Sam Bankman-Fried Appeals Judge’s Decision to Reveal Names of His $250M Bond Backers

Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled early last week that the two currently unidentified people who co-signed the bond could be made public.

AccessTimeIconFeb 7, 2023 at 8:24 p.m. UTC
Updated Feb 7, 2023 at 8:40 p.m. UTC

Former FTX chief Sam Bankman-Fried has appealed a judge’s decision to allow the identities of the two currently unidentified people who co-signed his $250 million bail bond to be made public, according to a filing made on Tuesday. It was already known that Bankman-Fried’s parents also co-signed the bond, but the other names were kept private.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled early last week in favor of four separate petitions by a number of news organizations seeking the names of these individuals, who signed onto the bond earlier this month.

Now that an appeal has been filed, Kaplan's ruling has been stayed until at least Feb. 14.

A slew of media companies, including the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and CoinDesk, had filed suit to get the court to release the identities of the two people, saying that “the public’s interest in this matter cannot be overstated.”

Bankman-Fried’s lawyers had argued the possibility of physical threats to the parties were reasons to keep their identities private.

UPDATE (Feb. 7, 19:46 UTC): Updates information about the stay on the ruling.

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Nelson Wang

Nelson Wang was CoinDesk's news editor for the East Coast. He holds BTC and ETH above CoinDesk's disclosure threshold of $1,000.


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