Mr. Singh held / owned about $32 billion, also proven by the court that he owned around 7.8% FTX's U.S. arm, 10% of it's venture arms, and 44 million shares in the main International Exchanger. By far calculation this made, Mr. Singh largest stakeholder in the FTX.
In the recent hearing, they pleaded guilty for about 6 crimes and now he is getting ready to give official statement against his Childhood friend and partners involved in the whole FTX drama.
On the other hand some of his colleague thinks, Mr Singh over the period of time got tangled up on wrong foot due to misconduct and improper directions. Some also says that people actually put him into that position so that he fraud the system.
Sadly, Mr Singh's past life and current life are entirely opposite to each other. For example, he was bright student, acted as Senior Class President at Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough, Calif. At the age of 16 he also participated in marathon of 100 miles to fulfill the charity.
However, over the time Mr. Bankman-Fried’s decisions made him to follow wrong foot path and he also never questions the whole point of running company that way. The article tells everything in storyline how it all happened, this must be the detailed review up until now. What is your take on this?
Nishad Singh followed Sam Bankman-Fried into the high-stakes world of cryptocurrency trading. Now he could help put the former FTX chief executive in prison.
Mr. Singh, the 27-year-old former director of engineering at FTX, pleaded guilty this week to six criminal counts, including wire fraud. He agreed to cooperate with the government’s investigation of FTX’s collapse.
The deal means Mr. Singh could end up testifying against a colleague and friend whom he has known since childhood. Just a few months ago, he and Mr. Bankman-Fried were housemates in the Bahamas, living in a luxury penthouse with other executives at FTX and its sister trading firm, Alameda Research.
“I’m unbelievably sorry for my role in all of this and the harm that it has caused,” Mr. Singh said in a court hearing in Manhattan on Tuesday.
n to ethics and philanthropy.
Mr. Singh wrote software code that allowed Mr. Bankman-Fried to divert FTX customer funds to Alameda, and—along with Ms. Ellison and Mr. Wang—knew about the misappropriation of funds, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
At this week’s hearing, Mr. Singh also admitted to falsifying FTX’s revenue at the direction of Mr. Bankman-Fried.
In a statement, his lawyers said he would do everything he could to make things right for FTX’s victims.
Mr. Singh owned a sizable chunk of FTX, which was valued at $32 billion before its collapse. Bankruptcy-court filings show Mr. Singh owned 7.8% of FTX’s U.S. arm, 10% of its ventures arm and 44 million shares in its main international exchange, making him one of the unit’s largest shareholders.
Raised in California by Indian immigrant parents, Mr. Singh became senior class president at Crystal Springs Uplands School in Hillsborough, Calif. Two former classmates recalled that he was an ambitious and diligent student. At age 16, he ran an ultramarathon to raise money for charity and set a world record for the fastest 100-mile run by a runner of his age, according to the San Jose Mercury News. He later did a TEDx Talk on the achievement, discussing how he overcame childhood asthma to become a long-distance runner.
In 2017, Mr. Singh graduated with highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in electrical engineering and computer science. He took a job at Facebook but left a few months later after learning that his friend’s big brother had started a crypto-trading firm, Alameda, and needed engineers.
Bitcoin was in the midst of a wild bull market and the firm seemed like an exciting opportunity, Mr. Singh said in a 2020 podcast interview. “I watched Sam execute a sequence of trades,” he said, recalling an early visit to Alameda’s office in Berkeley. “I knew nothing about trading at the time, but even then it was understandable that sequence of trades was superprofitable and easy to understand.”
When he arrived at Alameda, Mr. Singh was “an unfailing nice person, good team player, good cultural influence and relatively weak programmer,” Mr. Bankman-Fried wrote in a 2018 performance review seen by The Wall Street Journal.
His technical proficiency improved over time, and he demonstrated a knack for easing internal tensions, eventually making him a valuable employee, Mr. Bankman-Fried wrote.
