The United States District Court of Southern New York has denied a request by former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried for a four- to six-week adjournment of his sentencing hearing on the eve of his pre-sentencing interview.
Lawyer Mark Cohen of Cohen & Gresser wrote a letter to Judge Lewis Kaplan, who had presided over Bankman-Fried’s trial in the US District Court of Southern New York, on December 20, 2023 ahead of his pre-sentencing interview scheduled for December 21, 2023. Cohen said the defence needs more time to prepare for the pre-sentencing interview.
Judge Kaplan did not allow any changes to the schedule. He said the defence had not objected to the sentencing date when it was initially set, and Bankman-Fried has already received one extension for filing his sentencing submissions.
The request, if allowed, would have delayed the pre-sentencing interview as well as the sentencing hearing currently scheduled for March 28, 2024. At present, disclosures for the pre-sentence investigation report are scheduled for January 5, 2024 and February 2, 2024, but the government has not yet announced whether it will proceed with a second trial on the severed charges against Bankman-Fried. Those are the five charges that Bankman-Fried objected to because they were not in the original indictment that resulted in his extradition from the Bahamas.
Hardware cryptocurrency wallet provider Ledger has said it will reimburse all users who have been affected in the Ledger Connect Kit exploit. Apparently, some $600,000 in assets were stolen from users through blind signing on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) decentralised applications (DApps).
Multiple decentralised applications using Ledger’s connector library — including SushiSwap and Revoke.cash — were compromised on December 14, 2023, resulting in massive losses by investors.
Ledger said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on December 20, 2023 that they are aware of the exploit and will ensure that affected victims will be made whole and repaid. “We commit, by any way possible, including gestures of goodwill, to make sure this is done by the end of February, 2024. We are already in contact with many impacted users and are actively working through the specifics with them,” Ledger said in a post on X.
Ledger further said that it will continue to work with the DApp ecosystem to allow clear signing but will no longer allow blind signing with Ledger devices. Ledger expects to put an end to blind signing with Ledger devices by June 2024.
Lee Bok-hyun, the head of South Korea’s Financial Supervisory Service (FSS), is expected to meet United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler to discuss crypto related matters during his forthcoming visit to the US in January 2024.
According to a report in South Korean news outlet Chosunbiz, Lee reportedly plans to discuss the crypto market’s status and the direction of supervisory policy affecting the crypto space. “Regulatory cooperation between countries is important for borderless virtual assets,” Cointelegraph quoted an unnamed South Korean government as saying.
Incidentally, both the US and South Korea are at odds over the extradition of South Korean national and Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon, who was arrested in Montenegro in March 2023 and sentenced to four months in prison for using falsified travel documents.
