billionaires. Among other things, his FTX advertises in Formula 1 and claims to be one of the fastest-growing crypto exchanges worldwide. In 2021, the revenue of the crypto exchange soared by more than 1,000%, from $89 million to $1.02 billion in 2021. However, the UK regulator FCA is unimpressed and has issued a warning against FTX, saying that it is not authorized to target people in the UK.
In March 2022, FTX Group announced the establishment of FTX Europe AG, Switzerland, as a holding company (report here). In fact, FTX is licensed through various entities in several regulatory regimes. However, this may not be sufficient for the UK regulator to operate in the UK as well.
The FCA has come to attention several times in recent months as being very critical of crypto and has also expressed warnings and concerns about Binance and its activities in the UK.
In recent years, FTX has aggressively bought into several existing licensed brokerage firms, such as K-DNA Financial Services Ltd in March 2022, FTX Australia Pty Ltd (formerly ITFS Markets Pty Ltd), also announced in March 2022, or ZUBR, a Gibraltar-based DLT provider with GFSC license, in 2020.
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