Bankman-Fried, whose stake in FTX and the Alameda Research hedge fund was once estimated to be worth as much as $26 billion on paper, faces seven decades in jail on a series of federal charges related to oversight of the now-bankrupt firms.
The former friend
Adam Yedidia was a college friend of Bankman-Fried at MIT and worked as a software engineer for FTX in 2021-22. He said he informed Bankman-Fried in June 2022 that $8 billion in FTX customers’ cash was missing, and that they later discussed the missing money in person.
He said Bankman-Fried seemed unusually nervous during their conversation, and acknowledged that FTX was vulnerable.
Despite that, Yedidia said he trusted Bankman-Fried. In November 2022, when the business was collapsing and people were leaving, he wrote to him on Signal and said, “I love you Sam. I’m not going anywhere.”
Yedidia said that changed when he learned FTX customer deposits had been used to pay loans to Alameda’s creditors, which he called “flagrantly wrong.” After that, he resigned.
He was then asked why he lost faith in the company and quit.
“FTX defrauded all its customers,” Yedidia said. The answer was stricken from the court record.
The co-founder
Bankman-Fried appeared visibly upset at times during the testimony of FTX co-founder and technology chief Gary Wang. He looked at the ground at times and once put his head in his hands while Wang was on the stand.
Wang told the court about the days before Alameda and FTX failed. He said the firm’s leaders considered shutting Alameda down, but couldn’t because it owed roughly $14 billion and had no way to pay it back.
Asked about a tweet by Bankman-Fried that said, “Assets are fine,” Wang said, “FTX was not fine and assets were not fine.”
The star witness
Caroline Ellison, Alameda’s CEO and Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend, said that he told her to steal some $10 billion from FTX’s customers and use it to repay firms that had lent money to Alameda.
“Sam directed me to commit these crimes,” Ellison said near the beginning of several days of testimony.
She also testified that Bankman-Fried instructed her to mislead lenders to make the firm’s finances look better than they actually were — a way to stop those lenders from getting nervous and asking for their money back.
Ellison’s personal relationship with Bankman-Fried was discussed at times during her testimony. While Ellison was on the stand for three full days, the two appeared to avoid looking at each other throughout.
Ellison broke down in tears after prosecutors shared messages where she told Bankman-Fried that she was relieved the truth about FTX and Alameda was finally coming out.
Ellison, like Wang and another top FTX executive, Nishad Singh, have pleaded guilty to a series of fraud-related criminal charges and are cooperating with the government’s prosecution of Bankman-Fried in the hope of getting their own prison sentences reduced.
The final days of FTX and Alameda Research
Christian Drappi, a former software engineer for Alameda, testified about the final days before FTX and Alameda failed. He said Ellison told him that FTX had a “shortfall” of users funds because Alameda had been borrowing them. He said he was shocked to learn about that.
While Drappi was on the stand, the prosecution played a recording of a company meeting led by Ellison. It was secretly taped by another employee who gave it to Drappi.
In the recording, Ellison tells employees that FTX doesn’t have enough funds to give all of its users their money back, and is trying to raise funds. Drappi says he’s surprised because a firm would usually raise money to fund their operations, not to “fill a hole in a company’s balance sheet.”
He then asks Ellison if the loan was collateralized in a standard way. She says it wasn’t.
“That seems pretty bad,” he says.
Drappi resigned from Alameda the following day.
The ex-CEO
The final witness of the week was Zac Prince. He’s also the CEO of a crypto company that went under — not an exchange like FTX, where digital currencies like Bitcoin are traded, but a company that lent to other businesses in the industry.
Prince’s company, BlockFi, lent more than $1 billion to Alameda Research over a few years, and he said the company always made payments on time. He also saw Alameda’s balance sheets every quarter, and based on those, he thought the company was in very good shape.
He said he did not know Alameda was taking money from FTX, or about loans it made to insiders like Bankman-Fried, and would not have lent to Alameda if he’d known the true state of its finances.
When the crypto market fell sharply in mid-2022, BlockFi was also hit hard. It struck a deal with FTX in which borrowed from BlockFi and also had an option to buy it. It also made more loans to Alameda.
Prince testified that BlockFi had $350 million on FTX in late 2022. He said that it ultimately lost $1 billion when Alameda and FTX filed for bankruptcy, and testified that it would not have happened if Alameda had been able to pay back its loans.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
