SBF's 25-year FTX sentence survives appeal, case now at the Supreme Court

Sam Bankman-Fried is serving 25 years. His appeal is dead. His last stop is the Supreme Court — and since September, that's exactly where his petition has been sitting, after a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit unanimously rejected his challenge on June 12, 2026.

The panel didn't mince words. Judge Barrington Parker called the prosecution's evidence robust, to put it mildly, writing that Bankman-Fried reassured customers, investors and regulators their money was safe while treating FTX as his personal piggy bank. Bankman-Fried's lawyers had argued Judge Lewis Kaplan wrongly shut out evidence that FTX could repay everyone, and leaned too hard on limiting his testimony. The panel wasn't buying it.

The sentence landed on March 28, 2024. Kaplan handed down 25 years plus forfeiture of roughly $11 billion, telling the court Bankman-Fried had made a very bad bet about whether he'd get caught. Prosecutors had pushed for 40 to 50 years; the defense wanted no more than six and a half. According to Reuters, he's locked up in a low-security federal prison near Santa Barbara, California, with a release date in 2044 at the earliest.

Meanwhile, FTX customers are getting paid. The FTX Recovery Trust is returning 105 percent of their 2022 dollar claims — and that's less generous than it sounds. The bankruptcy froze every claim at November 11, 2022, the day FTX filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware alongside Alameda Research and about 130 affiliates. Bitcoin was trading near $17,000 back then.

The unwinding started with a November 2, 2022 CoinDesk report on an Alameda balance sheet stuffed with FTT, FTX's own token. Binance chief Changpeng Zhao announced his exchange would dump its FTT, customers yanked billions, FTX froze withdrawals, and Binance's rescue takeover collapsed inside a day. Successor CEO John J. Ray III — the man who wound down Enron — called the corporate controls unlike anything he'd seen.

The trial followed fast: arrest in the Bahamas in December 2022, extradition, then a Manhattan courtroom under Kaplan in October 2023. A jury convicted him on all seven counts in hours. Three former insiders — Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang and Nishad Singh — testified against him, while he took the stand and denied stealing. Ellison got two years; Wang and Singh walked free of more prison time. Ryan Salame drew seven and a half years in May 2024. The wider takeaway, especially in Europe: an exchange balance is legally a claim on the operator, which is why MiCA forces customer funds to be held separately.