Sam Bankman-Fried (also known as SBF), the former CEO of the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, wants a pardon from President Trump. The disgraced former executive, who is currently serving out a 25-year sentence in federal prison for his role in the collapse, posted an X thread on Thursday praising Trump and his pro-crypto stance, in addition to claiming that he’s actually been a Republican since 2022.
In the thread, SBF claimed that former President Biden “bungled crypto,” notably by appointing Gary Gensler as SEC chair, who went on to become the biggest perceived villain of the crypto industry due to his enforcement of traditional securities regulations on crypto assets. Additionally, Bankman-Fried spouted off about a large number of other Republican talking points, such as the ineffectiveness of lockdown policies during COVID, various “insane Dem woke policies,” and the politicization of the Department of Justice by the Biden administration to attack Trump and others.
“The Dems may control trad media. But they don’t control the truth,” said SBF in the final post of the thread.
This thread did not go over well on Crypto Twitter, as many respondents indicated this was nothing more than an attempt to get in Trump’s good graces for a pardon. One crypto lawyer went as far as to seemingly hyperbolically claim, “I now believe financial crimes should be eligible for the death penalty.” The crypto world still holds a lot of animosity toward SBF, to say the least.
Indeed, a report in The New York Times from last March indicated SBF was ramping up his lobbying efforts with the Trump administration in search of a pardon. However, in an interview with The New York Times earlier this month, Trump indicated such a pardon was unlikely. Prediction markets Kalshi and Polymarket put odds at a pardon for SBF this year at 21% and 17%, respectively; however, these odds are based on low combined volumes of less than $25,000.
As pointed out in a Community Note on SBF’s X thread, court documents also previously revealed that a Republican pivot, including an interview with conservative media personality Tucker Carlson (which did indeed happen), was part of his earliest plans for making a comeback from the FTX debacle.
While SBF has been able to convince some, such as The Big Short and Moneyball author Michael Lewis, that he’s not such a bad guy, it’s important to remember that he literally took customer deposits from FTX and moved them into a separate business where they were effectively gambled and lost. While some have claimed the situation is not that bad because FTX customers were eventually made whole, the reality is that customers only received the dollar value of their crypto holdings from around the time the crypto exchange filed for bankruptcy. In other words, the massive crypto asset gains that would have been made by customers since then were lost. Additionally, SBF was literally charged and convicted of committing fraud.
At times, SBF can appear as a master manipulator, but it’s worth noting that he also once accidentally revealed too much information to a journalist over direct messages, which ended up being entered into court as evidence by the prosecution.
That said, can SBF really be blamed for seeking a pardon? After all, it worked out for former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who was in prison for his role in the insufficient anti-money laundering standards in place at the crypto exchange during his time there. The pardon was the subject of “unprecedented corruption” allegations against the current president from a former DOJ official, in addition to acting as supporting evidence for pay-to-play allegations made against the SEC by Democrats on the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services.
Of course, SBF may be out of luck if he has no business arrangements with Trump-affiliated crypto businesses, as the developers of bitcoin privacy wallet Samourai Wallet have found out with their own pardon aspirations.
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