The US Senate says Sam Bankman-Fried should never be pardoned — and why FTX still matters to beginners

The US Senate voted this week to formally oppose any pardon for Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of collapsed crypto exchange FTX. The resolution is symbolic — it can't actually stop a presidential pardon — but its unanimous, bipartisan support sends a clear message, and it's a good moment to revisit why the FTX collapse remains one of the most important cautionary tales in crypto.

The measure, S. Res. 772, passed by 'unanimous consent,' meaning it cleared without a single senator objecting. It states that Bankman-Fried should 'under no circumstances' receive clemency, including a pardon or a reduced sentence. It was led by Senators Cynthia Lummis and Ruben Gallego, the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee's digital assets subcommittee. As a simple resolution, it carries no legal force and cannot limit the president's constitutional power to grant pardons.

The vote comes after Bankman-Fried applied for clemency from President Donald Trump in June, a request now listed as pending in Justice Department records. Trump has pardoned several other crypto figures, including Binance founder Changpeng 'CZ' Zhao and Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, but said in January he had no plans to pardon Bankman-Fried. On the prediction market Polymarket, traders currently put the odds of a pardon by the end of July below 1%.

For newcomers, here is why this name keeps coming up. Bankman-Fried ran two companies at once. FTX was an exchange, which holds customers' money the way a broker does — and is not supposed to touch it. Alameda Research was a separate trading firm he also owned. Prosecutors say he moved billions of dollars in FTX customer deposits over to Alameda, which spent it on trades, investments and real estate, while FTX's own software quietly exempted Alameda from the rules that would have forced it to cover its losses.

The house of cards fell in November 2022, after it emerged that much of what propped up Alameda was FTT — a token FTX had created itself and could issue at will. When Binance said it would sell its FTT holdings, the price cratered, customers rushed to withdraw their deposits, and FTX couldn't return the money because it was no longer there. The exchange filed for bankruptcy, and American customers alone lost more than $8 billion. A jury convicted Bankman-Fried on seven counts, and he was sentenced to 25 years — with a release date around 2044.

The lasting lesson isn't about one man's fate. It's that leaving your coins on an exchange means trusting that company to actually hold them and not misuse them — something FTX customers learned the hard way. It's why so many people repeat the phrase 'not your keys, not your coins,' and why moving longer-term holdings to a wallet you control is worth understanding. This is information, not advice.