SBF says ex Caroline Ellison is to blame for FTX bankruptcy and Bitcoin stocks are having a wonderful 2023

After Sam Bankman-Fried was allowed to prepare his testimony for the judge on Thursday (never seen this before), he did this again on Friday in front of a jury at the FTX trial in New York.

Meanwhile Bitcoin had another good week with a gain of 15%. Over in the global markets, Bitcoin-related stocks are the best in class.

Defense

Sam is the only witness his team of lawyers is calling up and they probably came to the conclusion that attack is still the best defense.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried testified Friday in his New York fraud trial that his biggest mistake was the company not having oversight.

When asked if FTX had a risk management team when it was rapidly expanding, Bankman-Fried said, “We sure should have, but no, we did not.” pic.twitter.com/6TZlAefaoo

— The Recount (@therecount) October 27, 2023

Several times during his six-hour interrogation, Sam stated that much of the blame lay with his aides (and especially his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison).

On Monday, the prosecutor will have the opportunity to question Sam as well and the trial will continue. The American media still expects SBF to face a prison sentence of several decades.

Bitcoin stocks

While European stock markets are not really having a great year, things are quite different for crypto and Bitcoin. Stocks that can be directly linked to Bitcoin are having an absolutely fantastic 2023 so far in fact.

We already talked about this subject at the beginning of August, when we mainly focused on the Bitcoin mining companies. Today we’re doing three more.

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust

Grayscale is an investment fund that almost exclusively purchases Bitcoins. As they are listed on the stock exchange, you can easily multiply the price of their share by their number of shares and divide this by the price of their number of Bitcoins. This should logically lead you to the price of Bitcoin. But that’s not true.

Grayscale has been trading at a discount for almost a year if you compare their share to the price of Bitcoin. This helps to explain why Grayscale is up more than 200% since the start of this year.

Microstrategy

Michael Saylor, chairman (and former CEO) of the investment firm Microstrategy, rose to fame when he lost billions during the Dotcom crisis from 2001 to 2003. He bounced back over the next decade and started investing in Bitcoin early on.

So this year has been very good for Microstrategy stock. They are up about 190% since the beginning of the year.

Coinbase

CEO Brian Armstrong’s company reached its highest price on the day of its IPO in 2021. Since then, the share price has fallen sharply due to the descending price of Bitcoin in 2022 and the FTX scandal in November of that same year.

2023 seems to be the turning point for Coinbase though. Americans are investing in Bitcoin again and Binance’s problems are actually good news for Coinbase.

The company’s shares are up some 100% this year.