Tag Archives: series-ftx-trial

Last year, as cryptocurrency company FTX and sister trading firm Alameda Research were melting down, Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison held an all-hands meeting and told staff that Alameda had taken customer deposits from FTX and could not pay them back. When asked in the meeting by an employee whose idea …

As the criminal trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried unfolds in a Manhattan courtroom, some observers in the cryptocurrency world have been watching a different FTX-related crime in progress: The still-unidentified thieves who stole more than $400 million out of FTX on the same day that the exchange declared bankruptcy …

By the evening of November 11 of last year, FTX’s staff had already endured one of the worst days in the company’s short life. What had recently been one of the world's top cryptocurrency exchanges, valued at $32 billion only 10 months earlier, had just declared bankruptcy. Executives had, after …

The trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, now coming to the end of its first week, is far bigger than just crypto. Reporters from the largest media outlets (including WIRED) have flocked to New York to cover it, TV stations are airing feature-length documentaries on the fall of the crypto …

Imagine, for a moment, that one of the world’s most beloved and successful journalists had, in 1994, embedded himself in OJ Simpson’s world. Imagine that this writer had been reporting an uplifting rags-to-riches biography of the famous football player for months, only to find himself hunched over scribbling notes in …

Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange FTX may have lost at least $8 billion in customer money, but he “didn’t intend to defraud anyone,” his defense team said Wednesday during the opening arguments of his highly anticipated trial. Though legal experts had long speculated that Bankman-Fried, or SBF for short, would take …

In the weeks after Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange began to crumble last November, he chose to ignore the most basic piece of legal advice: Say nothing, or risk incriminating yourself. He took media interviews. He appeared on podcasts. He tweeted incessantly. He started his own Substack. He promised to …

Aditiya Baradwaj joined crypto-trading firm Alameda Research when it was run out of an anonymous first-floor office in downtown Berkeley, California. It was September 2021, and the day Baradwaj arrived, Sam Bankman-Fried, the company’s founder, was sitting in the middle of the trading floor playing League of Legends. By then, …

At first, Anand thought it was just a glitch. He’d read a few tweets saying that withdrawals from FTX—then the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world—had been suspended. But these things had happened before in the crypto market, he said, “when they do server maintenance or something like that … …

On October 3, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, is due to go on trial for fraud and conspiracy in a court in the Southern District of New York. Last fall, a report published by news outlet CoinDesk cast doubt over the health of FTX’s sibling company, Alameda …