A Parisian cocoa trader told Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial jury that pricey ads and FTX’s confident CEO helped convince him the crypto exchange was a safe place to deposit over $100,000 so he could trade cryptocurrencies – but he never expected that anyone but him would touch his funds.
The federal government began its prosecution of Bankman-Fried in earnest Wednesday afternoon with a customer-turned-witness who introduced the jury to crypto trading, the FTX exchange, and the allegedly illegal loans that felled crypto’s fastest-growing company last November.
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Marc-Antoine Julliard, a commodities trader who lives in London, said he only intended to “spot trade” cryptocurrencies on FTX – which is to say, buy and sell tokens like bitcoin. Critically, he said he never agreed to loan his assets out. The finance professional said he avoided FTX’s more lucrative “margin lend” feature because he wanted to have full control over his assets.
“Did you ever consider the possibility that FTX was borrowing your money,” asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Kudla, a prosecuting attorney. Julliard responded: “No.”
More than 100 reporters and onlookers gathered in one of Manhattan’s largest, wood-paneled federal courthouses to catch a glimpse of Bankman-Fried, the 31-year-old who prosecutors say defrauded his crypto customers, investors and lenders of billions of dollars.
In their opening argument, prosecutors cast Bankman-Fried as a calculating villain who told few in his empire about the alleged illegal activity that they said ruined his companies and ravaged investors. They bolstered this image of a secret conspiracy with their second witness, Adam Yedidia, a college friend of Bankman-Fried who followed him to the crypto hedge fund Alameda Research and then on to FTX.
During questioning from AUSA Danielle Sasson, Yedidia said he resigned from FTX the week of its bankruptcy “when I learned that Alameda Research had used customer deposits to pay back lenders.”
The legality of the loans are central to the case against Bankman-Fried. Prosecutors allege Alameda backstopped its…
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