(Reuters) – Brett Harrison, president of FTX US, is stepping down from his role but will stay on in an advisory capacity at the cryptocurrency exchange, he wrote in a series of tweets on Tuesday.
Harrison’s decision comes a month after one of his now-deleted tweets caught the ire of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
The U.S. regulator had said the July tweet contained misleading claims that funds held at and stocks purchased through FTX were FDIC insured, and ordered the company to remove any misleading language from its social media accounts and websites.
In response, chief executive officer Sam Bankman-Fried emphasized FTX is not FDIC-insured, and apologized if anyone misinterpreted previous comments.
Harrison, who took over the role in May last year, is moving on at a time the cryptocurrency exchange is seen as the ‘white knight’ of the beleaguered sector as it acquires assets, technologies and customers of companies at cheap valuations in a shaky digital assets sector.
“This industry is at a number of crossroads. The one that matters most to me, as a financial technologist, is the intersection of the arrival of larger market participants, and the increasing fragmentation and technological complexity of the market’s landscape,” he wrote on Twitter, adding he will remain in the industry.
The cryptocurrency sector has been crippled due to an industry wide sell-off after the collapse of major tokens terraUSD and luna. Several firms including hedge fund Three Arrows and crypto lenders Celsius and Voyager Digital filed for bankruptcy, while Coinbase, BlockFi and Crypto.com laid off thousands of employees.
(Reporting by Mehnaz Yasmin in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri)
