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.