A nearly 10-acre estate on Orcas Island is headed into government hands after a top engineer and associate of Sam Bankman-Fried at the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX pleaded guilty to a six-count indictment, including wire fraud.
Former FTX engineering chief Nishad Singh bought the secluded property for $3.7 million in October, according to county property records.
Singh agreed to forfeit the property as part of his guilty plea, according to people familiar with the case. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the forfeiture was redacted from court records.
The Orcas Island property includes a four-bedroom house and a two-bedroom guesthouse with “luxury amenities,” a 70-foot lap pool, hot tub, forests, gardens, ponds “and infinite privacy,” according to an online listing.
The property includes “magnificent marine and mountain views” including views of the San Juan Islands, Vancouver Island, the Olympic Mountains and Mount Rainier.
San Juan County, which includes Orcas Island, has some of the highest home prices in western Washington. The county’s median single-family home price was $960,000 in 2022, higher than King County’s median of $900,000.
Singh, 27, paid for the house with money from his personal FTX account. But the government believes the property is linked to his crimes in the case, in which prosecutors allege that customer funds at FTX were misappropriated by co-founder Bankman-Fried and his lieutenants.
Before FTX’s collapse, Singh reportedly lived with Bankman-Fried and others in a luxury penthouse in the Bahamas. It is unclear how much time, if any, Singh spent at the Orcas property since he bought it.
Singh has also agreed to forfeit an undisclosed amount of stock, prosecutors said in court last month. The assets subject to forfeiture were blacked out in a revised indictment filed in conjunction with his guilty plea. His lawyer declined to comment on the property forfeiture but, following the plea, said Singh “wants to do everything he can to make things right for victims.”
The plea marked the culmination of more than two months of talks with federal investigators in Manhattan about Singh’s exposure to an alleged fraud at FTX that has cost customers more than $8 billion.
Singh has agreed to cooperate with the government in the hope of receiving a lighter sentence.
Singh was a childhood friend of Bankman-Fried’s brother, Gabe, and joined a subsidiary of FTX’s sister company Alameda as an engineer in late 2017. He then began working on the foundational code to build FTX, which became one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges.
At FTX he managed about 20 engineers and took direction from Bankman-Fried on “high priority projects,” according to a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Singh became aware that Alameda was borrowing funds from FTX in mid-2022, he told a judge during his plea hearing.
In June, he tried to track the amount of customer funds that Alameda had borrowed from the exchange, and by early September he realized the hedge fund couldn’t repay the billions it owed.
This story includes material from Bloomberg reporter Ava Benny-Morrison and Seattle Times reporter Heidi Groover.
This story was updated to clarify the relationship between FTX and Alameda.
