Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried met with top officials at the CFTC more than 10 times over the past 14 months, says chairman Rostin Behnam

Rostin Behnam, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), during a Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022.

The founder and former CEO of failed cryptocurrencies exchange Sam Bankman- Fried met with high-level officials at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission more than 10 times over the past 14 months.

The Senate committee oversees the nation's commodities markets. The meetings with Bankman-Fried centered around FTX's "dogged" desire to amend the clearinghouse license for LedgerX.

The amendment was filed about a year ago and would have allowed LedgerX to directly settle the derivatives. By the time FTX filed for bankruptcy, the proposed change was not yet approved.

We met with Mr. Bankman- Fried and his team. Over the course of 14 months, we met 10 times in the office of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

One of the few FTX entities that didn't file for bankruptcy last month was LedgerX, which was registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

FTX filed for Chapter 11 reorganization last month after Bankman- Fried stepped down as CEO.

The third-party custodians it uses to hold cash and digital assets have been in close contact with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. According to the information presented to us, the customer property remains secure and the financial resources to operate for the foreseeable future are available.

Most of the meetings with Bankman-Fried and the FTX team took place in Washington, but there was also a meeting at a conference in Florida, two phone calls and a number of messages intended to move the application along.

Emails were exchanged between the two parties during the hearing.

The 10 meetings I mentioned were the subject of some of the messages. It was about updates, giving us, again, this approach to 'we submitted answers to the questions from the division or we have more data to just support their advocacy of this application,' all in relation to the application.

The chair said he didn't know how many times Bankman-Fried or FTX executives met with other staff at the agency, but he said they were in the building "quite a bit."

The decision to be as transparent as possible was made very early. There were a lot of strong feelings about this application. I felt I needed to be the chairman of the agency that met with FTX and Mr. Bankman- Fried.

The commission was looking at FTX's application at the time it filed for Chapter 11. There had been no decision as of November 11.