Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the disgraced founding father of the bankrupt FTX change, 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 may in some way reverse his fortunes.
This week, the disgraced FTX founder formally requested govt clemency through the Division of Justice’s Workplace of the Pardon Lawyer 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.
Nevertheless, the possibilities of any approval are slim as President Donald Trump has repeatedly rejected the thought of granting SBF any clemency.
Notably, merchants on the blockchain-based prediction market Polymarket are at present pricing in solely a 8% likelihood 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 nearly no likelihood of success, the mere submitting was sufficient to ignite a speculative frenzy throughout digital asset exchanges.
Information from CryptoSlate exhibits that the rapid beneficiary of Bankman-Fried’s authorized maneuvering has been FTT, the native change token that when underpinned the FTX ecosystem.
FTT is successfully a ghost asset. The token has no inherent utility, no growth workforce, and no underlying enterprise following FTX’s catastrophic chapter in November 2022.
Regardless of this, digital asset markets often commerce on sentiment, distressed narratives, and algorithmic reactions to breaking information.
Following experiences 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 knowledge exhibits that the buying and selling quantity for the bankrupt token skyrocketed by over 600%, surpassing $16 million.
Market knowledge signifies that round 30% of this speculative exercise passed off on Binance, the rival change 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 individuals are treating FTT as a political possibility on Bankman-Fried’s destiny. If merchants imagine a pardon would revive public curiosity in FTX-linked belongings, even briefly, the token turns into a direct option to specific that view.
In the meantime, that commerce stays indifferent from any clear authorized or chapter restoration mechanism. A pardon wouldn’t mechanically 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 stated he misappropriated billions of {dollars} in buyer funds deposited at FTX, defrauded buyers within the change, and misled lenders to Alameda.
In consequence, US District Choose Lewis Kaplan imposed a 25-year jail time period, three years of supervised launch, and greater than $11 billion in forfeiture.
Nevertheless, 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 change confronted a liquidity disaster moderately than true insolvency and that the property’s later recoveries present clients may have been made entire 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 mustn’t have been surrendered to outdoors restructuring advisers.
Nevertheless, that model of the occasion conflicts with the case prosecutors introduced 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 towards Bankman-Fried,
Ryne Miller, FTX’s former normal 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 change unraveled.
Trump’s crypto pardons create a gap, however not a straightforward 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 Instances, 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 Street 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 an easy, multi-billion-dollar embezzlement scheme that financially devastated tens of millions of on a regular basis retail buyers.
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 an extended, very long time.”
This view can also be shared by a number of crypto lovers, with one business analyst saying, “Pardoning SBF doesn’t launch one fraudster, it simply green-lights the subsequent thousand. The message turns into: steal billions, do a MAGA rebrand from jail, stroll free.”
