Once the prosecution wraps up its case this week in the ongoing Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) trial, his defence will be able to call on up to six potential witnesses in order to support the case of the embattled ex crypto CEO.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) outlined this in its filing on Tuesday and will only call a single witness once the trial resumes Thursday (26 October).
The defence will begin its case that same day after lunch, with potential witnesses including an FTX investor and customer. The six witnesses proposed have not yet been identified nor confirmed.
However, last Monday (23 October), a court filing revealed that the defence plans to use Joseph Pimbley – member of litigation consulting firm PF2 and a financial risk expert – to challenge the testimonies that were presented by Caroline Ellison and Nishad Singh.
Pimbley has reportedly “extracted data” on the line of credit between FTX and Alameda Research to see how much the crypto exchange’s sister firm actually used, according to a disclosure statement.
The defendant also has information on all accounts based on FTX’s Amazon Web Services database and will raise database queries in regards to charts and diagrams which will be presented in his case.
A court filing revealed: “Pimbley will testify to his opinion, based on data extracted from FTX’s database, that: (i) usage by Alameda Research of its line of credit fluctuated between approximately $1bn and $3bn between October 2021 and September of 2022 and decreased for a substantial portion of June 2022.
“(ii) the majority of balances for non-Alameda, non-FTX users are concentrated in just four coins (USD, BTC, ETH, and USDT) relative to the hundreds of coins defined within the FTX database, and more than 75% of non-Alameda, non-FTX balances arise from accounts that have spot margin enabled, spot margin lending enabled, or show futures activity.”
Whilst Pimbley has yet to be confirmed as the sole witness in Thursday’s proceedings, it is still unclear whether the defence may rest on Friday (27 October) as well.
A court filing read: “In addition, the government respectfully requests that if the defence rests on Thursday or Friday morning, that the court hold a charge conference on Friday afternoon, so that the parties can proceed to closing arguments on Monday morning.”
It was noted in a filing on Tuesday that the DOJ pushed back on the defence’s letter after it deemed SBF’s team’s choice of words to be confusing or inaccurate.
It also remains unclear whether or not SBF will testify himself during the defence proceedings.
