2023-10-02 20:00:09
Sam Bankman-Fried, upon his arrival at the courthouse in New York, August 11, 2023. EDUARDO MUNOZ / REUTERS
His fortune had been estimated at 26 billion dollars (24.6 billion euros). He paraded around with disheveled hair in Bermuda shorts and a t-shirt at conferences and generously financed elected politicians, mainly Democrats. He had recruited stars to praise his adventure, such as Brazilian top model Gisele Bündchen and her then husband, American footballer Tom Brady. It was the time of bitcoin craze, in 2021 and 2022.
But this October 3, Sam Bankman-Fried, known as “SBF”, 31, will be taken from his prison to appear on the first day of his trial in Manhattan and the “Mozart of cryptos” has nothing left. This son of professors at Stanford Law University (California), himself a graduate of mathematics and physics at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was dropped by his main collaborators and his former girlfriend Caroline Ellison, who decided to collaborate with American justice.
He faces more than a hundred years in prison, for having been at the origin of the largest bankruptcy in history in the field of cryptocurrencies: that of the FTX platform, accused of having embezzled its clients’ money. to reinvest it in very risky bets in the Bahamas, via a trading subsidiary called Alameda.
Speculative madness
The most famous cryptocurrency, bitcoin, has survived the turmoil and is trading at around $27,200 (25,700 euros), 40% more than a year ago but two and a half times less than $69,000. reached in November 2021 at the height of speculative madness. No one anymore believes that these currencies not based on any underlying are safe, the platforms supposed to host them often turning out to be real traps, as was FTX, the platform founded by “SBF”.
Read also: Article reserved for our subscribers After the fall of the FTX platform, cryptocurrencies in search of trust and regulation
The crisis finds its roots in 2021 when the post-Covid bubble begins to deflate. Many cryptocurrencies are falling, as are some trading platforms, but FTX appears to be a safe haven, as is its rival, Binance. Everything went wrong in November 2022 when an article from the media CoinDesk appeared, which revealed that Alameda had converted a good part of its assets into FTT, a cryptocurrency created by FTX, which exposed it to a fall in the currency.
Savers are rushing to withdraw their funds, which increases the panic. Sam Bankman-Fried tries to be saved by his rival Binance, but it lets him go. On Sunday, November 6, 2022, his boss, Changpeng Zhao, a 45-year-old Chinese-Canadian entrepreneur, decided to withdraw cryptocurrencies from the FTX platform, for around $500 million.
You have 59.2% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
#trial #Sam #BankmanFried #Mozart #cryptocurrencies #bankruptcy #FTX #opens #York