(ConservativeJournal.org) – Unless there are some winks and nods going on behind closed doors that none of us are privy to, Sam Bankmam-Fried is likely on his way to prison for a lengthy stay. On November 2, a New York jury convicted the one-time baron of the cryptocurrency industry on each of the felony counts he had been charged with after deliberating for only four hours.
The 31-year-old crypto titan was also a behemoth in the world of political donations and he reportedly dished out in excess of $70 million to any number of campaigns, the overwhelming majority of which went to Democrats. Of his Republican donations, they were said to have been made exclusively in regard to industry regulation as opposed to political ideology.
According to Time Magazine, the scale of SBF’s contributions to liberal candidates during the 2022 midterms put him behind only George Soros. Bankman-Fried’s 2019 founding of the now-defunct FTX exchange was coupled with endorsements from celebrities and former heads of state.
After three years of operating, it all came crashing down. A stand-alone tweet from the CEO of a competitor to FTX, known as Binance, initiated one of the biggest collapses in the history of finance. Changpeng Zhao, the executive in question, told his followers he planned on dumping his company’s holdings of FTX’s native token.
On a normal day, such a move would be destructive, but not necessarily catastrophic. Bankman-Fried, it turned out, did not have the money to cover Zhao’s sale. That lack of funding uncovered an entire empire of fraud on SBF’s part. It was quickly alleged that he had been using customer funds from FTX to handle loan obligations at a sister company known as Alameda Research.
Bankman-Fried was arrested shortly thereafter in the Bahamas and extradited to the United States. Former Alameda and FTX executives were given immunity in exchange for their testimony. SBF faces as much as 100 years behind bars.
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