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.

Follow the Coin Desk podcast network to get the audio each morning with content from the Coin Desk Regulation Team and voiced by Wondercraft AI.

It could take six weeks for prosecutors to make their case against Sam Bankman-Fried.

But only three days were needed for the judge overseeing his trial to lose patience with the

former Crypto Chief's defense team.

Judge Lewis Kaplan was visibly and audibly disgruntled and mightily displeased with Mark

Cohen and AMP Company on Thursday. On multiple occasions, the white-haired federal judge

chastised the defense attorneys for asking imprecise and repetitive questions of government

witnesses. During one especially aggravating cross-examination, he called the attorneys over for a sidebar

slap down.

I've given you a lot of latitude, but the repetitive questioning needs to be curbed.

The 78-year-old judge told defense attorney Chris Everdell as he probed Adam Yedididdea,

a former friend and employee of Sam,

and now a witness for the prosecution.

Kaplan's displeasure with the defense team underscores the difficulties they face when mounting their two-pronged campaign to secure a not guilty verdict from the jury.

First, they must use cross-examination to undermine government

witnesses' credibility in jurors' eyes. Second, they must inject Sam's most favorable facts

into the court record by asking witnesses' questions that don't get shot down at a cringe-worthy

frequency. There was plenty of cringe in the courtroom,

as the defense tried questioning Yadidia, the government's first spicy witness, to share insider

knowledge of crypto exchange FTX and its downfall. Yadidia had been called to testify about a bug in

FTX's accounting software that caused it to wildly overstate how much money

...