Thanks for the summary. One nitpick:
During this section especially I kinda wanted to shout at my podcast when Will asked rhetorically “was he lying to me that whole time?” the answer is yes Will, it seems like they were. The code snippets from Nishad Singh and Gary Wang that the prosecution shared are pretty damning, for example.
To be fair to Will, he does acknowledge that Nishad’s insurance fund code “seems like really quite clear fraud”, if comparatively minor.
As for the other code snippets in your link—the “backdoor”—Nishad and Gary said the intention was to support Alameda’s role as a backstop liquidity provider (which FTX was heavily dependent on in its early days to function):
“[Wang] testified about several changes Bankman-Fried asked him to make to FTX’s software code to allow Alameda to withdraw unlimited funds from the exchange. . . . Wang agreed that the changes were necessary for Alameda to provide liquidity on the exchange” (Reuters)
“Singh also acknowledged that he originally thought some of the special treatment Bankman-Fried’s trading firm Alameda Research received on FTX was meant to protect customers by allowing it to more effectively ‘backstop’ some trades. ‘My view at the time [was that] it would be helpful for customers,’ Singh said” (Financial Times)
As others have observed, it’s been taboo to publicly speculate on SBF’s innocence since long before his conviction, including—or perhaps especially—in EA spaces. So please excuse the pseudonym, but...
I think this sentence is a tragedy. This isn’t the place to get into my general issues with the United States incarceration system, but even putting that to one side, I believe there’s much more to this story than meets the eye and it would be nice to see more EAs seriously grappling with the arguments in his defense.