LedgerX Applies for Futures Status with CFTC

LedgerX is a company that is actively working on bringing a fully licensed bitcoin futures exchange online. The company was started by Paul Chou, Juthica Chou, Zach Dexter and Ethan Rigel.

Paul Chou is an experienced securities trader, software engineer and financial entrepreneur. At Goldman Sachs, he was responsible for developing, trading, and risk managing high frequency equity trading strategies for US and Japanese markets.

Juthica spent 7 years as a derivatives trader at Goldman Sachs where she specialized in algorithmic trading. She started her career in high-frequency options market-making where her product scope ranged from equity and index options to VIX, treasuries, currencies and commodities.

Zach is an experienced software engineer, technologist and tech manager. As a consultant, Zach built out the full tech stack for a number of SaaS products.

As CFO and Co-Founder of LedgerX, Ethan oversees the capital structure, accounting and cash flows of the business and works to optimize the company’s finances to put it in the best place to succeed.

LedgerX has applied for registration with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission as a swap execution facility and a derivatives clearing organization. LedgerX intends to initially list bitcoin option contracts.

The company applied for the registration with the CFTC in late September the founder Paul Chou told Yuliya Chernova of the Wall Street Journal.

The company whose previous investors have included Google Ventures, Ben Davenport, Kamal Ravikant, Eric Kagan, Brock Pierce, Tom Robinson, Ryan J Orr, Owen Gunden, Jameel Halfan and Lightspeed Venture Partners has raised a total of $4.5 million dollars to date between seed investments and the latest Series-A round lead by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Google Ventures had previously been involved in the seed round earlier in the year.

All of that money is being put hard to work bringing in the talent and resources necessary for the venture to receive the desperately needed regulatory approval before it can begin options trading.

To help secure that regulatory approval the company has brought in Dr. Jim Newsome. Dr. Newsome is a Founding Partner of Delta Strategy Group. While serving as executive of a Mississippi-based trade group, Dr. Newsome was nominated by President Clinton and confirmed by the Senate to be a Commissioner of the CFTC in 1998. When President Bush was elected in 2000, Newsome was nominated and confirmed as Chairman of the CFTC.

Without the CFTC approval all of this will have been for naught as the company is unable to offer the futures market in the United States without the right regulatory approval but with a former chairmen of the CFTC and the funds raised along with the vast connections from the investors things are looking good for the venture.

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