On video: Power plant restarted to mine Bitcoin/Angular
Fried Bankman, founder and CEO of the FTX crypto exchange that collapsed in 2022, was sentenced today by a US court to 25 years in prison.
The trial began at the beginning of last October and included testimony under oath from Sam's best friends, along with his employees, partners, and former managers.
FTX customers lost about $8 billion and investors about $1.7 billion. Judge Louis Kaplan said during the reading of the verdict that Bankman-Fried's claim that the customers would get their money back was "misleading, flawed and speculative"
Bankman-Fried, who is considered the king of crypto, was convicted last November by the jury of all seven criminal counts he was charged with, in a trial that was held In New York. The former billionaire was convicted of bank fraud, commodity fraud, securities fraud and money laundering.
Bankman Fried. 25 Year Wonder Boy Inside/GettyImages, Michael M. Santiago
The FTX exchange collapsed at the beginning of November 2022 after the publication of a report by the CoinDesk exchange, which revealed that the founder of Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $10 billion of his clients' funds in FTX to another of his companies called Almeda Research - and that a large part of this amount disappeared.
After an influx of investors Rushing to cash out, FTX filed for bankruptcy protection on Nov. 11, after its value plummeted from $32 billion to bankruptcy within days. Bankman-Fried's net worth, estimated at $16 billion, plummeted to almost nothing. And he retired from the position of CEO. On December 12, Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas on suspicion of fraud.
The collapse of the stock exchange, which was then the second largest in the world, shocked the market. Crypto stocks lost two-thirds of their value, while the total crypto market cap plunged below $1 trillion.
The Attorney General of the United States, Damien Williams, said at the time that this was one of the biggest financial crimes in American history. Bankman-Fried was released on bail of 250 million dollars - the largest in history.
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