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The $8 billion Sam Bankman-Fried criminal trial starts today – here’s what’s at stake and how we got here

A year ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was revered as a titan of the industry and living large at a $40 million penthouse in the Bahamas, while he ran a crypto empire valued at $32 billion. On Tuesday morning in a Manhattan federal court in New York, the now disgraced founder and ex-CEO of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX will stand trial for allegedly masterminding one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history.

Here is what you need to know about the multi-week trial that starts today, the government’s case against 31-year-old Bankman-Fried, and how we got here.