In an email to Mr. Bankman-Fried included in the performance review, Mr. Singh told his boss: “It’s really, really fun learning about trading from you. I do feel slow when I try to learn, let alone when I need clarification ten times later. Ironically I think it’d help my fears here if you were honest with me about when I’m being a dumbass.”
Mr. Singh moved to Hong Kong after Alameda set up shop there. When the firm launched FTX in 2019, Mr. Singh was one of the key technical architects of the new crypto exchange, along with Mr. Wang.
In 2021, when Mr. Bankman-Fried relocated FTX’s headquarters to the Bahamas for its crypto-friendly regulatory regime, Mr. Singh settled in a five-bedroom penthouse in Albany, an elite gated community, with other top executives. Among them was his girlfriend, Claire Watanabe, who ran human resources and some FTX marketing efforts. The two of them owned a goldendoodle named Gopher. The dog became something of an FTX mascot, appearing occasionally in Mr. Bankman-Fried’s Twitter feed.
Former colleagues say Mr. Singh generally fell in line with Mr. Bankman-Fried’s decisions on how to run the company. He occasionally became his pointman for tricky personnel issues. For instance, after Mr. Bankman-Fried fell out with the head of FTX’s U.S. arm, Brett Harrison, last year, Mr. Singh acted as a go-between for the feuding executives, people familiar with the matter said.
With other members of the inner circle, Mr. Singh was on the FTX Foundation board. The foundation backed causes popular in the effective-altruism community, such as research to prevent pandemics and limit the risks of artificial intelligence.
In an interview last summer, Mr. Singh said his earliest philanthropic efforts focused on animal welfare, but he had shifted to favor “long-termist” causes because of the greater potential impact on humanity. “You can care about saving lives today, or you can care about saving lives in the future,” Mr. Singh told the Journal. “Over time I’ve become increasingly convinced that trying to affect the future is just higher-leverage.”
Mr. Singh became a liberal megadonor, giving $11.7 million last year to candidates, political-action committees and branches of the Democratic Party, according to OpenSecrets.org, a website that tracks political contributions.
This week, Mr. Singh pleaded guilty to a scheme that involved making illegal political contributions using Alameda funds and masking the source of the money. In an indictment filed against Mr. Bankman-Fried last week, prosecutors said the former FTX chief executive used Mr. Singh as a straw donor to back left-leaning candidates. Referring to Mr. Singh as “CC-1,” the indictment said Mr. Bankman-Fried pushed the younger executive to give at least $1 million to a super PAC that would in turn support a congressional candidate associated with LGBT issues.
That episode appears to refer to Mr. Singh’s role in Vermont’s contested Democratic primary for its sole House seat last year. On July 7, he gave $1.1 million to LGBTQ Victory Fund Federal PAC, a huge contribution for a group that had only about $150,000 of cash at the end of June, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Over the following weeks the PAC spent $990,000 in support of Becca Balint, the candidate who went on to win the Aug. 9 primary, FEC filings show. Ms. Balint won the general election, becoming the first openly gay person to represent Vermont in Congress
Ms. Balint didn’t solicit funds from Mr. Singh and only learned he was behind the donation from news reports, said Natalie Silver, her campaign manager. Ms. Balint’s staff did meet with Gabriel Bankman-Fried and his Guarding Against Pandemics PAC, Ms. Silver added. A spokesperson for LGBTQ Victory Fund indicated it was ready to return the money, pending guidance from authorities.
In November, after FTX suspended customer withdrawals and it became clear that billions of dollars had gone missing, Mr. Singh fell into a psychological crisis, according to colleagues who saw him at the time and worried about his mental health. He sounded remote when colleagues tried to speak to him, and he was gaunt and unshaven the night before FTX’s bankruptcy filing on Nov. 11, people familiar with the matter said.
He and Ms. Watanabe left the Bahamas for the U.S. soon after.
How FTX’s Nishad Singh, Once an Honors Student, Turned to Crypto Crime
He is the latest member of FTX’s inner circle to plead guilty to fraud
