Unpacking the First Day of Sam Bankman-Fried's Actual Trial

Danny is CoinDesk's Managing Editor for Data & Tokens. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL.

A Parisian cocoa trader told Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial jury that pricey ads and FTX’s confident CEO helped convince him the crypto exchange was a safe place to deposit over $100,000 so he could trade cryptocurrencies – but he never expected that anyone but him would touch his funds.

“Did you ever consider the possibility that FTX was borrowing your money,” asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Kudla, a prosecuting attorney. Julliard responded: “No.” During questioning from AUSA Danielle Sasson, Yedidia said he resigned from FTX the week of its bankruptcy “when I learned that Alameda Research had used customer deposits to pay back lenders.”

Day one of witness testimony gave both sides a taste of Judge Lewis Kaplan’s hold on the courtroom. The 78-year old Clinton appointee cracked the rare joke and on occasion lightly tussled with trial teams for asking what he found to be leading or irrelevant questions. In one of the stranger back-and-forths of the day, he challenged prosecutors’ attempts to show the jury a zoomed-in version of the first witnesses’ FTX wallet.

After the jury left the room on Wednesday, Bankman-Fried’s trial team asked Kaplan to make accommodations for the defendant's adderall prescription. He is not getting the four doses he needs to stay focused throughout the day, they said. Prosecutors had Yedidia take this description a step further, mentioning that they’re decentralized currencies but not delving too deeply into what that means. It is a tactic seemingly geared toward easing a jury composed of laypersons into what promises to be a complex case stemming from the digital asset ecosystem.

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