In brief
- President Trump has ruled out a pardon for disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried
- Bankman-Fried was convicted on fraud and conspiracy charges tied to the misuse of billions in customer funds and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
- The decision contrasts with Trump’s earlier clemency for other crypto-linked figures, including Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and executives tied to BitMEX and Binance.
President Donald Trump ruled out a pardon for FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried on Thursday, seemingly drawing a line between his crypto-friendly agenda and the industry’s most infamous fraud case.
Trump was responding to questioning from a New York Times reporter who also asked about pardon requests for several high-profile figures, including Sean “Diddy” Combs.
A jury convicted Bankman-Fried in November 2023 on multiple fraud and conspiracy counts tied to the misappropriation of billions in FTX customer funds. He was sentenced in March 2024 to 25 years in prison and has since appealed both his conviction and sentence.
Bankman-Fried’s parents reportedly began exploring ways to secure his pardon, roughly nine months later in January of last year, through several meetings with lawyers and others considered to have the President’s ear.
That same month, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road darknet marketplace, who had been serving a life sentence since 2015.
Trump exercised his presidential powers to provide clemency for other notable crypto industry figures on multiple occasions in 2025, including BitMEX’s co-founders and Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao.
When asked about Zhao’s pardon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Decrypt in November that the president “exercised his constitutional authority,” saying that Zhao “was prosecuted by the Biden Administration in their war on cryptocurrency.”
Trump also told The New York Times in an interview on Thursday that he sees no issue with his family’s expanding business interests while he is in office, including in the crypto industry, arguing that earlier efforts to limit their activities earned him “no credit” for doing so.
The president said his administration’s support for crypto is driven by both political and strategic considerations, saying he “got a lot of votes” for backing the industry and framing it as a contest with China for global leadership while dismissing concerns that regulatory rollbacks benefiting crypto firms could present conflicts of interest.
“I got a lot of votes because I backed crypto, and I got to like it,” Trump said in the interview. “China wanted it, and one of us was going to get it.”
Decrypt has reached out to the White House press office for further comment.
Daily Debrief Newsletter
Start every day with the top news stories right now, plus original features, a podcast, videos and more.
