U.S. prosecutors have indicted Richard Kim, a 39-year-old former senior trading executive at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, on securities- and wire-fraud charges for allegedly misappropriating nearly all of a $4.3 million seed round raised for his Cayman Islands-incorporated start-up, Zero Edge. Court filings unsealed in Manhattan on 13 August say Kim diverted about $3.8 million of investor money into personal accounts and lost almost the entire sum within a week by making leveraged cryptocurrency bets and gambling on the VIP crypto casino and sportsbook Shuffle. Investors in the June 2024 financing included Galaxy Digital, where Kim had worked for six years before leaving in March 2024 to launch Zero Edge, which planned to build a blockchain-enabled gaming app but never went live and entered voluntary liquidation last December. Prosecutors say Kim misled backers by blaming the losses on a “treasury management strategy” rather than personal gambling, while admitting to the FBI after his April 15 arrest that he knew his actions were “clearly wrong.” Kim was released on a $250,000 bond and faces a maximum 20 years in prison on each count if convicted. The case underscores renewed regulatory scrutiny of start-ups that merge cryptocurrency and online gambling, an industry segment that has attracted prominent financial-sector alumni and venture capital but remains lightly supervised.