Cryptocurrency tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted and faced 110 years in prison

According to AFP News Agency, a New York jury (USA) convicted Sam Bankman-Fried after 5 weeks of trial. The sentence that the cryptocurrency "tycoon" faces is 110 years in prison.

The official sentencing will take place on November 3 (local time).

In their closing arguments, prosecutors described the defendant as "an extremely intelligent man, driven by greed." They also said that Sam Bankman-Fried "knew what he was doing" when he secretly transferred money from the FTX exchange to his Alameda Research hedge fund.

Prosecutor Danielle Sasson asked the jury to convict Bankman-Fried, criticizing the defendant's "arrogance to think he could get away with a scam."

Sam Bankman-Fried, 31, until last year was considered the face of the cryptocurrency industry before the shocking collapse of the FTX exchange.

Sam Bankman-Fried co-founded FTX in 2019 and it quickly became the world's second largest cryptocurrency exchange, behind only Binance.


"Except for Mark Zuckerberg (Meta CEO), no one in history has ever been so rich at a young age," Forbes magazine headlined in 2021 and estimated Sam Bankman-Fried's fortune at 26 billion USD.

The main witness in the trial, also Bankman-Fried's girlfriend and former associate Caroline Ellison, admitted they "stole approximately $14 billion" from FTX customers.

The siphoned money was put by Bankman-Fried into Alameda Research - a cryptocurrency hedge fund of which Ellison is the CEO, and used in venture capital transactions, political financing as well as real estate investments. Flashy real estate in the Bahamas (where FTX is headquartered).

Prosecutors estimate that more than $8 billion of customers "evaporated" by the time FTX went bankrupt due to Alameda's bad investments.