Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency entrepreneur whose trading exchange went bankrupt after an alleged theft of billions of dollars from customer accounts, told a court in New York on Friday that he knew “basically nothing” about crypto before starting his trading firm.
Bankman-Fried, 31, who was briefly a multibillionaire and the face of a new financial industry, also admitted that he had made “large mistakes” but said he never committed fraud.
Asked about his knowledge of cryptocurrencies at the time he set up Alameda Research, he told the court: “I had absolutely no idea how they worked … I just knew they were things you could trade.”
Bankman-Fried told the jurors that he had hoped to create the world’s finest marketplace for digital currency trading. “Did
