Sam Bankman-Fried Asks Supreme Court to Overturn $11B FTX Forfeiture

FTX’s Founder Takes His Case to the Highest Court

Sam Bankman-Fried has asked the US Supreme Court to throw out the fraud conviction that sent him to prison for 25 years, in a petition filed on Thursday that also targets an $11 billion forfeiture order.

Filing is the last formal route left to him within the American court system. Every level below the Supreme Court has already ruled against him.

According to Cointelegraph, his lawyers argue the trial judge wrongly stopped the defence from showing that FTX and its sister trading firm Alameda Research held enough assets to eventually make customers whole.

It is the highest-profile crypto legal story of the year, and it lands almost four years after FTX collapsed in November 2022.

What the Petition Actually Asks For

The petition presents two arguments to the justices.

The first concerns evidence. Bankman-Fried’s team says the trial court barred them from telling the jury that FTX and Alameda were “temporarily illiquid” rather than genuinely broke, and that the firms’ investments would have covered customer losses given enough time.

The second concerns money. The petition argues that the $11 billion forfeiture violates the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibits excessive fines.

Neither argument disputes that customer money moved from FTX to Alameda. Both instead attack how the trial was run and how the punishment was sized.

The $11 Billion Number Sits Awkwardly

The forfeiture figure is the part of the case most likely to catch the attention of ordinary crypto users, because the customers at the centre of it have largely been paid.

The FTX Recovery Trust has been returning money for more than a year. Cointelegraph reported that its fifth distribution of roughly $900 million was paid on July 31, bringing total payouts to around $10 billion since the bankruptcy filing.

Recovery rates now range from 103% to 105% for most customer and unsecured claim classes, with the smallest “convenience” claims under $50,000 receiving about 120%. Those percentages are calculated against prices on the November 11, 2022 bankruptcy filing date, when the estate valued Bitcoin at $16,871, rather than against what the same coins are worth now. Many former customers have objected to that method for years.

Bankman-Fried’s lawyers lean on that repayment record. Prosecutors have consistently argued the opposite, that a fraud is still a fraud regardless of whether the estate later recovered value in a rising market.

How a Case Actually Reaches the Supreme Court

Filing a petition and getting a hearing are two very different things, and the gap between them is enormous.

A losing party asks the Supreme Court to review a lower court’s decision through a petition for a writ of certiorari. The court itself says it receives approximately 7,000 to 8,000 such petitions each term and grants oral argument in about 80 cases.

At least four of the nine justices must vote to take a case before it proceeds, a long-standing convention known as the rule of four. Most petitions are simply denied, usually without any written explanation.

No response deadline has been set and the petition has not yet been scheduled for a conference, so nothing about the timing is settled.

Why the Second Circuit Already Said No

Bankman-Fried has been here before, one rung down the ladder.

On June 12, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld both his conviction and his sentence. The panel relied on the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Kousisis v. United States, which held that an act can constitute wire fraud even without intent to cause net economic harm.

That precedent is inconvenient for the current petition, because it weakens the argument that eventual repayment should have been admissible as a defence.

US courts have become a routine venue for crypto disputes in recent years. In August, Bybit’s legal fight over its $1.5 billion hack resulted in asset freezes against entities tied to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, showing how far the sector’s biggest questions have moved from code to courtrooms.

A Pardon Campaign Running in Parallel

The Supreme Court petition is not the only track. Bankman-Fried has separately applied to President Donald Trump for a pardon.

The two efforts are independent of each other. A pardon would not require the justices to act, and a denial by the court would not preclude executive clemency.

Pursuing both at once is unusual, though not contradictory, since each route addresses a different branch of government. Whether either succeeds is genuinely unclear, and any forecast at this stage would be speculation rather than analysis.

Why Crypto Still Cannot Put FTX Down

Nearly four years on, the FTX name still shapes how the outside world talks about this industry. Every exchange-failure headline since has been measured against it, and every argument for holding your own keys rather than trusting a platform traces back to it.

That is the real weight of this petition. It is not likely to change where the money went or who has already been repaid. It does drag the sector’s worst moment back onto front pages during a soft stretch for the market, with the BTC price near $76,900 and total crypto market capitalisation slipping to around $2.64 trillion.

For beginners, the useful lesson is not about one man’s appeal. The questions FTX raised, about custody, transparency, and what a crypto exchange is actually doing with deposits behind the scenes, are the same questions worth asking of any platform holding your funds today.

The justices may never take the case. The reckoning it represents has already been absorbed by the industry regardless.