Sam Bankman-Fried Files Formal Pardon Request as Samourai Developers Remain in Prison

Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX co-founder serving a 25-year federal prison sentence for fraud and conspiracy, formally submitted a presidential pardon application to the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of the Pardon Attorney. The application, listed as pending on the DOJ's public clemency case status tool, requests a "pardon after completion of sentence," meaning it would not result in early release but could restore certain civil rights once his full term is served.

The filing surfaced the same week that the Bitcoin community is watching a separate pardon question: whether President Trump will act on behalf of Keonne Rodriguez, co-founder of Samourai Wallet, who is currently five months into a 60-month sentence at FPC Morgantown in West Virginia.

TWO CASES, ONE STARK CONTRAST

Bankman-Fried was convicted in November 2023 on seven felony counts for orchestrating the fraud that collapsed FTX, once valued at $32 billion. Prosecutors described the scheme as one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history, with a forfeiture order of approximately $11 billion. He was sentenced to 25 years in 2024.

Rodriguez and his co-founder William Lonergan Hill built Samourai Wallet, a non-custodial Bitcoin privacy tool. Both pleaded guilty to operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. Rodriguez received a five-year sentence in November 2025; Hill received four years. The Bitcoin Policy Institute, Coin Center, and other organizations have argued that the prosecution misapplied federal law, pointing to FinCEN's own guidance that non-custodial software developers are not money transmitters. The case has had a documented chilling effect on privacy-focused development in the United States.

WHERE TRUMP STANDS

Trump told the New York Times in January that he has no intention of pardoning Bankman-Fried. A White House spokesperson reiterated that position when CNN asked for comment on the pardon filing. During his second term, Trump has pardoned Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, and the co-founders of BitMEX, but he has consistently placed Bankman-Fried in a separate category.

On the Samourai side, Trump said in December 2025 that he would "look at" the Rodriguez case and directed then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine it. No pardon has followed. Rodriguez himself wrote from prison in May 2026 that he has come to accept the pardon is very unlikely and that he will serve his full sentence.

WHY IT MATTERS BEYOND THE INDIVIDUALS

To anyone outside the Bitcoin community, the FTX collapse is often the first and only thing they associate with the industry. An SBF pardon alongside one for open-source software developers would collapse a distinction that matters: the difference between a developer who wrote code users controlled independently and an executive who misappropriated billions in customer funds. Those are not equivalent cases, and treating them as such would hand critics a legitimate grievance at a moment when the industry is working to separate its reputation from the FTX wreckage.

The Samourai prosecution set a precedent that FinCEN's own guidance did not support. If that precedent stands while a convicted fraudster walks free, the message to Bitcoin developers operating in the United States is hard to ignore: building privacy tools carries more legal risk than running a centralized exchange that misuses customer deposits.