SBF Prison Experiment: Despite having his appeal rejected and little hope of a pardon, he maintains his innocence and seeks release.

According to a report by Mars Finance on June 17th, citing an in-depth report by New York magazine, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is currently detained in Lompok Federal Prison in California. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison in March 2024 for fraud and conspiracy. On June 12th, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his formal appeal, further reducing his legal recourse. That same month, SBF formally filed for a presidential pardon. According to Polymarket data, his chances of being pardoned before 2027 are approximately 14%. Regarding his release, SBF's parents have hired two Republican lobbyists to lobbied the Trump administration, and his mother, Barbara Fried, continues to post on Substack advocating for his innocence. Anonymous websites and multiple X accounts are also campaigning for him. However, Trump made it clear earlier this year that he "has no plans" to pardon SBF, and prominent Republican senator Cynthia Ramis, a staunch supporter of crypto, also publicly opposed the move, making SBF's political future uncertain. In contrast, CZ, also convicted of money laundering, received a pardon from Trump, partly because his trading platform supported the Trump family's crypto project, World Liberty Financial. While in prison, SBF maintained a prolific writing and legal activity: serializing his prison memoir, *Manfred*, writing the "Where Did the Money Go?" document to prove FTX's solvency at the time, and independently filing a motion for a new trial (which was rejected). He maintained that the approximately $8 billion in customer losses stemmed from unintentional accounting errors rather than deliberate fraud, and pointed out that FTX's bankruptcy proceedings have so far repaid victims over $10 billion. Simultaneously, he actively courted Trump, using his father to operate the X account to publish pro-Republican content and giving an interview to Tucker Carlson, for which he was temporarily placed in solitary confinement. In prison, SBF lost about 30 pounds, maintained a strict vegan diet, played approximately 6,000 games of pixelated dungeon crawler daily, taught chess, was obsessed with pickleball, and refused to join any racial "caravan," choosing instead to remain independent. According to former inmates, he helped several inmates prepare legal documents, was well-liked among them, and was hailed as a "counterintuitively peaceful person." SBF's greatest fear was not the long prison sentence, but rather that his brain would be "trained into neurons that only search for Oreos" during his long incarceration—that is, losing the ability to think about and influence the outside world.