Sam-Bankman Fried is once again arguing that he’s innocent.
The former FTX chief posted a lengthy document on X this week claiming that the exchange “was never insolvent” and that bankruptcy lawyers, not bad balance sheets, were to blame for the company’s collapse.
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The document is packed with tables showing hypothetical “mark-to-market” gains on assets FTX once held, from Solana to Anthropic, implying the company would be worth over $100 billion today if not for the lawyers.
Yet many of the document’s central claims, like the assertion that FTX “was never insolvent” and could have repaid customers in full, does not line up with financial filings.
The FTX founder was convicted on seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering after the collapse of the crypto exchange in late 2022. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March 2024.
The post is the latest volley in Bankman-Fried’s broader campaign to reframe his conviction and win political sympathy. As The New York Times reported, his parents and legal allies have been quietly lobbying for a presidential pardon, enlisting Trump-connected lawyer Kory Langhofer and even arranging a jailhouse interview with Tucker Carlson.
Prediction market traders on Kalshi give him only about a 10% chance of receiving a Trump pardon, suggesting that the post may be aimed as much at shifting those odds through a rehabilitation of his image as at rewriting FTX’s history.
UPDATE (Oct. 31, 09:15 UTC): Adds paragraph on Bankman-Fried’s conviction and length of his sentence.
Source: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/10/31/sam-bankman-fried-posts-30-page-ftx-was-never-insolvent-document
