[darawk]

Many of the TradFi HFT firms were in support of FTX's proposal. The people that ran FTX were generally reasonably competent at finance (ex Jane Street), but extremely cavalier about risk with other people's money, and extremely poor at operational management.

This is not a defense of them in any sense, other than to say that they were perfectly capable of being scumbags while also producing a good alternative to CME's futures products.

You can read about all of the people that thought FTX's proposal was good here:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-15/ftx-once-...

[graeme]

> Many of the TradFi HFT firms were in support of FTX's proposal.

I read all the quotes. None appear to be Tradfi HFT firms. They instead appear to be a variety of VCs and individuals FTX paid money to or who had a crypto interest.

For example the Fidelity quote is not “Fidelity, the firm”. It is from “ Fidelity Digital Assets President Tom Jessop”

[darawk]

Then you didn't read very carefully:

> Several letters noted the fact that the derivatives market had become concentrated in a dwindling number of players, and argued that it would be safer to trust middleman-free operations such as Bankman-Fried’s. “In the traditional intermediated model, a dependence on a limited number of clearing organizations creates a systematic concentration of risk,” Richard J. McDonald, chief regulatory counsel for Susquehanna International Group, wrote “The CFTC has an opportunity to minimize market risk by enabling platforms, such as FTX, to provide direct access to trading on margin without required intermediation.”

Susquehana is a very well respected tradfi quant firm: https://sig.com/

> FTX’s plan would “protect and empower” US investors, permitting retail investors access to products “previously available only to the small subset of well-resourced and powerful investors able to connect to the complex, traditional market infrastructure,” Peter L. Briger, CEO of investment manager Fortress Investment Group, wrote to the CFTC

Fortress Investment Group is a very well respected tradfi firm.

They're all right there. And this isn't even a complete list. If you search around, plenty of other traditional quant/HFT firms strongly supported the move. Basically the only two entities that opposed it were CME and Binance.