Former FTX US president Brett Harrison’s Architect expands crypto-style perpetual futures into AI compute markets

Architect Financial Technologies, the firm founded by former FTX US president Brett Harrison, is planning to expand its perpetual futures exchange into AI-linked markets through new contracts tied to data center compute pricing.

In a statement shared with The Block, the company said its institutional-focused exchange, AX, will “imminently” introduce perpetual futures designed to track daily GPU rental prices used in AI model training and inference, as well as dynamic random-access memory pricing, pending regulatory approval. Architect described the planned products as the financial industry’s first exchange-traded futures contracts based on compute.

The contracts are being developed in partnership with compute index provider Ornn Data, which supplies benchmarks derived from live GPU transaction data. Ornn CEO Kush Bavaria told The Block that the company sources pricing data from multiple partner spot markets, with HydraHost serving as its largest contributor through GPU brokering activity.

According to the firms, the products are intended to serve AI companies, data center operators, lenders, and hardware vendors seeking to hedge volatility and depreciation risk tied to compute infrastructure. Positions will be marginable and can be funded using either U.S. dollars or U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoins. Architect CEO Harrison told The Block that the firm is currently in discussions with market makers to support liquidity at launch, alongside data centers and compute buyers seeking hedging tools.

“As capital expenditures for AI and AI-adjacent companies continue exponential growth, there is an urgent cross-industry need to establish standardized derivatives contracts and centralized order books for compute,” Harrison said in the statement.

Bavaria added that compute is rapidly becoming “the defining commodity of the AI era,” arguing that the absence of transparent and tradeable pricing benchmarks has limited institutional risk management. Ornn’s indices are built on real transaction data from live GPU markets and are intended to support price discovery for compute exposure, he said.

“AI labs and GPU-heavy companies need price certainty instead of GPU market swings. We’ve already executed our first compute swap with more in pipeline,” Bavaria told The Block. “Infrastructure providers sitting on billions in GPU capacity have no way to hedge. And traditional commodity traders are circling compute as the next opaque market to arbitrage.”

Applying crypto-style perpetual futures to traditional and emerging asset classes

The planned expansion builds on Architect’s broader strategy of applying crypto-style perpetual futures — non-expiring derivatives contracts popularized in digital asset markets — to traditional and emerging real-world assets, first launched in October. AX currently allows institutional investors to trade perpetual contracts tied to assets such as equities and foreign exchange, but does not list derivatives linked to cryptocurrencies.

Architect operates AX through its Bermuda-regulated subsidiary and targets non-U.S. institutional traders, as perpetual futures tied to traditional assets remain unavailable to U.S. participants.

Backed by investors including Coinbase Ventures, Circle Ventures, and Anthony Scaramucci’s SALT Fund, the firm raised $35 million in a Series A funding round in late 2025, led by Miami International Holdings and Tioga Capital, as investors increasingly evaluate whether crypto-derived market structures can be adapted for macro, real-world, and emerging asset classes under regulated frameworks.

Architect previously raised a $5 million pre-seed round in 2023, followed by a $12 million seed round in 2024. The Series A round brought Architect’s valuation to $187 million, a person familiar with the matter told The Block.

Harrison, who served as president of FTX US for roughly 17 months before stepping down in September 2022, shortly before the Sam Bankman-Fried empire’s infamous collapse, has positioned Architect as an effort to bring the capital efficiency and continuous trading mechanics of crypto derivatives into regulated global finance, as interest grows beyond digital-asset-native markets.

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