When the government called Peter Easton, an accounting professor at the University of Notre Dame, to the witness stand on Wednesday, his testimony was unsurprising: Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of the now-bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, took customer funds for years.
To buttress his conclusions, the accounting professor pointed to examples of when Bankman-Fried, now on trial for fraud, deployed customers’ cash and crypto: venture investments, political donations, and a $2.2 billion buyback of equity in FTX from Changpeng Zhao, CEO of rival crypto exchange Binance. And $1.2 billion of that $2.2 billion—denominated in the cryptocurrencies BUSD, BNB, and FTT—specifically came from customers, Easton said.
