NEW YORK – An apologetic FTX co-founder was sentenced Wednesday to no time in prison after a prosecutor and a federal judge praised his cooperation against Sam Bankman-Fried and his efforts to recover money for victims of the cryptocurrency fraud.
Gary Wang testified for parts of three day s at Bankman-Fried’s trial last year, explaining his role as FTX’s chief technology officer in a fraud that Judge Lewis A. Kaplan described as one of the two or three biggest in U.S. history.
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Kaplan praised Wang for being the first person to cooperate after FTX collapsed in November 2022, sharing information that Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos said enabled prosecutors to quickly extradite Bankman-Fried from the Bahamas in December 2022.
Bankman-Fried, 32, is serving a 25-year prison term for a fraud that misappropriated over $11 billion of funds that belonged to customers, investors and lenders.
FTX once promoted itself as a high-flying cryptocurrency trailblazer with celebrity endorsements and a Super Bowl advertisement before a collapse in the cryptocurrency market exposed a yearslong fraud that doomed companies Bankman-Fried operated from 2017 to 2022.
Given a chance to speak, Wang apologized to customers and investors.
“I'm deeply sorry to all the people hurt by my actions,” Wang said. “There were so many things I could have done differently.”
Wang said he “took the cowardly path instead of doing the right thing. Nothing I do will ever be able to make up for it.”
Roos described Wang's work since the fraud in heroic terms, saying he was “the first FTX cooperator to come in the door” even though he played a minimal role in the fraud and did not create the complicated computer code that enabled the fraud.
In his first day of meeting with prosecutors, Wang “deciphered basically half the case for us,” he said, adding that it might have taken the government months or years to figure out the code.
He said Wang has continued to cooperate with several agencies and those seeking to recover money for FTX investors. He said Wang had also created software that is enabling prosecutors to find unrelated financial frauds.
As he announced the sentence, Kaplan said Wang had “limited culpability” in the fraud.