CryptoLink - October 2023 Updates
Samuel Bankman-Fried Trial Concludes with Guilty Verdict
On November 2, 2023, following just four hours of jury deliberations, Samuel Bankman-Fried was convicted of two counts of wire fraud conspiracy, two counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, each of which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. He was also convicted of conspiracy to commit commodities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities fraud, each of which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison. We set out below a summary of the trial against Bankman-Fried, which took place between October 3 and November 3, 2023. On October 3, 2023, Samuel Bankman-Fried’s trial began with jury selection. On October 4, 2023, Bankman-Fried’s college friend Adam Yedidia, who worked as a developer at FTX and a trader at Alameda Research, took the witness stand. This followed, on October 5, 2023, with former chief technology officer Zixiao ‘Gary’ Wang (the first of three government cooperators) taking the stand and testifying to implementing features into FTX’s code which allowed Alameda to incur a significant line of credit and maintain a negative balance on the exchange, each at the direction of Bankman-Fried.
