Key Takeaways
- The petition challenges a 25-year sentence and seven counts returned against Bankman-Fried in 2023.
- His Second Circuit appeal failed in June 2026 on the Supreme Court’s 2025 Kousisis ruling.
- The justices decide later in 2026 whether to hear the case, after a June 8 pardon bid stalled.
Two Asks, Not One
The , namely:- First, the conviction: Bankman-Fried’s lawyers argue the trial court improperly barred him from presenting evidence that FTX and Alameda Research, while temporarily illiquid, held enough assets to eventually make customers and investors whole.
- The second is money: They contend the $11 billion forfeiture order violates the Eighth Amendment’s excessive fines clause.
Why Kousisis Is the Hinge
In June 2026, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit . It leaned on Kousisis v. United States, a 2025 Supreme Court decision holding that conduct can constitute wire fraud even without intent to cause net economic harm. Per that notion, whether the victims ultimately got their money back is beside the point and the deception itself is the crime.Bankman-Fried’s team is trying to turn that ruling around and their argument runs roughly as follows, i.e. if prosecutors do not need to prove economic loss to win a fraud conviction, then evidence of economic loss should not be admissible at trial either.
However, if prosecutors are allowed to put loss evidence in front of a jury anyway, the defense must be allowed to rebut it with evidence pointing the other way.
It is a symmetry argument, and it is the most credible thing in the filing. The weakness is that the Supreme Court decided Kousisis recently and decisively, and the justices rarely revisit their own reasoning within a year to help a defendant whose case it was used against.
The Other Track Already Failed
The courtroom is Bankman-Fried’s second route. He formally submitted a to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Pardon Attorney on June 8, requesting a pardon after completion of sentence, a designation that restores certain civil rights without shortening the term. President Donald Trump publicly , citing the scale of the fraud.The U.S. Senate then removed any ambiguity by unanimously approving S.Res. 772, a bipartisan resolution opposing any pardon or commutation for the former FTX chief. Bankman-Fried’s publicly after Trump commuted Ross Ulbricht’s sentence.
His earlier also failed when Judge Lewis Kaplan denied that motion in April, dismissing the fresh-evidence claims as baseless.
The Road From Here
Filing a petition for a writ of certiorari is not the same as getting a hearing. The Supreme Court receives thousands of these each term and agrees to hear roughly 1%. Four of the nine justices must vote to grant review. The court is expected to decide later in 2026 whether to take the case.If certiorari is denied, which is the statistical default, the conviction, the sentence and the forfeiture all stand, and Bankman-Fried’s direct appeals are effectively exhausted. If it is granted, the case becomes a vehicle for clarifying how far Kousisis reaches, with consequences well beyond crypto.
Either way, the FTX estate has moved on without him. Cumulative distributions to creditors since early 2025 approach $10 billion, with a starting July and dotcom and U.S. customer claims reaching .
Claims are valued at November 2022 petition-date prices, when bitcoin traded near $16,000, so a customer who held one BTC on the exchange is repaid . Getting 105% back in dollars while the bitcoin price sits above $77,000 is the grievance that has never gone away.
Bankman-Fried, for his part, has floated once he is out.