FTX token (FTT) spikes 50% as Sam Bankman-Fried seeks Donald Trump’s pardon
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.
Yet, 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 government clemency by way of the Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney 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 standard authorized knowledge and the usual five-year post-sentencing ready interval for clemency functions.
However, 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 presently pricing in solely a 8% likelihood that Bankman-Fried will obtain a presidential pardon by the top of the 12 months.
A ghost token’s speculative rally
While political analysts and blockchain-based prediction markets give the pardon just about no likelihood of success, the mere submitting was sufficient to ignite a speculative frenzy throughout digital asset exchanges.
Data from CryptoSlate exhibits that the quick 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 crew, and no underlying enterprise following FTX’s catastrophic bankruptcy in November 2022.
Despite this, digital asset markets regularly commerce on sentiment, distressed narratives, and algorithmic reactions to breaking information.
Following experiences of the pardon utility, FTT spiked more 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.
Moreover, CoinMarketCap information exhibits that the buying and selling quantity for the bankrupt token skyrocketed by over 600%, surpassing $16 million.
Market information signifies that round 30% of this speculative exercise occurred 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 contributors are treating FTT as a political choice on Bankman-Fried’s destiny. If merchants imagine a pardon would revive public curiosity in FTX-linked property, even briefly, the token turns into a direct solution to specific that view.
Meanwhile, that commerce stays indifferent from any clear authorized or chapter restoration mechanism. A pardon wouldn’t robotically restore FTX, revive FTT’s old platform utility, or change the fundamental construction of creditor claims. It would 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 traders within the change, and misled lenders to Alameda.
As a outcome, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan imposed a 25-year jail time period, three years of supervised launch, and greater than $11 billion in forfeiture.
However, Bankman-Fried has continued to dispute the core public understanding of FTX’s collapse. In interviews and online statements, he has argued that the change confronted a liquidity disaster moderately than true insolvency and that the property’s later recoveries present prospects may have been made complete a lot earlier.
His argument facilities on the worth of FTX’s remaining assets and enterprise investments. He has claimed that FTX held property exceeding liabilities when it entered chapter and that management of the corporate mustn’t have been surrendered to exterior restructuring advisers.
However, that model of the occasion conflicts with the case prosecutors introduced at trial.
The authorities argued that FTX buyer deposits have 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 against Bankman-Fried,
Ryne Miller, FTX’s former normal counsel, has additionally rejected Bankman-Fried’s post-conviction solvency claims.
Miller wrote on X that property readily available in November 2022 have been nowhere close to sufficient and that firm insiders have been nonetheless attempting to assemble asset lists and lift emergency capital as the change unraveled.
Trump’s crypto pardons create a gap, however not a straightforward one
Despite 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 Times, a stance the White House has since maintained.
While Trump has been prepared to make use of his government 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 Road creator Ross Ulbricht and BitMEX executives like Arthur Hayes, the political calculus surrounding Bankman-Fried is essentially completely different.
Those earlier pardons have been largely framed round correcting regulatory overreach, anti-money laundering technicalities, or broader felony 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 traders.
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 a protracted, 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 following thousand. The message turns into: steal billions, do a MAGA rebrand from jail, stroll free.”
The submit FTX token (FTT) spikes 50% as Sam Bankman-Fried seeks Donald Trump’s pardon appeared first on CryptoSlate.
