Sam Bankman-Fried has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out his fraud conviction and cancel the $11 billion forfeiture a court ordered him to pay, marking the final stage of his direct appeal. The former FTX chief executive filed the petition on Thursday, seeking a new trial and asking the justices to drop the forfeiture tied to his sentence for stealing billions of dollars from customers of the collapsed exchange.
The petition
The filing represents the last stop in Bankman-Fried’s direct appeals process, after lower courts rejected his earlier challenges. His legal team has argued that his trial was fundamentally flawed and that the forfeiture order is disproportionate to the conduct at issue. The Supreme Court, however, agrees to hear only a small fraction of the petitions it receives each term, making the request a long shot. Even reaching this stage is notable, as the case has wound its way through the district and appellate courts for more than two years.
Background
Bankman-Fried was convicted in 2023 on fraud and conspiracy charges tied to the November 2022 collapse of FTX, once among the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. He was sentenced to roughly 25 years in prison, and a court separately ordered the $11 billion forfeiture as part of the case. The collapse wiped out billions in customer funds and became a defining event in the crypto industry’s regulatory reckoning, spurring renewed scrutiny of how exchanges custody customer assets.
What happens next
If the justices decline to hear the case, Bankman-Fried’s conviction and sentence will stand, though he continues to pursue other legal avenues. The petition keeps his case in the national spotlight as FTX’s bankruptcy estate carries on its years-long effort to repay creditors, even as FTX’s legal survivors push for the CLARITY Act, and it renews scrutiny of the trial that followed one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history. A decision on whether the court will take up the petition is expected in the coming months.
Industry reaction
The petition also revives a long-running debate over how aggressively federal prosecutors pursued the case. Bankman-Fried’s supporters have argued his sentence was unusually harsh, while prosecutors and victims have maintained that the scale of the FTX fraud warranted the punishment he received. The Supreme Court’s handling of the petition will be closely watched across the crypto industry, which has treated the case as a benchmark for how far regulators and courts are willing to go against major figures in the space.
