Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the disgraced founding father of the bankrupt FTX trade, is serving a quarter-century in federal jail for orchestrating one of many largest monetary frauds in US historical past.
But, crypto speculators are wagering {that a} newly filed presidential pardon utility might one way or the other reverse his fortunes.
This week, the disgraced FTX founder formally requested govt clemency by way of the Division of Justice’s Workplace of the Pardon Legal professional portal.
The transfer marks a proper escalation of a months-long shadow marketing campaign by his household and authorized surrogates to safe his freedom, defying typical authorized knowledge and the usual five-year post-sentencing ready interval for clemency functions.
Nonetheless, the probabilities of any approval are slim as President Donald Trump has repeatedly rejected the concept of granting SBF any clemency.
Notably, merchants on the blockchain-based prediction market Polymarket are at the moment pricing in solely a 8% chance that Bankman-Fried will obtain a presidential pardon by the top of the yr.
A ghost token’s speculative rally
Whereas political analysts and blockchain-based prediction markets give the pardon just about no likelihood of success, the mere submitting was sufficient to ignite a speculative frenzy throughout digital asset exchanges.
Information from CryptoSlate exhibits that the fast beneficiary of Bankman-Fried’s authorized maneuvering has been FTT, the native trade token that when underpinned the FTX ecosystem.
FTT is successfully a ghost asset. The token has no inherent utility, no improvement workforce, and no underlying enterprise following FTX’s catastrophic chapter in November 2022.
Regardless of this, digital asset markets regularly commerce on sentiment, distressed narratives, and algorithmic reactions to breaking information.
Following studies of the pardon utility, FTT spiked greater than 50% over 24 hours, peaking at $0.35. The surge represents a stark reversal from its all-time low of $0.2141 recorded simply days prior.
Furthermore, CoinMarketCap information exhibits that the buying and selling quantity for the bankrupt token skyrocketed by over 600%, surpassing $16 million.
Market information signifies that round 30% of this speculative exercise passed off on Binance, the rival trade that initially triggered the financial institution run on FTX by liquidating its personal FTT holdings in late 2022.
The newest rally means that some market members are treating FTT as a political choice on Bankman-Fried’s destiny. If merchants consider a pardon would revive public curiosity in FTX-linked belongings, even briefly, the token turns into a direct technique to specific that view.
In the meantime, that commerce stays indifferent from any clear authorized or chapter restoration mechanism. A pardon wouldn’t routinely restore FTX, revive FTT’s previous platform utility, or change the fundamental construction of creditor claims. It could primarily have an effect on Bankman-Fried’s private liberty and political narrative.
Bankman-Fried turns to a political argument
Bankman-Fried was sentenced in March 2024 after a jury discovered him responsible of two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and conspiracy counts tied to securities fraud, commodities fraud, and cash laundering.
Federal prosecutors mentioned he misappropriated billions of {dollars} in buyer funds deposited at FTX, defrauded traders within the trade, and misled lenders to Alameda.
Consequently, US District Decide Lewis Kaplan imposed a 25-year jail time period, three years of supervised launch, and greater than $11 billion in forfeiture.
Nonetheless, Bankman-Fried has continued to dispute the core public understanding of FTX’s collapse. In interviews and on-line statements, he has argued that the trade confronted a liquidity disaster moderately than true insolvency and that the property’s later recoveries present prospects might have been made complete a lot earlier.
His argument facilities on the worth of FTX’s remaining belongings and enterprise investments. He has claimed that FTX held belongings exceeding liabilities when it entered chapter and that management of the corporate shouldn’t have been surrendered to exterior restructuring advisers.
Nonetheless, that model of the occasion conflicts with the case prosecutors offered at trial.
The federal government argued that FTX buyer deposits had been secretly routed to Alameda and used for buying and selling losses, investments, actual property purchases, political donations, and debt repayments. Notably, former executives, together with Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, and Nishad Singh, who cooperated with US prosecutors, testified in opposition to Bankman-Fried,
Ryne Miller, FTX’s former basic counsel, has additionally rejected Bankman-Fried’s post-conviction solvency claims.
Miller wrote on X that belongings available in November 2022 had been nowhere close to sufficient and that firm insiders had been nonetheless making an attempt to assemble asset lists and lift emergency capital because the trade unraveled.
Trump’s crypto pardons create a gap, however not a simple one
Regardless of the aggressive lobbying effort, the political actuality dealing with Bankman-Fried is bleak.
President Trump explicitly dominated out clemency for the FTX founder throughout a January 2026 interview with The New York Occasions, a stance the White Home has since maintained.
Whereas Trump has been prepared to make use of his govt energy to pardon different outstanding crypto figures, together with a high-profile October 2025 pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, and earlier commutations for Silk Highway creator Ross Ulbricht and BitMEX executives like Arthur Hayes, the political calculus surrounding Bankman-Fried is basically totally different.
These earlier pardons had been largely framed round correcting regulatory overreach, anti-money laundering technicalities, or broader legal justice reform.
Bankman-Fried’s case, against this, is seen universally as a simple, multi-billion-dollar embezzlement scheme that financially devastated tens of millions of on a regular basis retail traders.
Even amongst pro-crypto Republicans on Capitol Hill, the pardon push has been met with hostility, with Senator Bernie Moreno saying:
“The man shouldn’t be pardoned. The man ought to go to jail for a protracted, very long time.”
This view can be shared by a number of crypto lovers, with one trade analyst saying, “Pardoning SBF doesn’t launch one fraudster, it simply green-lights the following thousand. The message turns into: steal billions, do a MAGA rebrand from jail, stroll free.”
