Trump Closes Door on SBF Pardon; FTT Slides as Odds Crumble
President Trump explicitly rejected a pardon for Sam Bankman-Fried in a NYT interview, crashing prediction market odds to 4% and sending FTT to $0.51.
The speculative trade on Sam Bankman-Fried’s freedom is dead.
President Donald Trump explicitly ruled out pardoning the former FTX CEO in an interview with The New York Times on Thursday, cementing Bankman-Fried’s 25-year sentence for orchestrating one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history. The definitive refusal ends months of quiet lobbying by Bankman-Fried’s legal team, who had reportedly hoped to frame his conviction as a byproduct of the same "weaponized" justice system Trump decried on the campaign trail.
Market Reaction: The "Pardon Premium" Evaporates
The rejection triggered an immediate repricing of Bankman-Fried’s fate on prediction markets. On Polymarket, shares for a 2026 pardon collapsed to 4 cents, implying a mere 4% probability, down from highs of ~12% following Trump’s election victory. Token markets reacted with similar apathy; FTT, the zombie token of the defunct exchange, slipped 4.6% to $0.51, hovering near all-time lows as the last catalyst for a speculative pump vanished.
Selective Clemency
Trump’s decision draws a sharp line between regulatory infractions and theft of customer funds. The President has already exercised his clemency power for other industry figures, pardoning Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht in January 2025 and Binance founder Changpeng "CZ" Zhao in October 2025.
While Ulbricht was framed as a libertarian martyr and CZ as a target of regulatory overreach, Bankman-Fried’s conviction for stealing $8 billion from depositors appears to have crossed a threshold of toxicity even for a pro-crypto administration. Trump told the Times:
"I got a lot of votes because I backed crypto, and I got to like it."
The President grouped Bankman-Fried with other high-profile inmates denied clemency, including Sean "Diddy" Combs and former Senator Bob Menendez.
The Last Hail Mary
With the executive branch avenue closed, Bankman-Fried’s future rests entirely on the judicial system. His lawyers argued before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in November that Judge Lewis Kaplan’s trial conduct was biased, but no ruling has been issued. Unless the appellate court orders a retrial, a statistical long shot, the 33-year-old will remain in federal custody until approximately 2045.
