SBF prison experiment: the second appeal was rejected, and the hope for a pardon is slim, still insisting on innocence and seeking release from prison

BlockBeats News — June 17, according to a deep-dive report by The New York magazine, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is currently detained at the Lompoc Federal Prison in California. In March 2024, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud and conspiracy. On June 12 of this year, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed his formal appeal, further shrinking his legal options; that same month, SBF formally submitted a presidential pardon application. According to Polymarket data, his probability of receiving a pardon before 2027 is about 14%.

On the prison-advocacy front, SBF’s parents have hired two Republican lobbyists to lobby the Trump administration. His mother, Barbara Fried, continues to publish posts on Substack to plead his case, and the anonymous website freesbf.org as well as multiple X accounts are also mobilizing support for him. However, earlier this year Trump clearly stated that he “does not plan” to pardon SBF, and well-known pro-crypto Republican lawmaker Cynthia Lummis has also publicly come out against it, making his political outlook far from optimistic. By contrast, CZ, who was also convicted of money laundering, has received a pardon from Trump—one reason being that his trading platform supported Trump’s family crypto project, World Liberty Financial.

In prison, SBF has kept up with extensive writing and legal activity. He has serialized his prison memoir, Manfred. He has written the “Where Did the Money Go” document in an effort to show that FTX was solvent at the time. He has also filed a new-trial motion on his own behalf (which has been denied). He insists that the loss of roughly $8 billion in customer funds stemmed from unintentional accounting oversights rather than deliberate fraud, and he notes that, to date, the FTX bankruptcy proceedings have repaid more than $10 billion to victims. Meanwhile, he has also tried to curry favor with Trump: his father operated an X account that posted pro-Republican content on his behalf, and SBF accepted an interview with Tucker Carlson—leading to him being kept in solitary confinement for a time.

As for life in prison, SBF has lost about 30 jin, maintains a strictly vegan diet, plays around 6,000 pixel dungeon games a day, teaches chess classes, is obsessed with pickleball, and refuses to join any racial “team,” choosing instead to be independent. According to former cellmates, he helps several other inmates prepare legal documents, is well-liked among fellow prisoners, and is praised as “an unexpectedly peaceful person.” SBF’s biggest fear is not serving a long sentence, but that, over the long term of his incarceration, his brain will be “trained into neurons that only seek Oreos”—meaning he would lose the ability to think about and influence the outside world.