In an outcome that won’t surprise observers, Sam Bankman-Fried, the Founder and former CEO of collapsed crypto exchange FTX, has been found guilty of all seven charges for which he was on trial and now faces up to a maximum of 110 years in prison.
Those charges include wire fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Bankman-Fried will be sentenced on March 28 next year, although he faces a second trial on March 11 for five other charges.
Trial over, there is now a sense, considering the outcome and how it reflects on the entire crypto industry, that a door has been closed on a turbulent and sometimes strange period. To grasp just how unprecedented these past few years have been, it’s worth considering the context and surrounding events that led to Bankman-Fried’s downfall.
BREAKING: A jury has found Sam Bankman-Fried guilty of all 7 criminal counts against him. @Kr00ney reports. https://t.co/NML57SVCdL pic.twitter.com/PccrhR0Eac
— CNBC (@CNBC) November 2, 2023
2020 to 2021: A Crypto Carnival
Bankman-Fried launched FTX in 2019, and the exchange peaked in mid-2021. By then, it had become the third-largest crypto exchange in the world. It had over a million users, while its upper executives were, as is now widely documented, living in otherworldly opulence, and eccentricity, in the Bahamas.
Part of the reason this rapid growth was possible was that as FTX launched, crypto itself was heading towards a manically bullish period, having recovered from the crash of 2018, which happened after the hugely euphoric run-up in prices at the end of 2017.
As unprecedented pandemic measures went into force in 2020, entire populations worldwide found themselves at home, always online, and often with stimulus payments incoming from the government. This occurred in sync with 2020’s Bitcoin halving–a four-year event widely believed to move the BTC price upwards–and suddenly there was a perfect recipe for a surging crypto bull market, with FTX and other platforms reaping substantial returns.
Worldwide Google searches for “bitcoin” surged in 2021.
What’s more, there was a public desire for a respectable exchange that retail investors, often inexperienced with crypto, could place their trust in. Bankman-fried stepped up to ensure that FTX played that role, putting in place celebrity endorsements, acquiring naming rights at what would briefly become the FTX Arena, and running a Super Bowl halftime commercial.
And as…
