Sam Bankman-Fried Wants Court to Toss Crypto Fraud Conviction

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is due in court Tuesday (Nov. 4) seeking a new trial.

As Reuters reports, the disgraced cryptocurrency exchange founder will ask a federal appeals court to overturn his fraud conviction.

Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud in 2023 and sentenced the following year to a 25-year prison term. At trial, prosecutors had called what happened to FTX a “fraud of epic proportions,” while the defense countered that Bankman-Fried had made mistakes at the company but had never stolen customer funds.

According to the Reuters report, attorneys for Bankman-Fried are expected to argue their client did not get a fair trial because the judge in the case did not permit evidence to support Bankman-Fried’s belief that FTX had sufficient funds to cover customer withdrawals.

But prosecutors have in court filings said that there was overwhelming evidence at trial showing Bankman-Fried’s guilt, including a wealth of internal documents and testimony from former FTX executives turned government witnesses.

Those witnesses, all part of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle, testified that the executive had directed them to pilfer FTX customer funds to cover losses at Alameda Research, the company’s crypto-focused hedge fund.

Reuters also pointed to unconfirmed media reports that Bankman-Fried’s supporters, along with his parents, have been lobbying President Donald Trump for a pardon, though Trump has not publicly said whether he is considering one.

Last month, Trump reportedly pardoned Changpeng Zhao, founder and former CEO of the crypto exchange Binance. However, when asked about the pardon during a 60 Minutes interview this week, Trump replied, “I don’t know who he is.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote recently about the resurrection of the Solana blockchain, which had plummeted in value along with FTX’s collapse. However, developers kept building, and now, three years after the FTX implosion, “Solana isn’t just alive but is being included by the Trump administration in conversations about a national U.S. crypto reserve,” that report said.

This “Lazarus-like return isn’t unique,” PYMNTS added, with Algorand, Cardano, BNB Chain and other so-called “zombie blockchains” enjoying renewed relevance.

“They are no longer framed merely as speculative ‘coins’ but as infrastructure: rails for tokenization, settlement and application development,” the report said.

“And in an industry notorious for boom-and-bust cycles, the reanimation of these networks says less about crypto market price charts and more about how the role of blockchain networks themselves are evolving in the broader economy.”