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At the same time, a draft of the product gets sent to various regulators for approval. If the product sets any new precedent or links to an easily manipulated market, it can get rejected or delayed. (Think crypto futures approval). Regulators can take weeks+ to bless a launch.

After all the green lights are given & developers have built the product into the larger exchange platform, you can finally open it for trading. If you're lucky, the product will actually match what the customer wanted & they'll still have an interest in trading it.

More often than not, either the customer's strategy will have changed while you were building the product, or the product wasn't built correctly. Either way, it becomes a low/zero volume market with no revenue almost immediately. (sad face)

As you can likely tell from the above, launching a good futures product that works is really hard. The design challenge mixed with competitive pressures forces exchanges to resort to largely copying what their rivals are making.

That's generally how a TradFi exchange launches products. How does FTX do it? Someone tweets at @SBF_FTX, SBF tells the product guy to build it, they build it, they launch it. No politics. No regulatory approval. No lost message in middle management. It's beautiful.

How can this be anywhere near possible? 1. No middle management - only a few dozen people are needed to launch a product vs. hundreds or more in TradFi. 2. Regulation - For the most part FTX doesn't need approval to launch stuff outside the US. (cont.)

3. FTX is focused on one market - crypto. It's not like there's a cash equities or fixed income business swallowing up all the internal time & resources. Focus matters. 4. FTX is private. They can choose fast growth > profits without dealing with angry investors.