He was the face of cryptocurrencies, a media genius with teenage looks, who was supposed to unite the sector, but the meteoric rise of Sam Bankman-Fried was matched only by his fall, with that of his FTX platform. The American, hero of digital currencies who became a pariah, will answer to fraud charges in a New York federal court starting this Tuesday, October 3.
If convicted, the young thirty-year-old is likely to spend the rest of his days in prison, because the seven charges against him are punishable, in total, by several decades of imprisonment. Having become a billionaire thanks to FTX, the second largest cryptocurrency exchange platform in the world, the thirty-year-old is notably accused from November 2022 of having used part of his clients’ funds without their knowledge to finance risky investments.
A movement of panic then dragged the company “SBF”, its nickname, towards the abyss. Its stock price, which had been close to $80 in September 2021, then fell from $22 to $2 between November 7 and 9.
The fallen platform announced on September 12 that it could, however, put billions of dollars in cryptocurrencies back on the market to repay its creditors.