Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on Macro, Bitcoin, and the Big Picture Power Shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, October 18th, and today we are doing an SBF trial update.

Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it,

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All right, friends, we are back to SBF trial coverage. And for those of you who are coming

into this fresh, or who just need a little refresher on what happened last week, the two biggest

witnesses in the first full week of the trial were ex-FTX co-founder and CTO Gary Wong,

and Alameda Research CEO at the time of its failure, Caroline Ellison.

Now, both of these folks were damning to Sam's case in different ways.

Gary was bad for Sam because his testimony kind of showed the mechanics of implementing their fraud.

He discussed when, at various points in the history of

FTX, Alameda's very special and privileged relationship with FTX was built into the actual codebase.

He also showed that it started extremely early, going all the way back to 2019.

Now, Caroline's testimony was damning because it showed just how much control Sam had over Alameda,

even after nominally he had stepped down from the CEO role.

Her testimony also made him look like just an utter asshole, but of course, being an asshole isn't

illegal.

However, the knowledge and control of Alameda is a different story.

So after Caroline finished, the next big witness was Zach Prince of BlockFi.

There were a few highlights. Prince said that he believed that Alameda research was solvent

...