Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty, and the crypto business might never get better.

 This industry has been permanently damaged by Sam Bankman-Fried, who has added to the idea that it is like the Wild West and customers have no protection. The crypto world will have to work hard for years to fix its image, if it ever does.

A jury only needed four hours to decide that Sam Bankman-Fried, the former "crypto king," was guilty of theft.

The 31-year-old man was found guilty of stealing billions of dollars from FTX users. Before it crashed last year, FTX was the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.

At least 80,000 FTX users in the UK are still out of pocket while the new management of the company tries to figure out where the money went.

During the trial, three executives close to Bankman-Fried gave evidence. These executives knew how the doomed company was run from personal experience.

His on-and-off girlfriend Caroline Ellison, CEO of sister trading firm Alameda Research, which helped bring down FTX, said it was a "relief" when the business went out of business.

Gary Wang, co-founder of FTX, said that Alameda Research had been able to take out unlimited amounts of money from exchange users' accounts without their knowledge. This money was used to fund risky bets and expensive purchases.

Nishad Singh, who was in charge of engineering at FTX, said that Bankman-Fried had spent almost £1bn on star endorsements, high-profile partnerships, and expensive real estate, which made it look like they were even more successful than they were.

The other three had all agreed to plea deals before the trial started. Bankman-Fried, on the other hand, does not have that option. When he is sentenced in March, he could spend up to 115 years in prison.

The verdict is a big blow to a young businessman who was once seen as the "white knight" of the crypto industry, someone who stepped in and saved companies that were about to go bankrupt.

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The effects of FTX's dramatic fallout have been felt in fields other than crypto.

There was pressure on US President Joe Biden to return the millions of dollars that Bankman-Fried gave to his campaign for president.

A group of famous people, including Larry David and Naomi Osaka, are being sued for promoting FTX in high-profile ads. She almost got involved in the mess, but luckily, a $100 million advertising deal fell through at the last minute.

Also, Bankman-Fried was giving politicians in Washington advice on how to regulate the crypto business. He pushed for rules that his own company would not have been able to follow.

That was also a bit awkward: a few months before FTX went bankrupt, he was at an event in the Bahamas with Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.

Blockworks' opinion editor, Molly Jane Zuckerman, said, "Bankman-Fried and crypto will now unfortunately be synonymous for the rest of eternity" because he was found guilty.You can't avoid it: the young, brilliant founder who said he would change the financial world was found guilty on seven charges, exactly one year to the day after the news story that brought down his company.

Cryptocurrency has been looked down upon for years by lawmakers, regulators, and the public, who saw it as nothing more than Monopoly money because it is notoriously unstable.

But digital assets were starting to become popular because they made foreign transactions cheaper and protected consumers in countries with high inflation.

Sam Bankman-Fried has done irreparable harm to this business by adding to the idea that it is like the Wild West and consumers have no protection.

The crypto world will have to work hard for years to fix its image, if it ever does.

Why? There are millions of people who were early users and really believed in what this new asset class could do. But FTX has badly let them down.

And who can you trust if not the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world?