“I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you have heard something about the case,” the judge said ironically when addressing the members of the jury who will decide the future of Sam Bankman-Fried. In a society eager for stories of rise and fall, fall and redemption, it is almost impossible not to know some detail of the story of this young man, who accumulated more than 25,000 million euros in cryptocurrencies before turning 30, and then caused a bankruptcy in his company that dragged down a good part of the industry and took away tens of billions in investments from his clients.
The trial against Bankman-Fried began this Tuesday in New York, almost a year after the collapse of his company. FTX was one of the greats in the cryptocurrency sector and its founder, the child guru of the movement. As the value of these digital devices grew, opinion on whether they were the future of money or just a gigantic bubble divided the population. The chaos caused by Bankman-Fried seemed to prove the latter right.
