The wheels of American justice do not turn nearly so fast as the cryptocurrency markets. But in the last 48 hours they caught up to Sam Bankman-Fried, the boy king of the shattered FTX crypto empire who now stands accused of perpetrating one of the largest financial frauds in US history.
A series of overlapping events unfolding in the Bahamas, Washington and Manhattan left 30-year-old Bankman-Fried in police custody, while offering fresh insights into how one of the digital token market’s dominant trading platforms suddenly collapsed into bankruptcy a month ago with $8bn in customer funds missing.
For Bankman-Fried the reckoning began on Monday, when he was arrested by local police just after 6pm at his apartment in Nassau, the Bahamas, after the US Department of Justice sought his extradition. Coincidentally, it was in the same week 14 years earlier that Bernard Madoff, mastermind of Wall Street’s biggest Ponzi scheme, was arrested on a US securities fraud charge.