Nishad Singh is working on making a deal with federal prosecutors to testify against FTX and Alameda Research founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
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Former FTX head of engineering Nishad Singh is trying to cut a plea deal with federal prosecutors investigating the exchange's collapse.
Singh would become the third senior executive to testify against the crypto exchange's founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, if prosecutors agree to give him a deal, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.
FTX co-founder Gary Wang and Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of sister trading firm Alameda Research, have already pled guilty to fraud and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. SBF is charged with eight counts including wire fraud, money laundering and campaign finance violations.
Federal prosecutors have accused the 30-year-old, who was once crypto's highest-profile billionaire, of stealing $10 billion from some one million FTX customers and secretly using it to cover losses at Alameda Research. As much as $8 billion has apparently been lost for good, although the leadership team brought in to run it through bankruptcy has said the firm's books are such a mess that they're not sure where many assets are or what happened to them.
While no charges have been filed, reports have tied Singh to code used to hide the transfers between FTX and Alameda — and to hide Alameda's losses by preventing its assets from being liquidated if its trading positions were losing.
One of a handful of senior FTX executives who lived in a huge luxury penthouse with Bankman-Fried in The Bahamas, Singh was identified by a whistleblower as one of three people who had the authority to make the transfers between the two companies. SBF and Wang were the others, FTX Digital Markets co-CEO Ryan Salame reportedly told Bahamian prosecutors a few days before FTX collapsed.
Bankruptcy filings have alleged Singh was one of several top FTX and Alameda executives who received huge loans from the company — hundreds of millions of dollars in his case. He was also a huge donor to Democratic candidates, giving some $9 million.
Salame reportedly gave tens of millions in political donations to Republicans. Bankman-Fried was known for his huge political donations — he planned to give $100 million in the next presidential election cycle — mostly targeting Democrats.
In one of his pre-arrest interviews, Bankman-Fried said he gave just as much to Republicans as Democrats, but the GOP donations were not publicized.
