Marc-Antoine Julliard, a commodities trader from London, said he only intended to'spot trade' cryptocurrencies on FTX - which is to say, buy and sell tokens like bitcoin. He added that he never agreed to loan out his assets, which he said was a waste of time. The finance professional said he avoided FTX's more lucrative'margin lend' feature because he wanted to have full control over his assets.
In their opening argument, the prosecutors cast Bankman-Fried as a calculating villain who told few in his empire about the alleged illegal activity that they said ruined his companies and ravaged investors. And with their second witness, Adam Yedidia, a college friend of Bankman-Fried, he followed him to the crypto hedge fund Alameda Research and then to FTX.
Bankman-Fried and his companies were 'building the plane in flight,' said Mark Cohen, who anchors the defense. He said his client, a'math nerd', did nothing illegal but perhaps unwise, like never hiring a chief risk officer to watch the health of his 'innovative' crypto exchange. He began casting blame at former Alameda Research CEO Caorline Ellison, Bankman-Fried's ex-girlfriend and a key witness, saying that the defendant told her to hedge the trading firm's risk on multiple occasions but she didn't.
Day one of the witness testimony gave both sides a taste of Judge Lewis Kaplan's holding on the courtroom. Clinton cracked the rare joke and frequently tussled with trial teams for asking what he found to be leading or irrelevant questions. In one of the strange back-and-forths of the day, he challenged prosecutors' attempts to show the jury a zoomed-in version of the first witnesses' FTX wallet.
The DOJ's case to date seems to be focused on casting FTX as a troubled company and Bankman-Fried as the face and director of those problems. Early testimony revealed that blockchain and cryptocurrencies were specific. Marc-Antoine Julliard, a London-based commodities trader and FTX customer, tells a jury what cryptocurrencies are and said he invested in coins like bitcoin and dogecoin.
The first set of witness testimony is also revealing- no law enforcement officials are expected to take the stand just yet and we're barely scratching the surface of the technical details about what blockchains are or how FTX actually operates. Instead, we are hearing from people immediately affected - a trader who lost north of $100,000 and still hasn't gotten it back - and deeply involved in the companies' operation.