- Sam Bankman-Fried was granted release on $250 million bail at a court hearing Thursday.
- Prosecutors allege he siphoned money from a cryptocurrency exchange he ran.
- Two of his top associates, Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, pleaded guilty and are cooperating with prosecutors.
Sam Bankman-Fried will be released from custody on $250 million bail, a federal judge ruled Thursday in SBF's first court hearing on American soil. He will be required to surrender his passport and stay with his parents ahead of a federal trial on a list of charges tied to the failure of FTX.
Judge Gabriel Gorenstein said Bankman-Fried will be fitted with an ankle monitor Thursday, when he's expected to be released after the hearing in Lower Manhattan.
The FTX founder was arrested on December 13 in the Bahamas, where his company is headquartered, as federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an eight-count criminal complaint against him. Bankman-Fried is expected to enter his plea on Jan. 3.
An attorney for Bankman-Fried did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment after the bail was approved. Bankman-Fried's mother, Barbara Fried, was seen entering the federal courthouse on Thursday ahead of her son's bail hearing.
Bankman-Fried was flown to New York on Wednesday night after a Bahamian magistrate judge, who denied him bail on charges there, signed off on the extradition to the US.
As Bankman-Fried arrived in the US, Damien Williams, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that two of Bankman-Fried's associates, Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang, pleaded guilty to fraud charges stemming from the FTX scandal and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
Prosecutors allege Bankman-Fried "orchestrated a years-long fraud" to hide from investors that he diverted funds from the FTX cryptocurrency exchange to Alameda Research, a hedge fund he also controlled.
Criminal allegations against Ellison and Wang, first filed on December 19, were unsealed in court on Thursday morning ahead of Bankman-Fried's court appearance.
Newly filed court documents in parallel civil proceedings from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission allege that Ellison manipulated the price of FTT, an in-house token used by FTX, thus inflating the valuation of Alameda Research, the trading firm she led, and misleading investors.
According to the civil filings, Wang created software to help divert FTX customer funds to Alameda, which Ellison misappropriated for Alameda's trading activity. The filings allege that Ellison and Wang were aware that Bankman-Fried's public statements about FTX's financial condition, risk management, and disentanglement from Alameda were "false and misleading."