A federal appeals court has upheld the fraud conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-defunct FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
In an opinion issued on June 12, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, based in the New York City borough of Manhattan, rejected arguments from Bankman-Fried’s attorneys that his 2023 trial was unfair and that the presiding judge was biased against him, among other claims.
“The government’s evidence against him was, conservatively stated, robust,” Judge Barrington Parker wrote for the panel.
Bankman-Fried’s attorneys also argued that Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, who presided over the trial, improperly limited the former FTX CEO’s testimony. The appeals court dismissed such an argument, saying that Kaplan “acted within his broad discretion” in concluding that additional testimony would have “created a real danger of confusing, if not misleading, the jury.”
Bankman-Fried was found guilty by a New York City jury in November 2023 on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy tied to the collapse of FTX, once one of the world’s largest digital-asset trading platforms.
The company collapsed in a matter of days in November 2022 after reports about the financial ties between FTX and Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm also founded by Bankman-Fried. Those reports showed that Alameda held a large amount of FTX’s own token, raising questions about the company’s financial stability and triggering a wave of customer withdrawals.
The collapse sent shockwaves through the broader crypto market, driving the total value of digital assets down to roughly $800 billion by the end of 2022 from an all-time high of about $3 trillion in late 2021.
Federal prosecutors described Bankman-Fried’s scheme as one of the largest financial frauds in American history. They said the evidence showed that although he assured investors, regulators, and the public that FTX customer funds were safe, he secretly transferred billions of dollars from customer accounts to Alameda and other entities.
Prosecutors said Bankman-Fried then used those funds to make investments unrelated to FTX customer deposits, cover Alameda’s losses, and finance other spending, while falsifying business records to conceal the transactions.
He was later sentenced to 25 years in federal prison.
His attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The ruling comes as Bankman-Fried has formally submitted a pardon request to President Donald Trump, according to information posted on the Department of Justice Office of the Pardon Attorney website.
The exact date of the filing is unclear, but the website states that a request for a “pardon after completion of sentence” was submitted in 2026 and remains pending.
In an interview with Fox Business from prison published on June 8, Bankman-Fried said he “absolutely” wants a pardon, although he acknowledged that the decision is “ultimately up to the president,” not up to him.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on that matter.
Trump said in a January interview with The New York Times that he was not interested in pardoning a list of high-profile figures that included Bankman-Fried.
When asked about Bankman-Fried, Trump replied, “I don’t know him at all.”
