First-order effects

• Aleynikov faces sentencing on the new conviction — the prior track record shows the court willing to impose years-long prison terms for trading-code theft.
• Goldman Sachs gets judicial confirmation that its high-frequency trading code qualifies as stolen confidential property, strengthening its hand against departing engineers.

Second-order effects

• Banks and trading firms watching the case have reason to harden code-access controls and exit procedures for quantitative developers, since the courtroom route to protecting algorithms now looks viable even after an appellate reversal.
• Federal prosecutors gain a template for pursuing employee source-code theft criminally — a path already being tested against developers at IBM and other firms accused of moving code to new employers or foreign recipients.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, departures of senior engineers carrying code become a criminal-law problem rather than a private contract dispute — a shift visible in the later string of convictions and sentences against engineers who moved proprietary work between employers, including Intel engineer Varun Gupta's probation sentence for sharing secrets with Microsoft and the IBM developer's guilty plea over source code intended for China.
• The line between an engineer's portable skills and the employer's intellectual property gets redrawn by juries case by case — though Aleynikov's own saga, where an appeals court later overturned this second conviction, shows how unsettled that boundary remains.