When political expectations meet crypto speculation: FTT is back in focus

By Oluwapelumi Adejumo

Compiled by Chopper, Foresight News

Original title: SBF Seeks Pardon, FTT Soars: A Political Gamble with a Win Rate of Only 8%

TL; DR:

• Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) officially applied for a presidential pardon, and FTT tokens rose more than 50% within 24 hours.

• The surge had nothing to do with the actual value of the token; it was simply a speculative bet on the market's amnesty application.

• Trump has refused pardons many times, predicting that the probability of approval given by the market is only 8%, and the transaction risk is extremely high.

Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), founder of the discredited cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is serving 25 years in federal prison for planning one of the largest financial fraud cases in US history. However, cryptocurrency speculators are betting that a newly submitted presidential pardon application may turn their fortunes around.

SBF seeks Trump's pardon

This week, SBF officially submitted an application for administrative pardon through the official website of the US Department of Justice's Office of Pardon Lawyers. The move marks an official escalation of the family and legal team's months-long secret lobbying campaign. This operation violates conventional legal practice and breaks the rule that it is necessary to wait five years before applying for pardon after a judgment.

The chances of approval are slim, however, as President Trump has repeatedly denied any pardons to the SBF. Notably, traders on the blockchain-based prediction market Polymarket currently believe that Bankman-Fried has only an 8% chance of getting a presidential pardon before the end of the year.

Probability of SBF being pardoned before the end of the year on Polymarket

Speculative rise in ghost tokens

Although political analysts and forecasters believe that the probability of a pardon being granted is extremely low, the news of “submitting an application” alone is enough to trigger a speculative frenzy on digital asset exchanges.

According to CryptoSlate data, SBF's legal actions directly benefit FTT, the native token of the FTX exchange. Today's FTT is already a ghost asset: since FTX went bankrupt in November 2022, the token had no actual application scenarios, no maintenance by a development team, and no underlying business support.

But the crypto market has always been driven by emotions, predicament narratives, and algorithms. After news of the pardon application came to light, FTT24 rose by more than 50% per hour, hitting a high of $0.35, a sharp rebound from the previous all-time low of $0.2141. Meanwhile, CoinMarketCap data shows that the bankrupt token's trading volume soared by more than 600%, surpassing $16 million.

According to market data, about 30% of speculative transactions occurred on Binance, a competitor that cleared FTT holdings at the end of 2022, directly triggering an FTX crowding storm.

This recent wave of gains suggests that some market participants see FTT as a political option to bet on SBF's fate. Traders believe that if the amnesty is passed, the market may briefly rekindle interest in FTX-related assets, and FTT will therefore become a direct game tool.

What needs to be clarified is that such transactions have nothing to do with legal proceedings or bankruptcy recovery. The presidential pardon cannot resume FTX operations, restart FTT's original functions, change the creditor claim structure, and only affects SBF's personal freedom and political narrative.

SBF's argument

In March 2024, a jury found SBF guilty of two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and conspiracy relating to securities fraud, commodity fraud, and money laundering. Federal prosecutors have charged him with embezzling billions of dollars from FTX clients, defrauding exchange investors, and misleading Alameda Research lenders.

In the end, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan sentenced him to 25 years in prison, 3 years of supervised release, and confiscation of over $11 billion in assets.

However, SBF has always denied the outside world's core characterization of the FTX crash. In interviews and online statements, he said that the exchange was experiencing a liquidity crisis rather than actual insolvency, and that the asset recovery situation after bankruptcy proved that customer funds could have been paid in full.

Its core argument focuses on FTX's remaining assets and venture capital value, arguing that assets outweigh liabilities in the event of bankruptcy, and that control of the company should not be handed over to external restructuring advisors. This statement completely contradicts the evidence presented by the prosecution during the trial.

Government evidence shows that FTX customer deposits were secretly transferred to Alameda to cover transaction losses, investments, property purchases, political donations, and debt repayment. Several former FTX executives have pointed to SBF. Former FTX general counsel Ryne Miller also publicly refuted its “solvency” claim, saying that at the time of the November 2022 crash, the company's assets were far insufficient to cover the debt, and insiders were still urgently piecing together a list of assets to raise life-saving funds.

Trump pardons crypto peers, SBF exceptions

Despite aggressive lobbying efforts, the political reality facing the SBF is extremely grim. In January 2026, Trump clearly declined to pardon the SBF in an interview with The New York Times, and the White House has maintained this position since then.

Although Trump frequently used amnesty powers, including pardoning Binance founder Zhao Changpeng in October 2025, and commuting the sentences of Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht and BitMEX executive Arthur Hayes, the nature of the SBF case is completely different. Previously, pardons were mostly interpreted as correcting excessive supervision, anti-money laundering technology issues, or promoting criminal justice reform.

However, the SBF case was widely regarded as a blatant 10 billion dollar misappropriation of public funds, causing millions of ordinary retail investors to be hit hard. Even among Republicans who support cryptocurrencies in Congress, the pardon proposal was strongly opposed. Senator Bernie Moreno put it bluntly: “This man should not be pardoned; he should sit on his feet.”

Many crypto industry practitioners have the same attitude. “Pardoning SBF is not about releasing a scammer, but rather condoning thousands of subsequent crooks. This sends a dangerous signal: if you misappropriate billions of dollars and repackage the prison in the image of MAGA, you can regain your freedom.”