Original｜Odaily
Author｜jk
When I was a teenager in fresh clothes and angry horses
In San Francisco in 2021, every visitor to this West Coast city will find huge FTX advertisements everywhere in the core of the city, featuring Sam Bankman-Fried and his iconic hairstyle. Who is this afro? tourists often ask. “Oh, that’s SBF,” the locals would tell them with a proud look on their faces, “a kid who grew up in the Bay Area and is now the CEO of the best exchange. Do you know Bitcoin?”
Source: CNBC
At that time, FTX was unparalleled in the United States. The bull market in the crypto world allowed this American-backed exchange, which started with derivatives, to ride on the wind. It not only firmly held the position of the second exchange in the world, but also reached a staggering valuation of 320 One hundred million U.S. dollars,Approximately equal to the annual GDP of El Salvador (yes, the country famous for Bitcoin).All this is the result of SBF and his team within 5 years. SBF became the Poster Boy in the circle as he wished. People called him the King of Cryptocurrency and pursued his effective altruism. At the same time, he made a lot of money using multiple times of leverage on FTX. . This is what a bull market looks like.
If you adjust your news search to 2021, you will find that his image is completely different from that of prisoners today. At that time, SBF was no longer content to be a successful person in the encryption circle, but was trying to build itself into a rising star integrating politics and business. He has become a fixture in Congress and Washington, giving $5.2 million to Bidens presidential campaign, the second-highest number of donors, and has publicly declared his willingness to support higher taxes on high-net-worth individuals. At that time, many leading media, both inside and outside the circle, were proud to be able to interview SBF.
At that time, it was only seven years after he graduated from MIT as an undergraduate.
And what follows is the history that readers are familiar with.
In 2022, market confidence began to waver a bit when Coindesk released information about Alameda Research’s balance sheet. A tweet from CZ officially started the selling wave of FTT. Even though SBF proved itself on Twitter and told investors over and over again that their funds were safe, FTX still inevitably went into a run. FTT lost more than 80% of its value, and SBF went from a young and famous CEO to one of the largest financial fraudsters in American history overnight.
On November 11, 2022, Alameda declared bankruptcy and SBF announced its resignation on the same day.
A year later, a jury faced the estranged SBF and found him guilty on all seven charges.
judgment day
On March 28, local time in the United States,A judge sentenced Sam Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison and ordered to pay an $11 billion fine for fraud.That sentencing standard was said to be less than the 40 to 50 years in prison federal prosecutors wanted, but far more than the five to six-and-a-half years his lawyers had recommended.
Judge Kaplan, who oversees the case, said he had never heard SBF express any remorse for the serious crimes he had committed. He said that in his 30 years as a federal judge, he had never seen anything like SBFs trial testimony. Odaily previously reported that SBF said I dont know hundreds of times during the trial testimony, avoided several key questions, and was once speechless when asked by the prosecutors lawyer. To the jury, this is tantamount to an admission of certain factual issues.
Before handing down SBFs 25-year prison sentence, Judge Kaplan said there was a risk thatThis person could do very bad things in the future [after being released from prison], and thats not an insignificant risk.
What SBF and his lawyers have been doing is to portray SBF himself as a nerd. Not only was this the previous trial strategy, but up until trial day, SBF attorney Marc Mukasey was alsoTrying to project a harmless image, FTX was an honest mistake made by this nerdy scientist. Sam is not a ruthless financial serial killer who goes out every morning and hurts people, the lawyer said. Instead, he is a clumsy math nerd with a relentless work ethic. He said SBF should not be kept in a four-by-four iron box.
Judging from SBFs diary, the lawyer said, he did not feel joy or happiness.
Prosecutor Roos said FTXs collapse at the end of 2022 was not due to a liquidity crisis or mismanagement. Prosecutors said: It was the theft of billions of dollars in customer funds around the world.
final confession
In court on judgment day, the SBF had a chance to speak for itself. At this moment, speaking has actually become an embellishment after the overall situation has been decided. When the lawyers arguments are over and the judge has basically set the tone, there is actually very little that SBF can do. So he spent about ten minutes speaking a lot in basically syntactically unsyntactic English, which also gave us a glimpse into the mental state of this once-famous man once the dust had settled.
One big thing, SBF says, is that my colleagues at FTX, I wasted what they built. They are disappointed. Im sorry for that, Im sorry for what happened at every stage... the things I should have done and the things I said, the things I shouldnt have done... I really care about everything.
He chose to forgive the three people who were once part of his inner circle and now stood on the witness stand to testify against him.He said, The entire industry rebuilt itself on Garys model, and many of the things he established became industry standards. When Alameda was in danger of collapsing, I received an anonymous message telling me how to fix the problem, and it was obvious. It was from Nishad, whos famously humble. And Caroline, whos amazing, mostly self-taught, came to me for advice on her employee reviews. I read her review of a person, and I learned It was a lot. They put their heart and soul into it, and then I threw all that away. I made a bunch of bad decisions. They werent made out of selfishness.
He also said, I was the CEO of FTX, I was its leader,This means that ultimately I am responsible. “If you’re the CEO, no matter why things go wrong, the responsibility is on you.Im not the most important person in the end...My useful life may be over.I have already given what I can give.
In the end, as if he had exhausted all his strength, he said this:There was this opportunity where I was able to do what I once wanted to do for the world, and thats not what Im doing now. If people do their best for the world, hopefully I can see them succeed and not just It’s my own failure.”
Bloomberg described the scene as SBF wearing a tan prison jumpsuit. Different from the short hair during the trial, his hair had grown out again. He stood with his hands folded in front of him. When the judge read the verdict, he did not react and looked down. hang down. His mother, Barbara Fried, looked out the window, while his father, Joe Bankman, put his face in his hands.
We are heartbroken and will continue to fight for our son, SBFs parents said in a statement after the verdict.
According to prison consultant Christopher Zoukis, SBF will likely be sent to a medium-security facility. Zoukis said SBF will likely end up at FCI Herlong, near the Nevada border, or at FCI Mendota, about 135 miles southeast of his parents home in Palo Alto.
In the federal criminal case, although there is no possibility of parole, SBF has a chance to have 25 years reduced from his sentence through good behavior.Former federal prosecutor Mitchell Epner revealed that if SBF took advantage of all available sentence reductions, he would likely have to serve a minimum of 12.5 years in prison.Federal prisoners typically receive up to 54 days off their sentence per year for good behavior, which is roughly equivalent to a 15 percent reduction in sentence. And since the First Step prison reform legislation was enacted in 2018, the sentences of nonviolent federal prisoners could be reduced by as much as 50 percent. In addition, special reasons, usually medical, also allow the court to reduce the sentence.
