Why Sam Bankman-Fried has been convicted of fraud

livemint.com:

FTX imploded. In its heyday the exchange was one of the world’s largest, with millions of customers and billions of dollars in customer funds. It was seen as the future of the crypto industry—a high-tech offering from a brilliant wunderkind who wanted to play nicely with regulators and usher in an era in which crypto could really go mainstream.

But on November 2nd 2022, exactly one year before a jury would decide his fate, CoinDesk, a crypto news outlet published a leaked balance sheet. It showed that Alameda, FTX’s sister hedge fund also founded by Mr Bankman-Fried, held few assets apart from a handful of illiquid tokens Mr Bankman-Fried had invented. Spooked customers began to pull assets from the exchange.

By November 7th it had become an all-out run, and FTX had stopped meeting withdrawal requests. Customers still had $8bn deposited on the exchange. On November 11th, after a week spent frantically trying to raise funds, Mr Bankman-Fried placed FTX into bankruptcy.

Over the last year various accounts of what went wrong have emerged. Many came from Mr Bankman-Fried himself, who spoke with dozens of journalists in the weeks following FTX’s collapse. Michael Lewis, an author who was “embedded" with Mr Bankman-Fried for weeks before and after it failed, has published a book about him.

Snippets have emerged from people tracing the movement of tokens on blockchains. The government revealed its theory of the case in several indictments. But little compares with the reams of evidence that have been divulged by former FTX insiders since his trial began on October 3rd, some of whom are testifying in co-operation with the government, having pleaded guilty to fraud already.