
Tomorrow, US marshals will transport Sam Bankman-Fried from a jail in Brooklyn to Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in Lower Manhattan.
The immediate agenda consists of appointing 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 could be in the dock along with Bankman-Fried, who has pleaded not guilty, over the course of the trial, which is expected to last about six weeks.
With a value of $32 billion, FTX has become a symbol of the illegality associated with the digital assets market. And with his slob chic vibe, and commitment to 'effective altruism,' 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 he did 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 worries 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, have taken steps to tighten their controls.
While Bitcoin has rallied 60% since FTX filed for bankruptcy last November 11, 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 eradicated from the market's existential crisis. DefiLlama data shows that the deposits, or total value locked, of the sector is about a quarter less than before FTX's downfall, at $38.7 billion.
If Bankman-Fried didn't do anything, he appears to have proven 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 $ 30 million penthouse in the Bahamas in 2022. He surrounded himself with colleagues who shared the luxuries 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. And he landed Michael Lewis, the author of The Big Short and Moneyball, as his biographer.
Lewis, who is releasing his book on Bankman-Fried and FTX this week, told the BBC on Monday that 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.
For Bankman-Fried, a mathematics whiz who graduated from MIT, cryptocurrencies were just a platform to generate enough wealth to tackle epochal challenges like pandemics and artificial intelligence. He chose effective altruism, EA, a philosophical and social movement designed to maximise impact for the common good.
At FTX's zenith, academics and intellectuals flew into the Bahamas to discuss a range of topics with Bankman-Fried and his colleagues. DL News spoke to several individuals who were privy to these discussions.
The interested in genetics 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.
The interest did not translate into action, however. ''I thought it was worth their time or money to actually do much on it, '' the person said of the people who met with Bankman-Fried.
As FTX's philanthropic arm was known, the Future Fund provided $100 million to efforts to prevent pandemics, addressing the risks of AI and other futuristic projects.
Bankman-Fried said in his post that he deemed the overly slow approval process by the US Food and Drug Administration to be too slow.
These projects were designed to safeguard the long-term future of humanity and were in line with EA's thinking.
Another source familiar with Bankman-Fried's work, who said his alleged misdeeds tarnished EA.
But the money wasn't his, prosecutors said. In August, the Justice Department accused him of using FTX funds to make $100 million in political campaign contributions in the run-up to the midterm elections in November.
prosecutors said in an updated indictment that month that prosecutors had said s profile, and curry favour with candidates.
The latest in a long list of bold-faced names who have faced justice in the federal court on Foley Square in downtown Manhattan, Bankman-Fried will be the latest in a long line of bold-faced names.
There were Bernie Madoff, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Martha Stewart all passing through here on their way to guilty pleas or jury verdicts. If Bankman-Fried wins, the media spotlight will be just as hot as Bankman-Fried's.
As he does so, Bankman-Fried faces the possibility he may not live outside the walls of penal institutions for decades, despite being incarcerated for the last two months.
If convicted, he faces a prison term of 20 years on each of the main charges in his indictment.