I think SBF was greasing political wheels to expand his financial crimes to the massive U.S. derivatives market.
In March, FTX asked the CFTC to change derivative clearing rules to match how FTX worked outside the US. The biggest change was to replace the intermediary (maintaining large backstop reserves) with an "auto-liquidation" protocol imposed upon traders. This was strongly opposed by other companies during a congressional hearing, but it was kept under consideration by the CFTC.
An FTX bankruptcy filing revealed that Alameda Research, SBF's trading outfit, secretly bypassed this auto-liquidation:
Cheat codes for playing with trillions? An actual super-villain.Quote:
Unacceptable management practices included the use of an unsecured group email account as the root user to access confidential private keys and critically sensitive data for the FTX Group companies around the world, the absence of daily reconciliation of positions on the blockchain, the use of software to conceal the misuse of customer funds, the secret exemption of Alameda from certain aspects of FTX.com’s auto-liquidation protocol, ...