NEW YORK — Sam Bankman-Fried will continue his defense Monday against allegations he committed fraud and conspired to commit other forms of fraud in operating FTX and Alameda Research.
Mark Cohen, Bankman-Fried’s attorney, said Friday he has a few more hours’ worth of questions. The Department of Justice then expects cross-examination to extend into Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon said.
The one-time crypto exchange CEO began sharing his story with a jury of New Yorkers on Friday, arguing that FTX’s collapse was the result of mistakes, including by some of his lieutenants who held key positions running the companies, including former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison. He’d previously testified before Judge Lewis Kaplan on Thursday without jurors present, though much of that testimony won’t make its way to the jury.
“We thought that we might be able to build the best product on the market, an exchange that would combine the elements that we thought were best from traditional financial products with the elements we thought were best from the big crypto ecosystem, that it could move the – move the ecosystem forward,” he testified Friday. “It turned out basically the opposite of that.”
The MIT graduate walked through his work at Jane Street and the origin of FTX and Alameda, before delving into some of the missteps he said led to last year’s bankruptcy. These included Alameda’s lack of hedges against the risks it was exposed to.
Read more: Sam Bankman-Fried Throws Caroline Ellison Under Bus in Testimony
Bankman-Fried also walked through some of his companies’ investments, his political donations and other issues prosecutors have said show he intended to defraud his customers and investors. At points, the FTX founder seemed to contradict testimony provided by government witnesses – namely, his friends and former executives like Ellison and FTX Head of Engineering Nishad Singh.
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