Sam Bankman-Fried’s bid to overturn his 25-year fraud conviction was unanimously rejected by a federal appeals court on Friday. Every legal door is now closed. The only way out is Donald Trump.
The Judges Were Not Impressed
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan did not mince words. When Sam Bankman-Fried’s legal team filed its appeal arguing the FTX founder should have his 25-year sentence overturned, three federal judges sat down and picked it apart argument by argument — and found every single one wanting.
“Bankman-Fried makes these arguments in the face of a trial at which the government’s evidence against him was, conservatively stated, robust,” the court wrote in its decision, handed down on Friday.
That word — conservatively — does a lot of work. The judges were essentially telling Bankman-Fried’s legal team to stop wasting everyone’s time.
The ruling unanimously upheld his conviction on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy and confirmed his sentence. Bankman-Fried, 32, will remain at a federal correctional institution in California. He won’t be eligible for release until he is well into his fifties — if he serves the full term.
What He Argued — and Why It Failed
The centrepiece of Bankman-Fried’s appeal was a gamble: argue that even if he had misappropriated FTX customer funds — to cover the losses of his hedge fund Alameda Research, to make political donations, and to buy luxury real estate — the exchange was still solvent enough to repay customers, and therefore no actual harm was caused.
The court rejected this outright, citing a key 2025 United States Supreme Court ruling that established that fraud occurs whenever a material misstatement is used to trick victims into handing over money — regardless of whether the fraudster intended to cause net financial loss. It does not matter that FTX might theoretically have scraped together enough to repay its creditors; Bankman-Fried falsified business records, concealed how he was spending customer funds, and deceived investors and users on a massive scale. That is fraud. Full stop.
“Bankman-Fried does not meaningfully contest the substantial evidence the government marshalled at trial,” the decision added. In other words, his own legal team couldn’t credibly refute what prosecutors had laid out at trial in 2023.
The appeal also challenged jury instructions and other procedural matters. The court dismissed those arguments too.
A Pardon Play Straight Out of Desperation
With appeals exhausted, Bankman-Fried has precisely one card left in his hand: a presidential pardon from Donald Trump.
What makes this particularly rich is the timing. Earlier this week — before Friday’s ruling landed — Bankman-Fried formally applied for a pardon through the Office of the Pardon Attorney, a government agency tasked with reviewing clemency applications. It was the first formal step in what has so far been a somewhat surreal campaign to win the current president’s goodwill.
For months, Bankman-Fried has been posting fawning flattery about Trump on social media from prison. Trump, for his part, has made clear he is not rushing to return the favour. He has pardoned a raft of other crypto-adjacent figures since taking office, including a handful of founders and early-stage crypto advocates caught up in prior administrations’ enforcement actions. Bankman-Fried, however, sits in a very different category: the man behind the biggest crypto collapse in history, who wiped out billions of dollars of retail investors’ money.
Trump has previously signalled that he has no intention of granting Bankman-Fried clemency. The wider crypto industry — which spent years positioning itself as Bankman-Fried’s political opponent and lobbied hard against the idea — has pushed back ferociously at any suggestion a pardon might be on the cards.
Drake and the Art of Picking a Side
Not everyone is quite so opposed. The rapper Drake recently called for Bankman-Fried’s release from prison in a critically panned new album — placing himself squarely in the small but vocal camp of cultural commentators who believe the sentence was disproportionate. It hasn’t moved the needle on actual policy.
The optics of Bankman-Fried’s pardon campaign are, to put it kindly, complicated. He defrauded customers of upwards of $10 billion. His co-conspirators at FTX and Alameda Research cooperated with prosecutors, testified against him, and received significantly lighter sentences as a result. Bankman-Fried went to trial, maintained his innocence, and lost — comprehensively.
The Mathematics of It
None of the arithmetic changes with Friday’s ruling. FTX customers lost money they were told was safe. Bankman-Fried spent it on things they had never consented to fund. He falsified records to hide this. Three federal appeals judges have now confirmed, unanimously, that this constitutes fraud under any reasonable interpretation of the law.
A presidential pardon does not come with a finding of innocence. It is an act of executive clemency — one that Trump’s own allies in the crypto industry would likely regard as an embarrassment.
For now, Sam Bankman-Fried is going nowhere. Every legal exit has closed. The last door is painted in the shape of a reality television star who, so far, shows no sign of opening it.
