BlockBeats News, June 17th, according to a deep dive by The New Yorker magazine, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is currently being held at the Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex in California, serving a 25-year prison sentence for fraud and conspiracy until March 2024. On June 12th this year, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals rejected his formal appeal, further limiting his legal remedies; in the same month, SBF formally submitted a presidential pardon application, with the probability of being pardoned by 2027 estimated at around 14% according to Polymarket data.

On the front of the release movement, SBF's parents have hired two Republican lobbyists to persuade the Trump administration, his mother Barbara Fried continues to write on Substack to proclaim his innocence, an anonymous website freesbf.org and several X accounts are also rallying support for him. However, Trump had made it clear earlier this year that he "does not plan" to pardon SBF, and prominent pro-crypto Republican Congresswoman Cynthia Lummis has also publicly stated her opposition, casting doubt on his political prospects. In contrast, CZ, who was convicted of money laundering, has already received a pardon from Trump, partly because his exchange platform supported Trump's family's crypto project, World Liberty Financial.

While in prison, SBF has engaged in extensive writing and legal activities: serializing a prison memoir titled Manfred, drafting a "Where Did the Money Go" document trying to prove that FTX was solvent at the time, and personally filing a motion for a new trial (which has been rejected). He insists that the loss of about $8 billion in customer funds stemmed from inadvertent accounting errors rather than intentional fraud, and he points out that the FTX bankruptcy process has so far reimbursed victims with over $10 billion. At the same time, he has been actively trying to impress Trump, with his father operating an X account to post pro-Republican content on his behalf and conducting an interview with Tucker Carlson, which led to a period of solitary confinement.

Regarding his life in prison, SBF has lost about 30 pounds, maintained a vegan diet, plays around 6,000 rounds of a pixelated dungeon game daily, teaches chess classes, is obsessed with pickleball, and refuses to join any racial "car gangs" but chooses to remain independent. According to a former inmate, he has helped several fellow inmates prepare legal documents, is well-liked among them, and is hailed as a "counterintuitively peaceful person." SBF's greatest fear is not the long sentence but rather that during his extended term, he will "train his own brain to only think about finding Oreos," losing the ability to think and influence the outside world.