SBF: See you in 25 years

Author: jk, Odaily Planet Daily

The Youth of Fresh Clothes and Furious Horses

In San Francisco in 2021, every visitor to this West Coast city , you will find huge FTX advertisements everywhere in the core areas of the city. In the advertisements, there is Sam Bankman-Fried and his iconic hairstyle.

"Who is this afro?" Tourists often ask questions. "Oh, that's SBF," the locals will tell them with pride. "He is a kid who grew up in the Bay Area and is now the CEO of the best exchange. Do you know Bitcoin?"

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 had a high valuation. It has also reached an astonishing US$32 billion, which is approximately equal to the total national output of El Salvador (yes, the country famous for Bitcoin) in one year.

All of 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 became a frequent visitor to Congress and Washington, donating $5.2 million to Biden's presidential campaign, ranking second among donors; he publicly declared , is willing 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 7 years after he graduated from MIT as an undergraduate.

The following is the history that readers are familiar with.

In 2022, Coindesk released information about Alameda Research’s balance sheet, and market confidence began to waver a bit. 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.

In a short period of time, FTT lost more than 80% of its value, and SBF changed from a young and famous CEO to "American history" overnight One of the biggest financial fraudsters in the world."

On November 11, 2022, Alameda declared bankruptcy and SBF announced its resignation on the same day.

A year later, the jury faced the estranged SBF and declared him guilty on all seven charges.

Judgment Day

U.S. local time On March 28, the judge announced that Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud and must pay a fine of $11 billion. The sentencing standard was said to be less than the 40 to 50 years in prison that federal prosecutors wanted, but far more than the five to six-and-a-half years his lawyers had recommended.

The judge in charge of the case, Kaplan, bluntly stated that he had never heard SBF express any remorse for the serious crimes he committed. He said that in his 30 years as a federal judge, he had "never seen anything like" SBF's trial testimony.

SBF said "I don't know" hundreds of times during the trial testimony, avoided several key questions, and was once asked by the prosecution lawyer and was speechless. Word. To the jury, this is tantamount to an admission of certain factual issues.

Before handing down SBF's 25-year prison sentence, Judge Kaplan said there was a risk "that this person might do something very bad in the future (after being released from prison)." thing, and this is not an insignificant risk."

What SBF and his lawyers have been doing is to portray SBF himself as a nerd image. Not only was this the previous trial strategy, but up until trial day, SBF attorney Marc Mukasey was also trying to project an image of harmlessness when asking Kaplan for leniency, and FTX was an honest mistake made by the nerdy scientist.

The lawyer said, "Sam is not a ruthless financial serial killer who goes out every morning and hurts people." Instead, "he is a clumsy math nerd" with " Relentless work ethic”. He said SBF should not be kept in "a four-by-four iron box".

The lawyer said that judging from SBF's diary, he "felt no joy or happiness."

Prosecutor Roos said that FTX’s collapse at the end of 2022 was not due to “a liquidity crisis or mismanagement.” Prosecutors said: “That It was the theft of billions of dollars of customer funds around the world."

Final Confession

In court on Judgment Day, 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 talking a lot in English that was basically completely devoid of syntax, which gave us a glimpse of how things were settling down From now on, the mental state of this former proud man of heaven.

SBF says one of the big things is my colleagues at FTX, I wasted what they built. They are disappointed. I'm sorry for that, I'm sorry for what happened at every stage... the things I should have done and the things I said, the things I shouldn't have done... I really care about everything.

He chose to forgive the three people who were once part of the core team and now stood on the witness stand to testify against him. He said, "The entire industry rebuilt itself on Gary's 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, who is famously humble.

And Caroline, who is amazing, mostly self-taught, and she came to me for advice on her employees. Advice from reviews. I read what she said about a person and I learned a lot. They put their heart and soul into it and then I threw it all away. I made a series of bad decisions. These decisions were not made out of selfishness ."

He also said that I was the CEO of FTX and I was its leader, which means that I am ultimately responsible. "If you're the CEO, no matter why things go bad, the responsibility is on you. I'm not the person who ultimately matters most... My useful life may be over. I've given what I can." /p>

He finally said this as if he was trying his best: "There was once such an opportunity that I could do what I once wanted to do for the world, but that is not what I am doing now. If people are doing their best for the world, hopefully I can see their successes and not just my own failures. ”

Bloomberg described the scene as SBF wearing a tan prison jumpsuit. Different from the short hair during the trial, his hair was Long, standing with his hands folded in front of him, he did not react and looked downcast as the judge read the verdict.His mother, Barbara Fried, looked out the window, and his father, Joe Bankman, held his face in his hands.

"We are heartbroken and will continue to fight for our son," SBF's 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 , but through good behavior, SBF has the opportunity to reduce his 25-year sentence.

Former federal prosecutor Mitchell Epner revealed that if SBF takes advantage of all available With the reduced sentence, he may only have to serve a minimum of 12.5 years. Federal prisoners usually receive up to 54 days of sentence reduction per year for good behavior, which is approximately equivalent to a 15% reduction in sentence.

And since the 2018 First Step prison reform legislation, non-violent federal prisoners' sentences could be reduced by as much as 50 percent. In addition, special reasons, usually medical, are also allowed. The court reduced the sentence.