Sam Bankman-Fried testifies he regrets not hiring a risk management team at FTX before it collapsed and led to criminal charges against him

• Sam Bankman-Fried was asked on the witness stand if he hired a risk management team for FTX.
• "We sure should have," he responded in court.

Sam Bankman-Fried testified before jurors for the first time Friday morning, explaining his background working for the traditional Wall Street firm Jane Street, before starting his own crypto hedge fund Alameda Research and, later, his cryptocurrency exchange FTX.

He lamented the lack of a risk management team at FTX, a common refrain of his as he works to deflect blame from himself in the company's catastrophic collapse.

"Did you have a risk management team at FTX?" defense attorney Mark Cohen asked his client.

"We sure should have. But no, we didn't," Bankman-Fried replied.

As the company grew, Bankman-Fried said, so did its teams, "cobbling together" a marketing team, as well as teams for customer support, compliance, legal, operations, and "know your customer" initiatives.

He talked about FTX's rapid growth, from managing a few million dollars a day in trading to hundreds of billions of dollars at its height in 2021 and 2022. Bankman-Fried testified he worked between 12 and 22 hours per day and took off one day per month to keep up with managing the growth.

Bankman-Fried added that he didn't suspect FTX would experience such robust growth in a short time.

"Absolutely not," he said. "I thought there was a 20% chance of success and an 80% chance…that we'd launch but fail to attract customers."

His testimony before jurors followed an unusual hearing Thursday, where he testified without the presence of a jury but in front of US District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who's overseeing the case.

Kaplan had weighed whether to allow Bankman-Fried's defense team to present evidence related to FTX's terms of service and the advice he received from lawyers during the time of his alleged fraud.

On Friday morning, Kaplan said that much of the evidence could come in, but not "boilerplate" legal documents for the personal loans Bankman-Fried took from FTX.

Prosecutors have alleged that Bankman-Fried defrauded customers and investors by siphoning away billions of dollars from FTX customer funds to Alameda, which he also owned.

Bankman-Fried's attorneys have claimed that the reality was much more complicated.

According to their arguments and Bankman-Fried's testimony, the losses were the result of larger collapses in the cryptocurrency markets in late 2022 and the fact that many of FTX's customers were involved in spot margin trading, which allowed their accounts to be drained in the supposedly rare event where other security measures didn't succeed at covering the collateral for those losses.