The Blubber

Sam Bankman-Fried took the stand to testify Thursday at his criminal trial but the jurors were sent home for the day, per CoinDesk.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of FTX, has built a career on bold, high-stakes wagers that, for a time, paid off handsomely. However, he now faces the most precarious gamble of his life.

Following three weeks of damning testimony that portrayed him as a criminal mastermind, the former cryptocurrency billionaire took the witness stand on Thursday afternoon. His objective: to convince the jurors that, far from being a fraudster, he's merely a bumbling startup founder who bit off more than he could chew.

There was just one problem—there were no jurors present.

Sporting a gray suit and a lavender tie, Bankman-Fried had hardly begun to test his microphone when Judge Lewis Kaplan informed everyone that the jurors would be dismissed for the day.

Federal prosecutors had raised objections to certain aspects of Bankman-Fried's planned testimony. Consequently, Judge Kaplan requested that Bankman-Fried first provide testimony to him in the courtroom, without the jury present. It will be Judge Kaplan's decision whether this testimony can be repeated to the jurors.

During his testimony to Judge Kaplan, Bankman-Fried revealed that both FTX and Alameda heavily relied on encrypted apps like Signal to safeguard themselves against constant hacking attempts on FTX. He believed it was appropriate to use the auto-delete feature in these apps because Signal conversations were designed for casual discussions rather than formal policy deliberations or the exchange of business records.

Judge Kaplan interjected by asking, "A question that readily comes to mind: where is this policy?" When asked if such a policy was officially documented, neither Bankman-Fried nor his attorney, Mark Cohen, provided an answer.

The judge reprimanded Bankman-Fried and his attorney multiple times during the questioning for evading questions and not providing straightforward answers. After Bankman-Fried failed to respond to a query about his awareness of Alameda Research's negative balance on its FTX accounts in May 2022, Judge Kaplan remarked, "Part of the problem is that the witness has, let's say, a unique way of responding to questions."

This decision came after the defense presented two witnesses: Krystal Rolle, the Bahamian lawyer who represented Sam Bankman-Fried following the FTX collapse, and database expert Joseph Pimbley.