Today, the US marshals will transport Sam Bankman-Fried from a Brooklyn jail to the Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse in Lower Manhattan.
The immediate agenda involves selecting jurors to sit in judgement of the onetime crypto billionaire, charged with multiple counts of fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance offenses in connection with the failure of the exchange FTX last November.
Crypto itself may be at the docks during the course of the trial, which is expected to last about six weeks, along with Bankman-Fried, who has pleaded not guilty.
FTX, valued at $32 billion, has become a symbol of the deluge associated with the digital assets market. And, with his slob chic vibe and commitment to 'effective altruism, the 31-year-old entrepreneur has come to epitomise crypto for many in the mainstream.
By shifting billions of dollars worth of FTX deposits to cover losses in his hedge fund, prosecutors say 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 to prove that is exactly what he did, backed by testimony from several of Bankman-Fried's former associates, including his ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison.
The case has confirmed the speculations of crypto critics that the sector is a threat to Ponzi schemes and thievery, and emboldened watchdogs like Gary Gensler, the chair of the US SEC, have been forced to act with a flurry of civil actions.
While Bitcoin has rallied 60% since FTX filed for bankruptcy last November 11 and its 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.
Decentralised finance hasn't been left alone in the market's unsolved problems. DefiLlama said the deposits, or total value locked, of the sector is still about a quarter less than before FTX's decline, at $38.7 billion.
If Bankman-Fried had nothing else to do, he appears to have revealed yet again that if something seems to be too good to be true, it probably is. Which is unfortunate given the amount of doing good that Bankman-Fried vowed to do.
Bankman-Fried was running his FTX-Alameda empire from a $32 million penthouse in the Bahamas in 2022. He surrounded himself with colleagues who shared a lavish work-life space in the tropics.
Bankman-Fried charmed celebrities like star quarterback Tom Brady and his former wife, supermodel Gisele Bundchen, who were energetic - and well compensated - spokespersons for FTX. Lewis, the best-selling author of The Big Short and Moneyball, was hired as his biographer.
Lewis said he watched in amazement as the'most famous people in the world' would gather around the rumpled entrepreneur. The young tycoon was known simply by his initials - SBF.
As a maths whiz at MIT, Bankman-Fried, a maths whiz, was merely a streamboard to amassing enough wealth to tackle epochal challenges like pandemics and artificial intelligence. His chosen vehicle was EA, a philosophical and social movement designed to maximize impact for the common good.
Academics and intellectuals flew to the Bahamas for a meeting with Bankman-Fried and his colleagues at FTX's zenith. DL News spoke to several individuals privy to these discussions.
The interest in genetics, the source said, 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, said the person, who asked for anonymity as a condition of talking about dealings with Bankman-Fried.
However, interest did not translate into action. t have thought it is worth their time or money to actually do much on it, the person said of the people who met with Bankman-Fried.
FTX's philanthropic arm, the Future Fund, committed $100 million to efforts in pandemic prevention, addressing the risks of AI, and other futuristic projects.
Bankman-Fried said he was thinking of building a vaccine factory in the Bahamas to address what he deemed 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 keeping with EA's thinking.
Another person familiar with Bankman-Fried's work lamented that his alleged misdeeds tarnished EA.
But the money shouldn't be his, prosecutors said. In August, the Justice Department accused Donald Trump of using funds deposited by FTX customers to make $100 million in political campaign contributions in the run-up to the midterm elections in November.
prosecutors in an updated indictment said that s profile, and curry favor with candidates, could be removed from the list.
Bankman-Fried, who will appear at the defendant's table Tuesday, will be the latest in a long line of bold-faced names who have faced justice in the federal court on Foley Square in downtown Manhattan.
Bernie Madoff, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Martha Stewart each passed through here on their way to guilty pleas or jury verdicts. Bankman-Fried's presence in the media will be as hot as it is when he's in the spotlight.
Bankman-Fried, who has been incarcerated for the last two months after violating the terms of his bail, faces the possibility he may not live outside the walls of penal institutions for decades.
He faces a total of 20 years in prison on each of the main counts he faces in his indictment.