Today, US marshals will transport Sam Bankman-Fried from a Brooklyn jail to the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in Lower Manhattan.
The immediate agenda includes appointing jurors to sit in judgement of the onetime cryptocurrency billionaire, charged with multiple counts of fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance offences in connection with the failure of the exchange FTX last November.
Crypto itself, meanwhile, may be in the dock over the course of the trial, which is expected to last about six weeks, said Baniyan-Fried, who has pleaded not guilty.
FTX, worth $32 billion at its peak, is a defining symbol of the lawlessness associated with the digital assets market. And with his slob chic look and commitment to 'effective altruism,' the 31-year-old entrepreneur has epitomised the hopefuls and dreams of a blockchain-connected world.
By allegedly shifting billions of dollars worth of FTX deposits to cover losses in his hedge fund, Bankman-Fried violated one of the bedrock laws in finance - never tap customer deposits to juice your own trading book.
Prosecutors are expected to try and prove that he has done what he did, boosted by testimony from several of Bankman-Fried's former associates, including his ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison.
The case has confirmled the suspicions of crypto critics that the sector is rife with Ponzi schemes and thievery, and emboldened watchdogs like Gary Gensler, the chair of the US SEC, to crack down with a flurry of civil actions.
While Bitcoin has risen 60% since FTX filed for bankruptcy last November 11, the token's trading volume has nosedived - in August, it dropped to a five-year low. The days when BTC attracted mainstream investors appear to be over, at least for now.
The market has not been spared from the decentralised finance sector, making it a prime target for a decentralised finance industry. DeFiLama data shows the deposits, or total value locked of Lido, Aave, and other protocols, are still about a quarter less than before FTX's downfall, at $39.6 billion.
If Bankman-Fried did nothing else, he seems to have proven, yet again, that if something seems to be too good to be true, it probably is. It is unfortunate given the amount of doing good that Bankman-Fried vowed to do.
In 2022, Bankman-Fried was running his FTX-Alameda empire from a $30,000 penthouse in the Bahamas. In the tropics, he surrounded himself with colleagues who shared a luxuries work-life space.
Bankman-Fried charmed celebrities like Superstar quarterback Tom Brady and his former wife, supermodel Gisele Bundchen, who were energetic - and well compensated - spokeswomans for FTX. And he landed Michael Lewis, the best-selling author of The Big Short and Moneyball, as his biographer.
Lewis, who is releasing his book on Bankman-Fried and FTX this week, said he watched in amazement as the'most famous people in the world' would gather around the rumpled entrepreneur. The young tycoon was simply known by his initials - SBF.
Bankman-Fried, a maths whiz who graduated from MIT, envisioned cryptocurrencies as a means of achieving enough wealth to tackle epochal challenges like pandemics and artificial intelligence. He has chosen 'effective altruism,' or EA, a philosophy and social movement designed to maximize impact for the common good.
academics and intellectuals flew to the Bahamas to discuss their ideas with Bankman-Fried and his Compatriots. DL News spoke to several individuals who were privy to these discussions.
The interest in genetics, he added, boiled down to a willingness to use gene editing to increase would-be parents' odds of having kids who are happy, healthy, and smart.
''T get sad, so you can have guilt-free meat,'' he said, as a condition of talking about dealings with Bankman-Fried.
However, the interest did not translate into action. 't have thought it was worth their time or money to actually do much on it,' said Bankman-Fried, the person who met with Bankman-Fried.
The Future Fund, as FTX's philanthropic arm, raised $100 million to tackle pandemic prevention, taking into account the risks of AI, and other futuristic projects.
Bankman-Fried also said in his post that he considered an overly slow approval process by the US Food and Drug Administration.
These projects were designed to safeguard humanity's long-term future and were in line with EA's thinking.
Another person familiar with Bankman-Fried's work lamented that the case has tarnished EA.
Prosecutors say the money wasn't his. The Justice Department accused FTX of using money deposited by FTX customers to make $100 million in political campaign contributions in the run-up to the midterm elections in November.
In an updated indictment in May, prosecutors said that's profile, and curry favour with candidates, were in a jigsaw puzzle.
Bankman-Fried will be the latest in a long line of bold-faced names who've faced justice in the federal court on Foley Square in downtown Manhattan.
Bernie Madoff, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Martha Stewart all passed through here on their way to guilty pleas or jury verdicts. Bankman-Fried's win will be as hot as the media, he said.
He faces the possibility of not living outside the walls of criminal institutions for decades, as he has been convicted for the past two months.
If convicted, he faces a 20-year prison sentence on each of his main counts in his indictment.