Sam Bankman-Fried, who once ran one of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchanges, has been found guilty of fraud and money laundering at the end of a month-long trial in New York.

They presented evidence that Bankman-Fried’s crypto trading firm Alameda Research received deposits on behalf of FTX customers from the early days of the exchange, when traditional banks were unwilling to let it open an account.

Instead of safeguarding those funds, as Bankman-Fried repeatedly pledged to do in public, he spent the money to repay Alameda lenders, buy property and make investments and political donations.

Bankman-Fried made the risky move of taking the stand in his own defence, hoping to convince jurors that prosecutors had failed to prove he acted with criminal intent.

Bankman-Fried defended the money transfers between his firms as “permissible” and testified that he was largely unaware of the financial hole described by his deputies until a few weeks before the FTX collapse last year.

Panorama explores the breakneck rise and sensational fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, the maths genius who set out to transform the world of crypto but ended up being its biggest loser.

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