He asked me to sign my name to a ripped piece of ruled paper, which showed that I was No. Yaffe-Bellany is only a few years out of college, but the demands of the trial had given him a temporarily wizened affect he had typically been arriving no later than about four-thirty in the morning to insure a place in the courtroom. Before I could take up a seat on one of the granite benches outside, I was summoned toward the entrance by a spirited yet vaguely rumpled figure who turned out to be David Yaffe-Bellany, the lead crypto reporter for the Times. On my first day at the courthouse, I arrived at about a quarter before six in the morning. The mildly distracting intoxicant being meted out was the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, who had been charged with seven counts of fraud related to his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX. The predawn tableau outside the federal courthouse on Worth Street in lower Manhattan-with its shady band of hunched silhouettes drifting in and out of conspiratorial conversations-resembled scenes playing out elsewhere in the city at the same unseemly hour, before sample sales or at open-air drug markets.
