Sam Bankman-Fried: Key players in crypto king trial include ex-girlfriend and math camp friend

FTX and Alameda Research founder Sam Bankman-Fried is accused of orchestrating one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history.

Prosecutors say he siphoned billions of dollars from unsuspecting customers to fund a lavish lifestyle and then lied to cover his tracks.

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His defense team claims the 31-year-old was just an inexperienced entrepreneur who got caught up in the fast-paced and often volatile world of cryptocurrencies. Bankman-Fried is facing seven criminal charges, including money laundering and securities fraud. If he is convicted on all of the charges against him, he could be sentenced to 110 years in prison.

The trial is expected to last six weeks and showcase explosive testimony from some of the wunderkind’s closest associates as well as an ex-girlfriend.

Below are some of the key players in the trial.

Caroline Ellison, 28

Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend, ran Alameda Research. She is also at the center of the prosecution’s case against Bankman-Fried.

Ellison has pleaded guilty to seven criminal counts and has agreed to cooperate with the government. Prosecutors said that not only was she involved in criminal activity that included bribing Chinese officials to regain access to more than $1 billion in frozen cryptocurrency but that she also knew Bankman-Fried was defrauding its customers and did nothing about it.

Bankman-Fried’s defense attorneys have already tried to pin the blame on her, claiming Ellison was partly responsible for the conditions that led to FTX’s catastrophic collapse because she failed to follow instructions to hedge trading against the possibility of a downturn in crypto.

The trial marks the first time Ellison will speak publicly about her tumultuous time at Alameda, FTX, and as the on-again, off-again girlfriend of its founder Bankman-Fried.

Ellison made headlines earlier this year after Bankman-Fried shared her private writings with a reporter for the New York Times. The move led to the judge revoking Bankman-Fried’s bail and forcing the billionaire to remain behind bars until his trial began.

Ellison and Bankman-Fried’s paths first crossed at Jane Street Capital, a Wall Street trading firm he worked at after graduating from MIT, during the summer of 2015. Bankman-Fried was tasked with teaching Ellison and other interns how to trade. He eventually left to start Alameda Research, while Ellison, who had graduated from Stanford University with a degree in mathematics, continued to work for Jane Street. When her bosses sent her to her alma mater on a recruiting trip in the fall of 2017, she looked up Bankman-Fried, and the two met up for coffee in Berkeley, California.

He told her about Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm he was building, and by the end of their coffee meetup had almost convinced her to join him on his new venture. By March 2018, Ellison kissed both her Jane Street job and New York goodbye and moved to the Bay Area to work for Bankman-Fried.

She has claimed she was shocked when she showed up at Alameda. Bankman-Fried had hired about 20 people who knew nothing about trading or cared all that much about crypto.

Ellison quickly moved up the ranks and was named co-CEO of Alameda. It was during this time she was also linked romantically to Bankman-Fried. She lived with him and other top executives in a penthouse in the Bahamas.

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Alameda bought and sold cryptocurrencies for profit.

Overseeing the hedge fund, she knew Alameda had access to an unlimited line of credit at FTX that allowed the company to borrow customer funds without posting collateral. When the crypto market dipped last summer, she and other top brass agreed to borrow several billion dollars in customer funds from FTX to repay Alameda’s loans to lenders. Ellison told the authorities she and Bankman-Fried were in cahoots and put up misleading financial statements that hid what they had done.

Jurors in the Bankman-Fried trial are expected to hear a recording of a meeting that took place on Nov. 9, 2022, between Ellison and Alameda employees when she admits Bankman-Fried OK’d the funneling of customer funds to Alameda.

Nishad Singh, 27

Singh, an FTX founder, attended the same Silicon Valley prep school as Bankman-Fried and was close friends with his younger brother, Gabriel Bankman-Fried. After graduating with top honors from the University of California, Berkeley in 2017, he took a job at Facebook but left a few months later after Gabriel told him his brother had started a crypto trading firm and needed engineers. When FTX was launched in 2019, Singh was one of the key technical architects of the crypto exchange.

Singh served as FTX’s director of engineering and also wrote the software code that allowed Bankman-Fried to allegedly divert FTX customer funds to Alameda. He was also one of the company’s largest shareholders. He owned 7.8% of FTX’s U.S. arm, 10% of its ventures arm, and 44 million shares in its main international exchange, according to bankruptcy court filings.

The SEC claimed Singh and a handful of others knew about the misappropriation of funds. Singh pleaded guilty to charges of wire, commodities, and securities fraud, along with money laundering and campaign finance violations. He also admitted to lying about FTX’s revenue, something he claimed he did at Bankman-Fried’s direction. Part of Singh’s plea required him to work with federal prosecutors in the case against Bankman-Fried. He is expected to testify at Bankman-Fried’s trial in New York.

Gary Wang, 31

Wang met Bankman-Fried at math camp when they were in high school, and the two would go on to be college roommates.

In 2019, Wang, Singh, and Bankman-Fried founded FTX in Hong Kong before moving to the company’s headquarters in the Bahamas. At the time, the three friends were committed to “effective altruism,” a philosophy that allows followers to prioritize donations that will make the biggest impact for the most people. Like Singh and Bankman-Fried, Wang sat on the board of the FTX Foundation, and they all lived together in a penthouse on the Bahamian island of New Providence.

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The Securities and Exchange Commission claimed Wang was a willing partner in Bankman-Fried’s scheme to bilk customers and investors out of billions of dollars. Wang created the software that allowed the diversion of funds to take place. At his plea hearing in December 2022, Wang, FTX’s chief coder, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and three conspiracy counts of wire and securities fraud. He’s also facing civil fraud charges from the SEC and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Following the hearing, his lawyer Ilan Graff said his client has “accepted responsibility for his actions and takes seriously his obligations as a cooperating witness.”

During opening statements in Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial on Wednesday, Bankman-Fried’s lawyer Mark Cohen suggested Wang, who is expected to testify against his former friend on Thursday, tailored his statements to make prosecutors happy in exchange for a lighter sentence.

Ryan Salame, 30

Salame served as the chief executive of FTX and was a member of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle.

Last month he pleaded guilty to a campaign finance law violation and a charge of operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business.

Salame told U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan that he had made tens of millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions to both Republican and Democratic lawmakers in 2020 and 2021 at the direction of Bankman-Fried.

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The contributions were labeled as loans from FTX’s sister company, Alameda Research, and the purpose was to pad the campaign coffers of politicians in the hope of creating crypto-friendly regulations.

Under a deal with prosecutors, he agreed to forfeit up to $1.55 billion in assets.