Why We Invested in Architect: Building the Exchange for the AI Economy

A Founder Built for Market Infrastructure

Every investment we make ultimately comes back to the founder. We recognized almost immediately that Brett Harrison is an exceptional founder with a rare combination of experience across traditional market structure, crypto, and regulated financial infrastructure.

Before founding Architect, Brett served as President of FTX US and previously held leadership roles at Jane Street and Citadel, two of the world’s leading trading firms. Few founders have firsthand experience spanning institutional trading, exchange infrastructure, and crypto market structure at this level.

But credentials alone do not build enduring companies. Throughout our diligence, references consistently highlighted Brett's ability to recruit exceptional talent, earn the trust of sophisticated institutions, navigate complex regulatory environments, and execute against ambitious product roadmaps. It is often said that the strongest founder-market fit exists when a company becomes the truest expression of a founder's unique talents and passions. We believe Architect is exactly that for Brett.

Building the Exchange for the AI Economy

While Architect's early traction has come through perpetual futures, we believe the company's long-term opportunity is substantially broader.

As AI transforms the global economy, entirely new markets are emerging around compute, energy, metals, bandwidth, and other critical infrastructure inputs. Just as oil and electricity became foundational commodities of the industrial economy, we believe compute and its component pieces will become foundational assets of the AI economy. Perpetual futures represent the company's first product, but the broader vision is becoming the exchange powering the AI economy.

Perpetual Futures Beyond Crypto

Perpetual futures are one of crypto's most important financial innovations. After reshaping digital asset trading, we believe they are beginning to migrate into traditional financial markets.

For decades, futures markets have served as the backbone of global price discovery and risk transfer across commodities, currencies, and financial assets. Yet while trading has become increasingly electronic, the underlying market structure has changed surprisingly little. Traditional futures require participants to continually roll expiring contracts, creating operational complexity, fragmented liquidity, and additional costs.

We believe perpetual futures offer a fundamentally better design. By eliminating expiration dates, they provide continuous exposure through a single, liquid contract, simplifying trading while improving capital efficiency and price discovery. These advantages have made perpetual futures the dominant derivatives product in crypto, processing trillions of dollars in annual trading volume. In our view, that success validated more than demand for digital assets; it demonstrated a superior market structure.

We believe this design is particularly well suited to emerging AI infrastructure markets, where assets like compute and energy require continuous price discovery and efficient risk transfer.

While perpetual markets for commodities, foreign exchange, equities, and indices are beginning to emerge, the opportunity extends far beyond launching new contracts. It requires a new generation of brokerage, execution, and exchange platforms purpose-built for perpetual markets.

Building the Full Stack for Regulated Markets

Architect is integrating brokerage, execution services, exchange technology, and key regulatory licenses into a single platform for institutional derivatives markets. As liquidity grows, each component reinforces the others, strengthening customer relationships while expanding Architect's role within the broader trading ecosystem.

Equally important, Architect has chosen to build through regulation rather than around it.

Since our investment, the company has secured SEC and FINRA broker-dealer approval, obtained securities clearing capabilities through RQD, launched Architect Execution Services, and established market data agreements with Nasdaq, ICE, and OPRA.

Architect Execution Services now supports trading across futures, options on futures, and event contracts while onboarding a growing base of institutional customers.

The company has also continued to advance its exchange strategy. Most notably, its acquisition of IMX's CFTC-registered Designated Contract Market provides a significantly faster path toward launching regulated U.S. derivatives products than pursuing a new exchange license from scratch.

Execution Since Investment

Our original thesis centered on an exceptional founder and the opportunity to build the market infrastructure powering the next generation of derivatives.

Since then, Architect has continued to execute against that vision. Three months after launching its traditional asset perpetuals exchange, the platform surpassed $1 billion in trading volume. Less than one month later, it has exceeded $2 billion in cumulative trading volume and is now processing more than $1 billion in rolling 30-day volume.

Notably, Architect has achieved this without offering a token, operating an internal market maker, providing non-KYC access, listing crypto perpetuals, or supporting individual retail trading. To date, activity has been driven entirely by non-U.S. institutional participants.

For a newly launched venue focused on non-crypto perpetual futures, this early liquidity provides encouraging evidence that institutional demand extends well beyond digital assets. Architect recently launched the industry's first aluminum perpetual contract and continues expanding its international exchange across additional real-world asset markets.

The company is also bringing that vision onshore. Through the American Innovation Exchange, Architect plans to launch a U.S. futures venue focused on compute, energy, metals, and other critical inputs supporting the AI economy. 

In late 2025, the company announced a $35 million Series A financing and has since expanded its regulatory footprint, institutional customer base, and exchange capabilities.

We believe crypto's greatest contribution to financial markets may not be creating entirely new asset classes, but improving the infrastructure underlying existing ones. 

History suggests that category-defining companies are rarely incumbents adapting to a new technology. More often, they are born from the category itself and built natively around the new market structure. Incumbents are often too slow to recognize how fundamentally a market is changing, or too constrained by legacy technology to respond quickly once they do. 

As AI creates entirely new categories of economically important assets, we believe demand for purpose-built market infrastructure will grow alongside them. We believe Architect is uniquely positioned to build that infrastructure, and that's why we're excited to partner with Brett and the team as they help define the next generation of global financial markets.

For informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. The views expressed herein are those of the author as of the time of writing and may not necessarily represent the views of CMT Digital and its affiliates. Certain information contained in the piece has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of CMT Digital. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, CMT Digital has not independently verified such information.

 References to any securities, digital assets, tokens, and/or cryptocurrencies are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute a recommendation to invest in any such instrument nor do such references constitute an offer to provide investment advisory services. This content is not intended for investors or prospective investors and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision, including a decision to invest in any vehicles managed by CMT Digital. Such offerings are only made via formal offering documents. 

Past performance is not indicative of future results. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, and/or opinions expressed in this piece are subject to change without notice.