Welcome to the SBF trial, a CoinDesk Podcast Network newsletter bringing you daily insights from inside the courtroom where Sam Bankman-Fried will try to stay out of prison.

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We may not know for weeks whether Sam Bankman-Fried will take the stand at his own trial.

He may want the chance to explain himself to the jury, but his lawyers are surely wary of the

withering cross-examination such a tactic would

invite. No matter. The unconventional former crypto executive has already said publicly plenty

about what went down in FTX's final days. What follows are a series of excerpts from interviews

that SBF gave in the month between FTX's collapse and his arrest in the Bahamas.

They provide a picture of the mind of the man prosecutors allege was behind one of the greatest

financial frauds in history. According to the man himself, he was a well-meaning altruist

whose heady risk-taking got him in over his head. In early December, a Wall Street Journal interviewer

pressed SBF on his knowledge of operations at Alameda, the crypto hedge fund accused of borrowing

billions of dollars in crypto from FTX and its unknowing customers. According to SBF,

who had a 90% ownership stake in Alameda and lived with its CEO Caroline Ellison, he too didn't

fully know what was going on there, a refrain he later echoed in documents shared with the New York

Times.

FTX was a full-time job, he told the journal.

It was more than a full-time job.

And I didn't have enough brain cycles left to understand everything going on at Alameda if I wanted to.

I also didn't want to because I was concerned about conflicts of interest, and I felt like it would

be inappropriate for me to be looped into, certainly to details of what was going on there.

...